Interview with Talal Asad 

Ovamir Anjum

The work of Talal Asad, in particular his two landmark volumes Ge-
nealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity 
and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, 
Modernity (2004), has given new life to critical study of secularism 
and the idea of “religion” across the disciplines of anthropology, po-
litical science, religion, history, and colonial studies. In fact my first 
published article, “Islam as a Discursive Tradition” (2007), was a 
methodological inquiry into efforts to conceptualize Islam, focal-
ized through the work of Asad and his interlocutors. The preface to 
my 2012 book on Islamic political thought remarked my broader 
indebtedness to Asad’s notion of “discursive tradition” (against sim-
ple accounts of the “politicization” of modern Islam). Shortly after 
the book was published, in June 2012, I conducted a dialogue with 
Professor Asad in his Manhattan apartment, unique also for being 
a dialogue between an anthropologist and an intellectual histori-
an. Our conversation spanned topics of mutual interest: secularism 
and the nation-state, democracy, Islamic tradition, the questions of 
reform and coercion, and too (what was at the time) Egypt’s new 
revolution and so the possibilities and limits of Islamist politics. 
Since then, Asad has published articles which touch on themes we 
discussed (for example, the pair of 2015 essays in Critical Inquiry 
41:2 and 42:1), and a few other interviews have appeared in which 
he also reflects on his intellectual trajectory and methodological 
considerations (see in particular the interviews by Fadi Bardawil 
and by Basit Kareem Iqbal). Now, nearly six years later after they 
took place, AJISS publishes an edited transcript of our 2012 con-
versations, both for their remarkable theoretical and biographical 
candor and for how, when read in relationship to the essays he has 
published since then, they make visible the development of a sus-
tained argument regarding “tradition” and the project of modernity.

Ovamir Anjum is Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Depart-
ment of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo. He is the author 
of Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2012) and the editor of AJISS.



56 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

To begin the dialogue, I invited Asad to reflect on three inter-related points. 
First, the near inseparability of politics and governance in Islamic history. 
Second, the specter of the modern death of the Sharia. Scholars like Wael 
Hallaq argue that the Sharia is today unfeasible (and thus that attempts by 
modern reformists are doomed) because many of the preconditions of the 
Sharia are today unavailable. Therefore, the possibility that Sharia is no lon-
ger a feasible tradition—in the way that philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre 
talks about the death or irrelevance of a tradition, when its essential com-
mitment cannot survive a given rupture—is real. The issue of the death or 
fatigue of the Sharia is a critical question for my generation of scholars and 
historians of Islamic law. Indeed my book, Politics, Law, and Community 
in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (2012), and that of my friend 
Ahmad A. Ahmad, The Fatigue of the Shari‘a (2012), may be considered two 
responses to the gauntlet Hallaq has thrown. I wrote to Asad that his writ-
ings indicate both the continued viability of Islamic discursive tradition and 
too the specter of the “death of Sharia”. Third, the inseparability of modern 
forms of democratic politics from market capitalism. Timur Kuran’s Long 
Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (2012) argues that 
the Middle East declined because the Sharia is distributive (as evidenced in 
its laws of inheritance, zakat, and prohibition of usury) and, crucially, has 
no concept of a corporation. Thus it prevented the massive accumulation 
of wealth, which is a necessary precondition of capitalism. Though I think 
Kuran is mistaken on many points in Islamic law and history, on the whole I 
agree with the thesis that Islam couldn’t have produced modern capitalism. 
I asked Asad  what prospects the Sharia has for providing an alternative. 
Should Muslims intellectually invest in Sharia as the point of departure for 
not merely a sustained protest against the powers of the modern state but 
for imagining a constructive alternative?

Asad’s reflections on these three considerations then opened onto a 
broader conversation (conceptual, biographical, political), which is tran-
scribed further below.

§

Talal Asad: I haven’t yet read Timur Kuran’s work, although I have come 
across references to it. You agree with him on one major point: “Islam 
couldn’t have produced modern capitalism.” He regards this as an admis-
sion of Islam’s failure and you don’t. Of course I agree with you that the 
absence of “advanced capitalism” is not necessarily a failure. But you and 



 57

Kuran are concerned with another question, as to whether Islam can pro-
duce capitalism. When I was a young man there was a debate in progres-
sive circles around the question of why Islam failed to do so. Many of us 
assumed that history was—had to be—progressive and that societies could 
be seen as variously situated on the historical path marked out by the most 
“advanced” countries, some moving too slowly, others simply stalled. The 
failure of Islam to develop capitalism (and for socialists to prepare the fu-
ture beyond capitalism) was regarded as proof of its political and moral 
inferiority. Many thinkers have learnt to problematize the assumption of 
progress as a self-evident good, although important global decision-makers 
still use the notions of “developing” and “developed” to classify and mea-
sure societies in their journey to reach “modernity.” The abstract system we 
name “capitalism” (as part of a civilizational condition we call “moderni-
ty”) was not something a particular historical agent aimed at and achieved. 
Many historians now recognize that the development of capitalism in the 
West was due not to “religion” or “religious law” but to a multiplicity of 
factors, some intentional and others contingent.

The fact remains that capitalist organizations now dominate the 
globe—“unevenly,” as the expression has it—and they work, directly or 
indirectly, through the “sovereign” nation states into which the world is 
divided. People often refer to a feature of the modern world called “global 
governance”: political, financial, and legal institutions that transcend nation 
states and profoundly affect the ways states are run and their inhabitants 
can live. The states themselves vary enormously in wealth and power, and 
their modernity consists primarily in their aspirations for economic devel-
opment and political reform guided by liberal values. Given the variety of 
ethnic, religious, and linguistic forms of identity within these states, they 
are far less homogeneous than nationalist ideologists like to claim. This het-
erogeneity isn’t simply an “internal” matter, for it also involves business, 
military, and emotional connections between parts of the population in one 
“sovereign” state and those in others, connections based on historical ex-
perience, traditions, interests, and the like. The solidarities and antipathies 
that are generated by these connections help to explain many of the features 
of the modern landscape: the feelings of solidarity between Muslims who 
live in different countries, the support given by Euro-American govern-
ments (and especially, but not only, by Jewish citizens in those countries) to 
Israel, antagonism to immigrants, Islamophobia, etc. 

I have gone over these familiar points because in my opinion they are 
an essential context for thinking about “an Islamic alternative,” and espe-

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58 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

cially about the role of the Sharia in such an alternative. That context doesn’t 
dictate what the alternative must look like; it defines the constraints and op-
portunities to which one must attend. I would stress again that the modern 
state in which we all live is a dangerous body, necessary for achieving things 
we value as individuals and communities but capable at the same time 
of frustrating, limiting, and punishing us—especially for not being loyal. 
(Unlike earlier times, “loyalty” to the state is now rationalized as a condi-
tion of “security”.) Beyond the state, but supporting and working through 
it, is the network of powers that maintains global governance—even more 
dangerous because it is less responsive to the demands of citizens than the 
“sovereign” state is. Islamists who believe that it is necessary to establish an 
Islamic state as a way of dealing with the destructive forces of global capi-
talism seem to me to grossly underestimate the repressive and destructive 
powers of the modern state—even if some states (North American and Eu-
ropean states) are much more powerful in this regard than others. But the 
moral damage such a state can do, and not only to its non-Muslim citizens, 
should not be regarded as a trivial matter. That is why the state should not, 
in my view, be part of an Islamic political vision. Furthermore, Muslims in 
their own “Islamic state” cannot adequately confront the destructive forc-
es of global neo-liberalism. This is not merely because the modern state 
is too weak in that context but also because it is too deeply imbricated in 
the workings of international capital; it is precisely for that reason that the 
latter gives crucial support to the repressive functions of the former. (This 
reminds me of an old argument among Marxists about “socialism in one 
country.” To the extent that this doctrine was applied, the result was simply 
a more repressive nation state.)

Let me turn directly to the Sharia. Substantively, the Sharia is, as you 
know very well, no longer what it was some centuries ago. From a complex 
and flexible tradition that enabled the lives of many Muslims through the 
instantiation of a religious vision, it has been redefined and fixed as “law,” 
and through that as the prime marker of social identity. Of course the Sharia 
can be “democratically” reformed as law, but its dependence on the modern 
capitalist state makes that less interesting because we already know what 
kind of law capitalism demands. I think one may be able to retrieve part of 
the moral dimension of the vision underlying the sharia if amr bi-l-ma‘rūf 
is re-conceptualized as a collective moral-political project—but only if it 
is entirely detached from institutions of the state, and if it abjures punish-
ment. What, after all, does lā ikrāha fi-l-dīn mean? (My father, incidentally, 
translates dīn as “moral law”; this is a little too Kantian, in my view, but it 



 59

moves in the right direction.) Friendship, as you know very well, is a central 
value in Islamic tradition. Moral persuasion—i.e., persuasion that isn’t a 
means of seducing someone into undertaking an immoral act—is the only 
right procedure in this matter, although persuasion may require more than 
purely verbal engagement. Thus if one thinks of civil disobedience as part of 
amr bi-l-ma‘rūf it need not be seen merely as a negative action but as a mode 
of dissuading state power from undertaking (or continuing with) a vicious 
policy and thereby moving toward a moral vision that embraces all human 
beings (and all living beings). In my view this cannot be done—for moral as 
well as practical reasons—if one excludes “neighbors” who are not Muslims. 
Within the nation state as well as beyond it, links can be established with 
those individuals and movements that share at least some important objec-
tives with Muslims who are prepared to engage in civil disobedience. How 
exactly such links are established will depend on the particular judgments 
of those who are politically active. Some acts of protest and demands will 
be framed by the existing limits of the nation state while others will call for 
linkages at an international level because most of the collective problems 
that confront citizens (poverty, environmental degradation, war and terror-
ism, etc.) cannot be addressed locally. 

Nothing I have said seems to me to imply an abstention from demo-
cratic politics at the national level. On the contrary, they are part of the idea 
of a democratic politics that can draw on an Islamic tradition. Whether, and 
if so to what extent, party politics are essential to democracy is a difficult 
question. In any case I do not believe that Islamic parties should aim to 
capture state power because the result, unquestionably, will be that they will 
be captured by state power. Unlike several Muslim liberals, my argument 
about the state does not claim that secularism can be found in Islamic histo-
ry. Secularity, in all its complexity, is modern; it involves a number of things 
(ontologies, sensibilities, assumptions about legitimate knowledge, and so 
forth) some of which are more closely connected together than are others. 
An Islamic politics proposing particular programs of reform would use 
moral suasion that depends on the force of argument (as in any sound pub-
lic debate) as well as on the force of example. There is no reason why secular 
arguments should not be used—especially (but not only) when addressing 
non-Muslims. All I am saying is that it seems to me a mistake to think that 
Muslims have only one of two options: either to capture and use state power 
or to withdraw completely from “politics”. Liberal democracy, and the party 
politics on which it rests, have irreparable flaws, but their principled aban-
donment may simply add to the repressiveness of the modern state.

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60 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

Ovamir Anjum: Turning specifically to contemporary Egypt: if my view of 
the Islamist dilemma is correct, then would a “weak government”—weak 
in the modern democratic sense of having no clear majority and divided 
politics—not entail weakness in negotiating against the neoliberal policies 
that the US and other global powers are clearly bent on imposing on Egypt? 
Would not an ideological opposition to global capitalism (and closely allied 
global militarism) be necessary?  

TA: Understandably, one of the inevitable consequences of the 25 January 
uprising has been to focus the attention of Egyptians almost exclusively on 
Egypt, to reinforce the value and dangers of the state there. Ironically this is 
happening at precisely the time when people in the Arab and Muslim world 
are responding to events in Egypt with great interest and expressions of 
solidarity. One cannot say for sure what will happen there but I think that if 
the Ikhwan were intelligent and morally responsible they would try to make 
alliances with as many of the other parties as possible in order to defeat the 
army’s candidate, Ahmad Shafiq, and prepare the ground for substantial 
reforms of public life. But these alliances will succeed only if they are based 
on genuine moves of inclusiveness—accompanied by legally binding con-
cessions, not vague promises—on matters that will attract a range of social 
forces within Egypt (Christians, socialists, women, the poor, secularists, 
etc.) as well as potential supporters in the Arab world and beyond. This was 
what Abu al-Futtuh tried to do but the Ikhwan leadership turned against 
him. At any rate, simple ideological denunciations of global capitalism and 
militarism will not do—especially as many Ikhwan leaders are themselves 
highly successful businessmen, and their political shifts since the revolution 
have not been entirely re-assuring. Re-assurance will not come (and should 
not come) by way of declarations that they are determined to establish an 
“independent” Islamic state. In any case, I fear the opposition to the Ikhwan 
from the military, the business elite, the media, and the old Mubarak insti-
tutions is too strong.

You mentioned your book in your initial remarks. I think your attempt 
to retrieve a more community-oriented tradition within Islamic political 
thought was extremely interesting, as was the attempt to trace the rela-
tionship between faith and reason. I found what you had to say about Ibn 
Taymiyya much more enlightening than I had imagined I would. I had as-
sumed that he was simply someone who was willing to take a harsh line on 
various political issues, which turns out to be a gross over-simplification.



 61

However, I think you need to discuss the question of rebellion. You do 
say something about it when talking about the spirit of the Sharia, I think 
where you talk about al-Ghazali. Ibn Taymiyya’s position is to accept the 
ruler, however oppressive he might be, so long as he follows the Sharia. 
Does that mean he saw the Sharia as compatible with oppression? Yours 
is a historical work of course, but it would have been interesting to exam-
ine the issue of amr/nahy further, as I have been thinking about it myself. 
Amr/nahy could include a range of possible ways of opposing or resisting 
an unjust ruler. Not only are you supposed to stop someone who is acting 
immorally by word of mouth, or physically, you may also oppose him either 
individually or collectively. So I would include in the concept of amr and 
nahy the possibility not only of civil disobedience but also, in certain cir-
cumstances, of rebellion.

There is always the question, of course, of what one should do if 
non-violent civil disobedience fails. Are there situations in which forceful 
resistance becomes imperative, not just because it may be more effective but 
because it seems to be the only way of averting absolute disaster? I am not 
a total pacifist, but I would like to hear what contemporary answers from 
within the Islamic tradition have to say on this question. What do you think 
about Ibn Taymiyya’s view that so long as the ruler follows the Sharia there 
is the obligation to follow him, thereby ruling out rebellion? 
 
OA: Yes, I did discuss this briefly in my book. I also referred to Khaled 
Abou El Fadl’s Law of Rebellion in Islam, which shows the complexity of this 
tradition in a more detailed way. I do show, for one, that the first century 
and half of Islam is (ironically) filled with rebellions that were supported 
and participated in by the greatest of Sunni authorities—in particular, the 
revolts of ‘Abd al-Rahman b. al-Ash‘ath in the Umayyad period and that of 
al-Nafs al-Zakiyya in the early Abbasid period. It is said that in one of them 
none of the hadith scholars or the jurists stayed behind. This is something 
with which I challenge my interlocutors who hold quietism to be the only 
Sunni position. They don’t deny this history, but they interpret it through 
its historical consequences, in hindsight—that violence against the ruler is 
never good. There is this famous aphorism that “One day of anarchy is worse 
than sixty years of tyranny,” as stated by Ghazali as well as Ibn Taymiyya.

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62 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

TA: Yes, and it has often been repeated by Orientalists to characterize Is-
lamic political thought as essentially quietist. And yet one must bear in 
mind that social chaos is frightening for most people.

OA: The reason for this attitude, I think, was less theological or scriptural, 
but rather sublimation of certain historical lessons. Of course there were 
hadiths to this effect (prohibiting rebellion), but there are others, only 
slightly less explicit and forceful, that prompted in the direction you have 
mentioned, in which amr/nahy could take on the form of organized, armed 
rebellion, as indeed it did dozens of times in the first century and a half. But 
then one set of hadiths was privileged over others due to historical reasons. 
And Ibn Taymiyya was an exceptional historian. 

TA: You don’t talk about this enough in the book, do you?

OA: Right, I don’t. I remember a fellow medievalist, Aaron Zysow, a re-
markable scholar of Islamic texts, who teaches at Harvard and Princeton, 
saying in a lecture once, “Ibn Khaldun, he was an amateur compared to Ibn 
Taymiyya.” It may sound shocking at first but it makes sense if one is speak-
ing about intellectual history. On political history, of course, Ibn Khaldun 
was unparalleled. Ibn Taymiyya nonetheless surprises you with his insight 
and precise sense of historical development. In contrast, the mainstream 
jurists came to be quite weak in historical understanding. Al-Nawawi, for 
instance, complains of the jurists’ weakness, and also says that the had-
ith scholars were usually better historians of their own tradition—hadith 
narrators, even though their interests were limited. Ibn Taymiyya was re-
markable in that he seemed to know pretty much every intellectual trend 
throughout Islamic history. This is the knowledge that he used to mount his 
monumental challenge to all his contemporary scholarship. Nobody quite 
knew how to deal with him. He was not a typical scholar, who had become 
by then professors like us, known mainly for writing books.

Incidentally, another remarkable thing is that, unlike say al-Ghazali, 
Ibn Taymiyya doesn’t betray doubt or inner struggle. As I argue in my book, 
some of this inner struggle for classical theologians was structural, due to a 
crisis in their attempts to harmonize reason and revelation. Islamic scholar-
ship in the fifth/eleventh century was no longer as self-assured as it earlier 
had been. 

TA: By that you mean not self-assured in a political sense?



 63

OA: I mean in their struggle against the Muslim philosophers. I argued that 
this was something the Kalam theologians constantly struggle with, for they 
ended up, in an attempt to reconcile reason and revelation, dividing the turf 
between the two, holding that reason trumps revelation before one comes 
to believe in revelation.

TA: That was a very nice discussion in your book, by the way, of Ibn Taymi-
yya’s view that reason and revelation are mutually dependent and that this 
sets him apart from the argument of other thinkers over which of the two 
takes precedence.

OA: Right, that was a discovery for me too—that wasn’t what I had expected 
to find. For Ibn Taymiyya, that dividing of turfs was incorrect in both cases, 
for revelation is self-reflective in that even prior to one’s belief in it, it gives 
rational reasons for its own truthfulness, and in that once one has accept-
ed revelation, one does not set aside reason, but continues to reason with 
the revelation. And this amounts to saying that Ibn Taymiyya was far more 
pro-reason in a sense than often understood. 

TA: One of the things I was struck by on this particular point—and it’d be 
nice if you could say more in further publications, because you say it but 
don’t quite bring it out—is that Ibn Taymiyya is discovering that there is 
no such thing as abstract “Reason” with a capital R. He is concerned with 
“reasoning”, and therefore with the particularities of the situation in which 
one reasons and the things with which one reasons, the particularities of 
people’s character, of their historical context, etc. The Enlightenment rein-
vention of “Reason” is a hypostatization, but Reason as a universal is not 
very helpful in understanding ordinary life. At times, I seem to think that 
that’s what Ibn Taymiyya was saying. And that’s why for him there was a 
mutual dependence between reasoning and engaging with revelation. 

OA: Hallaq brings out some aspects of this in his Ibn Taymiyya Against 
Greek Logicians. 

TA: Yes, Hallaq is a friend of mine—I read that book a very long time ago, I 
don’t now remember it very well.
 
OA: But to go back to the point of rebellion, we have to remember that one 
of the ways in which the usual prohibition of rebellion against the ruler 

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64 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

could be circumvented is that for the Hanbalis, takfīr based on acts (rather 
than creed only) is easier to do—they could invoke “Whosoever does not 
rule by God’s revelation is a disbeliever” and so rebellion could be justified. 

Another reason is that for Ibn Taymiyya Sharia and justice, given his 
intervention in epistemology and ethics, are much more intermeshed and 
mutually implicated. For the formalist classical jurisprudence, one had to 
find a much closer relationship between an act and specific texts in order 
to establish its normativity, by which is meant ultimately its eschatological 
efficacy. 

We have to remember that the state in the classical Islamic practice 
is always bordering on illegitimacy—the classical jurists did not wish to 
theorize politics in such a way to accord the existing military states legiti-
macy, but these states survived for about a millennium of course and quite 
frequently they did not uphold the norms and limits of jurisprudence in 
punishing certain types of crime—as Johansen notes, it was almost expect-
ed that the rulers would cross the boundaries of fiqh. This is the reason for 
Ibn Taymiyya’s and his student Ibn al-Qayyim’s frequent complaints against 
the formalism of classical jurisprudence. The norm was that the ruler would 
often violate the norms of fiqh, seeing the Sharia as too soft and impractical. 
For instance, I recount an incident in my book in which Nur al-Din, when 
preparing for jihad against the Crusaders, and committed to following the 
Sharia as articulated by the jurists in a way that was a somewhat rare dis-
play of submission by a sultan, receives a complaint from a governor that 
limiting court procedures to those approved by the Sharia has led to the rise 
of highway robbery because the two upright witnesses typically required 
to establish a crime by the mainstream jurists are rarely available in such 
crimes. Nur al-Din dismisses the request saying that the Sharia is perfect. 

So, one way to look at this is that Ibn Taymiyya is interested in bringing 
together Sharia and the commonsense of ordinary Muslims and the logic of 
various Islamic projects. With the Sharia confined to a group of formalist 
jurists, it almost became a monopoly, and other erstwhile endeavors were 
left out of the reach of the normativity of the Sharia—for instance, the Sufis 
opposed their ḥaqīqa to the Sharia of the “exoteric” scholars, the ulema; the 
rulers opposed their siyāsa—real-life policymaking—to the theoretical and 
mostly ineffective jurisprudence, which they thought to be the Sharia, of the 
jurists; and similarly, the theologians created this dichotomy that we spoke 
of earlier. Ibn Taymiyya’s grievance is that the Sharia cannot be limited to 
the direct implications of specific texts, by which the general command-



 65

ments of revelation, such as to uphold justice and benevolence and so on, 
lost any effect independent of the specific texts.  

Another remarkable thing is the way Ibn Taymiyya conceptualizes 
power, as distributed in the society, rather than just limited to the rulers. 
So he frequently uses the phrase wulāt al-umūr rather than khalīfa, imām, 
or sulṭān—in particular, in his al-Siyāsa al-Shar‘iyya, al-Ḥisba, and other 
practical treatises—thus seeing the rulers as part of the continuum of power 
in the society. In the same vein, he speaks of amr/nahy as being general, a 
duty performed by all according their capacity and responsibility. This way 
of looking at power and authority was I think quite radical at the time, to 
the point that it did not really register in the politics and society of the time. 

Baber Johansen, in his recent treatment, incidentally, completely ig-
nores this aspect of Ibn Taymiyya, and says rather blandly that Ibn Taymi-
yya limits power to the rulers and the ulema.

TA: Could you send that reference to me? By the way, these are points you 
should develop in papers. I would urge you to do that. I think it is worth 
introducing your reading of the classical Islamic thinkers to your audience 
as quickly as possible to get some response. 

OA: Yes, my painstakingly deliberative way of writing is a weakness. Sher-
man Jackson, a friend and mentor, also says the same to me. By the way, do 
you know him?

TA: No, unfortunately not. I have been hoping to meet him for some time, 
but last year when he came to a conference in the Graduate Center I was 
away in Cairo. I watched a lecture of his on YouTube once and liked it very 
much.

OA: He is a well-regarded American scholar of Maliki jurisprudence, 
among other things. Incidentally, he has a recent book on Islamic theology, 
which perhaps is the best introduction to the field. It is not opinionated, 
which is why it is quite unique in that it is even-handed toward the four 
main schools of Islamic theology—the Traditionalists, the Mu’tazila, the 
Ash‘aris, and the Maturidis. 

TA: That would interest me, please do send me that reference too.

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66 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

Biography
TA: Are you originally from Pakistan?

OA: Yes, indeed. I was in fact thinking that my history is very similar to 
yours but flipped, in that I was born in Pakistan and grew up in the Gulf 
before coming to the US at eighteen. My ancestors came from Northern 
India where they had come, if one is to trust the tradition of family names, 
from Arab heritage. I started with Nuclear Physics, that was my first love. 
Then I switched over to the humanities and social sciences. 

TA: Very good. I am glad you did. 

OA: Then I went to Chicago to do an MA in social sciences, another MA 
in computer science, and then eventually came back to complete my PhD 
in history.

In other interviews you have talked about your childhood, but I am cu-
rious to learn a bit more. Let us begin with your early years in Pakistan. You 
have said elsewhere that you were not satisfied there as a young man, that 
you found rigidity of thought, and when you went to Europe, you expected 
something different. 

TA: Right, I expected to find reason and tolerance there…

OA: And a lot of people do think that they find that in the West…so why 
did you see these issues so clearly? Was it the keenness of your observation 
or was it the times that made some of these things much clearer?
 
TA: I don’t know. In fact, in some ways there is much greater hostility in the 
West today than there was at the time. There is no question about it.
 
OA: Perhaps precisely for that reason, one might feel betrayed when one’s 
expectations are different. 

TA: You may be right, but I don’t know that I felt betrayed. I think in some 
ways it was being a person trying to think for myself, even to take a distance 
from my father to some extent. Now that I think about it… you are still 
young, you will see when you get much older that when one looks back 
over one’s life one often sees things very differently, sometimes much more 



 67

clearly. I remember being very deeply disturbed when I was about fifteen. 
This was in Lahore. 

OA: You were in a boarding school then? 

TA: No, I was not a boarder. The school was called St. Antony’s High School 
in Lahore, run by the Order of Irish Brothers… Anyway, I wanted to say 
that I was deeply shaken in my faith when I was about fifteen, but I remem-
ber my father was very solicitous. I was surprised, because he could be very 
strict. He said I shouldn’t be upset, that my doubt was a test of my faith and 
not anything abnormal. And I was surprised that in spite of that experience 
he eventually sent me to England to study architecture. I was eighteen. And 
I studied architecture for a couple of years before I turned to anthropology. 
Architecture was his choice, by the way—he said that it would give me the 
discipline I needed, and it would also give me scope for imagination, be-
cause, he said, I was an imagination chap. But in the end it didn’t work, and 
I left architecture. I wanted to do anthropology instead.

OA: I want to talk about Pakistan a bit longer. Did you speak Urdu then?

TA: Yes I did! [In Urdu:] I have forgotten Urdu. I understand it. You too 
speak it, right?

OA: Yes. 

TA: [In Urdu still:] I could speak Urdu once, but it was not spoken at my 
school. I studied it as a subject, as a second language. 

OA: [In Urdu:] Do you ever go back to Pakistan now?

TA: [In English] Ah, I followed that! I went in 1983 or ’84, to meet an old-
time friend of mine from high school, we were in the same class, Tariq Ka-
mal Khan. He is now retired, he was the head of Pakistani Navy, an admi-
ral-in-chief or something.

OA: Well, the military is a class of its own, different from the rest of us. 

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68 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

TA: Well, yes, he is a Punjabi. I know that what the military, which is dom-
inated by Punjabis, did in Bangladesh was absolutely terrible. But Tariq 
wasn’t himself involved in that war of secession. 

OA: That’s not what I meant, but yes—one of the formative influences on 
me growing up was to be shaken by the burning of Karachi in the ’80s, 
which began in the name of ethnic discrimination, and I saw the city go 
to flames. I have hated ethnic riots and demagoguery with a passion since. 
I was too young to evaluate what was being said in terms of discrimina-
tion. But to me, the Punjabi-Muhajir friction was a terrible tragedy. The 
city was never the same again. My own friends growing up in Jeddah were 
often Punjabi. In fact, my single best friend from school, the only one I have 
stayed in touch with, is Punjabi. (In our family in Karachi we have Punjabi 
and Pathan links by marriage, even though our ancestors migrated from 
northern India. This ethnic divide has been a terrible upset for us and for 
the city.)

TA: Tariq, who comes from Jhelum, from the landlord class, is one of my 
oldest friends—and yes, of course, the Punjab has been the dominant part 
of Pakistan. We had many friends that I remember. My father knew very 
well someone called Chaudhary Niyaz Ali Khan, who owned a very big 
fruit farm in East Punjab near Pathankot, part of which he made into a 
waqf, where, as it happened, Maududi and his followers settled. 

OA: Did you ever meet Maududi?

TA: No, though my father did. I may have seen him with my father once but 
I am not sure. 

OA: So, after eighteen, did you ever go back to Pakistan apart from this? 

TA: Apart from the one occasion when I visited my friend Tariq, no, be-
cause my mother, allāh yarḥamuhā, had left Pakistan. When my parents 
separated my mother, heart-broken, moved back to be with her family in 
Saudi Arabia, in Medina. So, there was no relative in Pakistan. I had a few 
friends but I didn’t see them until I went back in the early ’80s. I went to Is-
lamabad, which didn’t exist when I was a child. Then I went from Islamabad 
to Lahore in half an hour by plane, which was an extraordinary experience. 
I remember we used to go to Murray [in the hills beyond Islamabad] from 



 69

Lahore by car, and it used to take a whole day. Lahore was totally changed 
when I visited it. It was a place I barely recognized. I remember an incident 
when I was being taken around to see the city: There used to be a large 
open space in front of a family friend’s house where I lived while I attend-
ed school in Lahore. On this occasion I heard my young guides talking 
about how there used to be a cinema and beside it a restaurant there that 
had now been pulled down. I told them that I remembered a time before 
the cinema and restaurant were even built. It was a strange experience. We 
both saw and talked about the same empty space, yet the space I now saw 
seemed identical with the space in my memory, while their memory was 
of buildings that had been built and eventually pulled down—both after I 
left Pakistan; what they now saw was an empty space that had succeeded 
these vanished buildings. Their empty space and mine were ultimately quite 
different.

I had Saudi nationality when I first arrived in Britain, because at the 
time I left Pakistan there was no nationalization law in place that would 
have allowed me to become a naturalized Pakistani. The one that existed 
was inherited from British India, and it stipulated that the applicant (or his 
father or grandfather) must have been born in His Majesty’s Dominions. 
But I needed a passport to travel to England, so my father went to his friend 
the Saudi ambassador who decided that since I was born in Medina I was 
eligible for a Saudi passport. Which meant that in London I had to register 
with the police every time I moved my lodgings, and this embarrassed some 
of my landladies.

When I switched my Saudi passport for a Pakistani one it made me 
a member of the Commonwealth, and that gave me the freedom to move 
and work as I pleased. I remember that I went into the passport office in 
London to surrender my Saudi passport and be removed from the status of 
“foreigner,” and the British official smiled and said to me, “Welcome, now 
you are one of us!” That shows you how things have changed since. 

OA: Interesting. I didn’t realize that’s what being a member of the Com-
monwealth meant. It seems now that it was always like this.

TA: No, not then. You were not a foreigner at all, you could come and go [in 
and out of Britain] freely. Then later they passed all sorts of laws that made 
it impossible to do so. But eventually, I think it was when I came back from 
the Sudan, that I decided to get British Nationality. This was just after the 

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70 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

Bangladesh debacle. Since Pakistan walked out of the Commonwealth in 
’72 in protest at the recognition of Bangladesh, suddenly I was a foreigner 
again. The Home Office decided that Pakistanis would now have to register, 
but the police didn’t like that because there were too many of us in Britain, 
so the government decide to give all Pakistanis British nationality. 
 
OA: Did you speak Arabic then?

TA: Yes, I spoke Arabic to my mother, but you know, a child’s Arabic. 

OA: And till how late did you go visit her?

TA: I was with her for the last year of her life, which was 1978. She had 
advanced cancer, and my maternal cousin, ‘Abd al-Aziz al-Dakhil, arranged 
for her treatment in Riyadh. I stayed with her that year, starting in early 
summer of 1977, and she died in the following summer, in 1978. I taught at 
Riyadh University until she died. But other than that, I had visited her every 
year in Medina, coming via Jeddah. She would always leave instructions in 
Jeddah for me to perform ‘umra before I came to her, so I did, dutifully. So I 
have done about ten of them or so. (One of these days I would like to go for 
Hajj, in shā’ allāh, with some friends of mine.) So, anyway, I lived with her 
for a couple of weeks or so every year. 

OA: So you haven’t been there since the ’70s? It has changed so drastically. 

TA: Yes, I am told. I have only gone once very briefly as part of a team to 
write a report on sociology and social anthropology in Riyadh University. 

OA: But you taught anthropology there in the ’70s. And in Arabic?

TA: No, sociology, they didn’t have anthropology. Teaching in Arabic was 
a bit of a strain for me at first. By the end I was reasonably fluent doing so. 

OA: That is quite impressive. Speaking and reading Arabic is one thing, but 
teaching something like sociology, with all the terminological issues, that’s 
quite something!

TA: Yes, of course, and I tried to lecture in a way they were not used to, 
critically, in which perhaps I was not very successful. I had studied Arabic 



 71

in England for my A-level certificate, and then as an undergraduate at Edin-
burgh University, where Arabic was my second subject after Anthropology. 
And then, of course, I went to the Sudan in the ’60s after doing my B.Litt at 
Oxford, and taught in Khartoum University (in English). After that I went 
repeatedly to Egypt. But Egyptian dialect is something I still find difficult. It 
often trips me up when they make qāf into a hamza and jīm into gāf. 

OA: Do they figure out that you are a khaliji from your accent?

TA: Yes, they do, and I tell them I get my accent from my mother. 

OA: I remember when I’d go to Egypt, they can tell my accent is Saudi. If I 
told them that I was from Pakistan, they are much kinder, there is a much 
greater sense of fraternity. I love Egyptians, in particular the ordinary peo-
ple, the sha‘b. There is an incredible openness in that class of people. They 
are open to each other and to foreigners. The gender segregation is also 
much mitigated. There is this amazing communal spirit.

TA: Right. I love going to Egypt too, some of our closest friends are in Cairo. 
I often tell them that my heart is in Egypt but that my mind is in the West. It 
can be difficult, of course, physically and logistically, living there. 

OA: Can we now talk about your father, and the specific critique of your fa-
ther’s position that you have? Did you ever confront him about the question 
of an Islamic state politics?

TA: No, not on this issue. Of course, one does not come to important po-
sitions just like that, one has to live through a variety of circumstances in 
which problems begin to emerge. He was quite keen on the idea of Pakistan 
as an Islamic state, as a unique experiment that was not based on race, eth-
nic origin, or other identities but simply on an ideological commitment to 
Islam. He kept this view all his life, I think. Although he later became less 
interested in the question of an Islamic state and more in the vision of the 
Qur’an, he never explicitly disavowed the former. 

I was thinking about this when we were talking about Ibn Taymiyya, 
because I remember from childhood my father talking about him quite of-
ten. Having read your book, I can see many of the things that he would 
have found attractive about Ibn Taymiyya. I certainly never heard him say 

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72 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

anything critical—in any case the reputation of Ibn Taymiyya as intolerant 
has emerged relatively recently with what is called “the rise of political Is-
lam”. Ibn Hazm was my father’s favorite, I think. So, no, I didn’t confront 
him on the question of the state. In any case, his book Principles of State and 
Government in Islam didn’t appear until the early ’60s.

He could be very strict but he never once raised his hand against me, 
even when I was naughty. My mother did strike me when I was little, but he 
never did. I remember him quoting a hadith once, by the way, about how 
it was makrūh (disliked) to strike even an animal in the face. I was very 
impressed by that. My father was a genuine intellectual and he gave me 
considerable freedom of thought. 

I have found that I underestimated what I got from my mother. She was 
barely literate—in her youth women in Saudi Arabia didn't go to school. 
But she read the Qur’an regularly, and one of my earliest memories as a boy 
is waking up from a nightmare in the early hours and hearing my mother 
read Qur’an, which was incredibly reassuring. But that’s not why I said I 
obtained something valuable from her. I came to realize slowly that whereas 
my father was an intellectual (for him Islam was an intellectual system) for 
my mother Islam was just an embodied condition of being, and it was grad-
ually over the years that I began thinking about her and her Islam. And so 
my intuitions about embodiment become more concretized and I realized 
that intellectuality was not the first and most important thing in thinking 
about “religion”, that “religion” has no essential definition because it is co-
eval with life. In any case “religion” is not a good translation of dīn, that's 
why I often use inverted commas when speaking of “religion”. My mother’s 
Islam was a way of being, an attitude, a range of sensibilities, a physical 
condition—of course she said her prayers regularly and read the Qur’an 
and fasted, and all of that somehow permeated her ordinary life. I don’t 
mean that she was “a good woman” but that her faith was not an abstract 
object. This contrast (between my father’s intellectual and critical approach, 
and my mother’s total absence of intellectuality) seems to me important in 
understanding “religion”. This was how my mother lived and this was what 
she believed made her a Muslim. And I think, paradoxically, that’s why she 
became important to me intellectually. 

OA: Yes. That reminds me of how theologians like al-Ghazali and al-Ju-
wayni would say toward the end of their lives that they wished for nothing 
but the “faith of the old women of Nishapur” (‘ajā’iz naysābūr), leaving be-
hind all of our delving into the oceans of theology and philosophy. At an-



 73

other occasion, in his Iḥyā’, al-Ghazali says that the faith of a theologian is 
like a thread hanging in the wind whereas that of a common believer is like 
an immovable rock. Very few people handle faith and reasoning together 
as lived experiences, these are not isolated instances. And what’s interesting 
is that Ibn Taymiyya doesn’t betray this doubt at all in any of his writings, 
which I find mysterious and incredible.

You seem to have been interested in Islamic tradition increasingly 
since the 1980s, when you wrote Genealogies. Was it the influence of your 
mother, or of her death?

TA: I think it may have been. When she died in 1978, I began to think about 
quite a number of things. Many of the papers that I wrote on the question 
of embodiment were written in the 1980s, although the book itself came 
out in ’93. 

OA:  You mentioned that your faith was shaken around fifteen. How has 
your faith developed since? Is what we see in Genealogies a reflection of that 
development?

TA: Yes, I am increasingly struck by the need for getting into, thinking 
about, Islamic tradition and educating myself more in my old age about 
what it means, and trying to look at it as it were with fresh eyes. And that 
impetus is something that has become an important part of my life. 

OA: When did your father pass away? And did that have an influence? How 
did he respond to your writings?

TA: He died in ’92, and none of my books on religion had come out by then. 
I don’t think he was terribly interested in my writings. There was nothing 
he could learn from them. He was very affectionate towards me, though. I 
remember him once saying to someone about me: “His īmān is ḍa‘īf” [his 
faith is weak] [laughter]. And I think that was not an unreasonable way 
of putting things. I have tensions in my thinking—sometimes I see things 
darkly, not only because of what the future may bring, but about the present 
and what it signifies and how it should be lived. I still have the habit of 
drawing on subversive genealogy, which is a kind of self-challenge. I am not 
comfortable with my writing. I don’t like to read what I have published until 

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74 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

long afterwards when it becomes “alienated”, because I find myself doubting 
many things I’ve written.

OA: In fact I love that about your writing—how your self-reflection is ev-
ident there, already. I feel I am in sort of a jungle, not in a city with clearly 
marked streets, because it is not easily predictable where I am going and 
what to expect. And that makes me go back to them again and again, and 
challenges me to think. 

TA: I try to explore things, you know. Somebody once asked me why I used 
the term “thinking” in many of my titles, and I said because thinking is a 
process that doesn’t stop. I find it difficult to stop writing not because I want 
to perfect it—there is no perfection—but because I need to think through 
the act of writing. I explore things and find things I had not expected, some 
disturbing things and some that are pleasing. Exploration is what I want to 
do rather than apply a ready-made theory. I don’t have a theory.  

OA: What makes your style distinctive? Are there authors or genres of writ-
ing that have influenced you?

TA: For influences, I suppose, certainly some of the Western philosophers, 
because I know them better than I do Islamic philosophers. People like 
Collingwood and Wittgenstein, because they force me to think very closely. 

The Impossible State
OA: Can we return to your critique of the idea of an Islamic state? You bring 
out the problematic nature of absolute loyalty to an Islamic state. But if we 
are talking about Islamists, I actually think that we do not have enough 
studies of what they were really trying to say. Take Maududi, for instance: 
he was a gifted thinker, a genius in fact, and a great writer. But I think he 
greatly suffered from the tendency and the need to present Islam in a final 
and unified voice, for a few reasons. South Asian Islam, for instance, had 
historically not seen the multiplicity of legal madhhabs that central Islamic 
lands like Egypt and Syria took for granted, and so just like Hanafism was 
the only real way to be Muslim, people tended to underestimate the possi-
bility of various opinions that were equally legitimate or superior to theirs. 
In Pakistan, in particular, where Hanafism prevails so exclusively, the idea 
of codification of Islamic law, now seen as problematic by many, presented 



 75

little difficulty—for Hanafism had historically been attuned to being the law 
of the government, since Abbasid times. This, in part, was the result of the 
lack or loss of traditional learning in its fullness. Premodern Muslim schol-
ars had this overwhelming sense of diversity within Islam—they speak as 
Hanafis or Sunnis or Ash‘aris, but much less frequently simply as Muslims. 
Which has its own problems of course—sectarianism, parochialism, and 
lack of collective being and action, and so on. Twentieth-century Muslim 
activists, necessarily thinking in an anti-colonialist, collectivist mode, were 
both tired of sectarian rivalries—and we are not past the adverse effects of 
sectarianism—and also deprived of the opportunity to learn and appreciate 
the value of a diverse, rich tradition. So calls for loyalty to the state, includ-
ing your father's ideas on the subject, which I think were a sophisticated 
version of the ideas that were quite common among the Islamists in his 
time, have to be understood in this context.

But there is another thing. To use Collingwood’s question-and-answer 
metaphor, there is not enough appreciation in our studies today that the 
questions for Islam and Islamic actors throughout the twentieth century 
were so different. It seems to me that we haven’t excavated those questions. 
So whereas I am very critical of the idea of the nation-state, even an Is-
lamic one, deserving absolute loyalty, and one can be critical, as you are, 
on Qur’anic grounds, but also on Islamic-traditional grounds, one must 
further wonder, what is different in our view of the nation-state from that 
of the twentieth-century Islamists? Is our realization about the tyrannical 
powers of the nation-state, applicable as it is to the theory and practice of 
the developed states in the West, equally applicable to the much less devel-
oped, much less complete, much less stable, states in the Muslim world? 
Finally, Hallaq’s claim that the Sharia is dead is based on the premise of near 
complete modernization of Muslim societies and state, which is not tenable.

TA: Yes, he says that in his book on Sunni legal theories. But his later books 
on Sharia and on modernity (due to appear shortly) are more interesting. 
I would urge you to read them. They pose questions about modernity that 
require a serious response.

OA: He overestimates, I think, the extent to which the modern state and 
law have replaced the Sharia in the Muslim world. One useful account 
which questions that premise is Anatol Lieven’s Pakistan: A Hard Country, 
which argues how Pakistan’s state and politics are not modern, that extend-

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76 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

ed family and tribal loyalties continue to play a significant role under the 
guise of democratic party politics. This incomplete modernization may be 
dismissed as corruption, and there is a great deal of that, but there is also 
something more—the possibility of not ending up in the same consumerist 
black hole in which modern capitalist democracies have ended up.
 
TA: I agree with you, but whether that means Pakistan doesn’t have the 
aspiration to “complete” a modern state, that as a state it can escape the dis-
torting effects of global capitalism and imperial subservience, is something 
I would dispute. Capitalism and politics are not the same in the Muslim 
world as in the West, of course. Things are quite different in different parts 
of the Muslim world too. And yet in most parts of the Muslim world (of 
what used to be called the Third World) there is the aspiration to “modern-
ize” the state and the economy, to root individual and collective life in the 
state and the economy. Modernization, incidentally, is never complete—it 
is always part of an unending demand for forward movement. There was 
nothing like this in premodern times, even though some people held to 
an ideal model of the state. (It may be better to speak of governance rather 
than state in the premodern period, but it is unlikely that this will catch on.) 
Nevertheless, I think that something very radical has happened in Western 
Europe from early modern times with the gradual formation of what we 
recognize as the modern state (accompanying an increasingly dense global 
capitalism) whose most famous theorist is Hobbes.

What distinguishes this modern political formation is not only the 
claim to “sovereignty” within internationally recognized borders, nor sim-
ply the famous “separation of powers” (Legislature, Judiciary, Executive), 
but something that is presupposed by it: the state is constitutionally inde-
pendent of both the rulers and the ruled, so that the political structure is 
something that has always to be worked through. It is true that it is individ-
uals who are acting, but the very idea that there is a structure, a body, that 
they inhabit and that represents them, enables political actors to claim that 
their actions have a certain “legitimacy”. When one speaks of legitimacy, 
one speaks of the political structure of the state and the law it maintains 
and dispenses.

I realize that the state as it is emerging everywhere is not the same. It 
is a trend and model. It is true that there are some conditions militating 
against it, it is true that there are attempts to subvert aspects of it, but every-
where the nation state that has emerged in tandem with global capitalism 
rests on a power that I think is terrifying.



 77

I think that we humans now find that this century may well be our 
last; if some of us survive it will be in a very different, a very unpleasant 
world. The dangers are so real, not only the vast unpredictabilities of cli-
mate change and the destruction of the environment and pollution of the 
seas, but also nuclear accidents (think of Fukushima), the militarization 
of space, the prospect of nuclear war. And the so-called “sovereign” state 
is central to all of this. Our modern civilization has presented us with an 
absolutely impossible predicament, one which may not be resolvable, I fear, 
because things are so interconnected.

Of course there are considerable differences among the states we find 
in the Muslim world—in Europe too, for that matter. But again, there is 
a tendency in virtually all modern states to take over greater and greater 
functions of control, to exert greater coercion and repression because of 
crises of the state and economy. Even the so-called liberal states are moving 
inexorably in that direction. And that movement is additionally justified 
by the global war against Islam, or terrorists, or by expectations of internal 
disorder. Of course one cannot tell with certainty what will happen. But 
things are pointing in the direction of continual economic, political, and 
social crises. All of this is contributing to the strengthening of state powers 
in a repressive direction.

And that is also happening in different ways and under different con-
ditions in different Muslim countries, as I said. But that shouldn’t rule out 
attempts to draw on various aspects of one’s intellectual traditions to think 
of alternatives. I no longer think these will be adequate—not only because 
of the way global interconnections work, economically, politically, cultural-
ly, and ideologically, but also because the nature of the state in each one of 
these places has developed according to a not unfamiliar logic. Of course 
Egypt is not the US, Pakistan is not France, the US is not Britain. But there 
is a common political/economic language developing throughout the world 
that pushes people further into a morass.

Having said that, again, I see no reason why one shouldn’t draw on the 
Sharia as a way of addressing questions of justice—whether, and if so, to 
what extent and in what way this can infuse the policies of a modern state 
is one question (about which I am very skeptical), but how it can contribute 
to the formations of moral disciplines independent—though not unmind-
ful—of the state is quite another.

Which is why I was very intrigued by the notion of naṣīḥa in Saudi 
Arabia and wrote a chapter on it in Genealogies, as you know. Naṣīḥa can 
be addressed to people of authority, including rulers themselves, and in that 

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78 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

way Islamic tradition is drawn upon. At any rate, my father was right—one 
must not start from the notion that the truth necessarily shines out from the 
West, that everything the West has produced is the standard for individual 
and collective life in the rest of the world.

I would like to see more studies of medieval Islamic governance. Is it 
necessary for the Sharia to be conceptualized as law? Since the nineteenth 
century the Sharia has increasingly come to be thought of as a series of laws, 
precisely because people are trying to modernize a state. One should carry 
out historical and anthropological studies in order to examine how (what 
we now call) morality, economy, religion, politics, and law worked in a so-
ciety that wasn’t “modern”. Of course, some disagreements were justiciable, 
people had to resort to some institutions to resolve disputes, but these in-
stitutions were embedded in communities, they used different procedures, 
and operated on different assumptions about the nature of the human. I 
think we need more studies of that. 

OA: Yes, we have far more attention given to aspects of legal history, but 
not enough looking at how these things worked together, which I take to be 
politics in its broader sense. My book is quite lonely in that regard.

TA: But it’s an excellent book which should prompt others also to take on 
these questions.
 
OA: On the one hand you are quite pessimistic toward the modern state, 
but you also point to, here and in other writings, optimism that Islamists 
might be thinking of real alternatives…

TA: Or “hope”, rather than optimism?

OA: Right, hope. But I notice that when you get down to it, you don't find 
what you were hoping for—that the Islamists in your view aren’t really able 
yet to get past the desires and the conditions of legitimacy dictated by mo-
dernity. Myself I find sometimes that the more conservative Islamists might 
be more interesting, for they are not afraid to talk about the “ugly”.

TA: But one has to think not only of political action, the distribution of 
power and the necessity of resistance, but also of institutions of teaching and 
learning, of inculcating Islamic values—which is neither the narrow-mind-
ed Wahhabi kind nor the disastrous modern kind.



 79

On Freedom to Experience in Virtue Traditions and Liberalism
OA: But to do that, to embrace a tradition of virtue and piety, involves re-
fusing certain experiences and interactions. The tradition of Muslim piety, 
for instance, requires limiting what one sees and hears, and more. In con-
trast, liberal-capitalist ethics, if you will, requires of us to be open to all 
experiences and traditions.
 
TA: Well, that claim is not quite true. There are all sorts of limits that liber-
alism imposes and all sorts of exclusions it secures. Modern liberal society 
does claim to value multiplicity and variety of experiences, which seems 
attractive until you look carefully at what this means. Indeed, it justifies 
certain kinds of arrangement as being more open and tolerant when it isn’t. 
The mere fact that there is supposed to be a multiplicity of views and pref-
erences in modern society is given as the reason for the moral and political 
superiority of the market: because the market is the mediator among people 
who have very different preferences, it is the best possible arrangement for 
our egalitarian, plural world; that is what the market is—a way of responding 
equitably (neutrally) to the fact that people want different things, physical, 
intellectual, spiritual. So the market comes to be seen as the supreme value 
rather than merely a dispenser of multiple values. It creates a particular 
kind of society in which wants are generated and increasingly monetized, 
and so only certain kinds of social relations can flourish. The liberal-secular 
prescription is that one must accommodate every sort of experiences and 
belief, and one must value them all, but it ends up encouraging a specific 
kind of experience typified in the consumption of commodities. The mar-
ket is not a neutral mediator of multiple values; it is an active constructor, a 
re-former of specific values. 

To return more directly to your question: it is perfectly possible to want 
to limit one’s experience in accordance with one’s tradition. Thus the liberal 
attack on what some consider to be sacred, from the standpoint of their tra-
dition, is dishonest because and to the extent that it discourages the shaping 
of experience beyond the market. But I am far less prescriptive, I think, than 
your question seems to suggest. I still have the habits of an anthropologist 
who is looking at a culture from outside. In this case I am looking at a cul-
ture in which I have spent most of my life, and which nonetheless seems to 
me to be deeply flawed, and I try to explore how and why that is the case. 
I see Western critiques of Islam from this perspective. I find a great deal of 
dishonesty in what is said there, a dishonesty that reveals something about 

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80 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

modern cultural assumptions. But my explorations are not meant to be a 
refutation of these critiques; they are an attempt to interrogate the question-
able assumptions on which they rest—so I question them. 

Of course I am in favor of people following their own tradition with all 
that that implies, in terms of sensibilities, virtues, and cultivating humility 
in the face of the divine. But I think this is becoming more and more diffi-
cult. 

OA: But it is often said that traditional societies are coercive and restrictive, 
whereas liberal ones, by definition, are not. 
 
TA: Coercion is highly relevant to liberal societies as the inverse of “free-
dom”. There is much talk nowadays, by intellectuals and politicians, about 
the importance of “freedom”; even our governments talk about defending 
it while at the same time using a variety of coercive measures, legal as well 
as illegal. Critics condemn these measures as “illiberal”, but I’m not per-
suaded that a liberal democratic state can do without them in moments 
of crisis; the primary duty of the state is to defend itself, whatever it takes. 
Now that crisis is the permanent condition of our time (economic depres-
sion, extreme weather, political corruption, military quagmires, the threat 
of terrorism) piecemeal government coercion, and preparations for future 
repression of unruly populations, are increasingly difficult for liberals to 
oppose. Liberals claim that they are uniquely against human suffering, but 
I find that they are simply more comfortable with a “modern” geography of 
pain which they justify in instrumental terms.

But even in civil society coercion takes many forms. Take seduction, 
for instance. In many cultures to seduce someone sexually was a serious 
offense, subject to severe penalties. In modern society sexual seduction is 
not subjected to punishment. Sexuality has been largely “liberated” but the 
work of seduction remains largely overlooked. And yet seduction is basic to 
the way the market works (including the marketing of political personalities 
in national elections), but especially the marketing of things and the erotic 
imagery in which they are frequently purveyed. We don’t think of sexual 
seduction as dangerous anymore, mainly because we regard every adult as 
possessing an autonomous will, as having the right to self-fulfillment (in-
cluding sexual fulfillment), and as capable of being “persuaded”. We think 
of persuasion as a good thing, as the working of reason itself—and aren’t we 
all for reason? But there are many ways (rhetorical techniques) by which 



 81

people are persuaded—seduced—into making immoral, cruel, decisions. 
That is where “free action” and “coercion” take place in liberal societies.

On Opposing Genealogy to Tradition
OA: In your interview with David Scott you express dissatisfaction with 
how MacIntyre opposes genealogy to tradition, in favor of the latter. But 
it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between these two 
versions of moral inquiry—that an inquiry committed to genealogy with no 
acknowledged and consistently held frame of reference cannot be compati-
ble with moral inquiry within a tradition, even if this inquiry is self-critical; 
that the similarity between traditional self-criticism and genealogical de-
construction in the tradition of Nietzsche and Foucault ends if one consid-
ers MacIntyre’s main argument, which is crucially sensitive to fundamental 
premises of reasoning. It appears that you understand “genealogy” as a tool 
of inquiry whereas MacIntyre speaks of it as a metaphysical non-commit-
ment to any truths, and taking that non-commitment itself as the point of 
departure for the inquiry of all else. What then do you make of MacIntyre’s 
broader argument about the necessity of community and tradition for the 
development of rational-moral inquiry, as well as of virtue?
 
TA: For MacIntyre, Genealogy is necessarily subversive. But for him it is 
to be approved of when it is directed at Encyclopedia, because Genealo-
gy undermines the latter’s fundamental assumptions. But when MacIntyre 
juxtaposes Genealogy to Tradition he sees it as a moral failure.

I don’t agree. I think MacIntyre is talking mainly about “discursive tra-
dition” rather than tradition tout court. There is a tension between some-
thing that is lived, taken for granted, habituated, embodied, and something 
that is intellectualized in order to make it capable of being the object of cri-
tique. MacIntyre doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between these two modes 
of Tradition. I think it is important to distinguish them, to examine the 
relationships between them, the way they intersect or stand apart, support 
or undermine each other, or remain indifferent to each other.

A discursive tradition needs to look back, as you show for Ibn Tay-
miyya, to look back and distinguish genealogically how things have come 
together to form what is true doctrine, what is reasonable and rational, why 
it has come to be taken for granted. When you take these things apart, you 
may be able to show that some aspects of a historical tradition were mistak-
en, some were not productive, and so on. In that sense, I see genealogy not 

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82 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

necessarily as subversive of an entire intellectual tradition nor necessarily a 
threat to an embodied life of virtue.

In genealogy—and it doesn’t have to be done exactly the way Foucault 
does it, and in any case there is a difference between his later work and his 
earlier work—the objective may be enlightenment of oneself, or it may be 
the reconstruction of one’s tradition. It need not be an opponent whom 
one is unmasking, with resentment and animosity, as MacIntyre suggests. 
It may be a way of asking oneself or one’s tradition whether what one has 
taken absolutely for granted is quite as unquestionable as it seems. One asks 
how and why it has come to be taken as self-evident. MacIntyre seems to 
accept genealogy as valuable so long as it adopts a critical posture toward 
the claims of encyclopedia, but he thinks that it is ultimately inadequate be-
cause it rejects the existence of an essence in tradition, because it disallows 
the possibility of an accountable (because continuous) self. MacIntyre’s po-
sition in this matter, so it seems to me, leads to devaluing the potentialities 
of genealogy as a mode of intellectual inquiry (as a mode of doing intellec-
tual history) rather than as an anti-morality.

In a related sense, people keep considering genealogy not as subversive 
but as a means of reforming Islamic tradition. I wonder if it is better to 
think not of reforming Islamic tradition but as living an Islamic tradition 
with the challenges which that offers. When there are challenges, dilemmas, 
questions, life will then require rethinking—sometimes more profoundly 
and at other times marginally. So the idea of reform strikes me—though 
everyone uses it, I have myself—as inadequate, especially when one thinks 
of what MacIntyre calls a vital, living tradition, because that by definition 
involves evaluation and requires appropriate responses to emergent diffi-
culties. And this always brings up the question of what is essential to the 
tradition and what isn’t. But this is not just an intellectual issue, not just a 
question of “reform”. We need to think of what it means for people to live a 
tradition, not just what a living tradition is. 

On Accretist and Revivalist/Originalist Types of Traditionalism 
in Islamic History
OA: Right, I too feel uneasy about the ambiguity of the concept of “reform”. 
I wish to suggest, along the same lines, that what is intended by “reform” by 
those who take the tradition seriously might already be an inextricable part 
of Islamic tradition—thus I narrate the story of the Sunni tradition in terms 
of “accretists” and “revivalists”. 



 83

TA: By “accretist”, I assume you mean what MacIntyre calls the Encyclope-
dist mode of inquiry?

OA: No, actually, I look at the contrast between two approaches to tradition 
in Sunni Islam, coming out of my work on Ibn Taymiyya. The first mode of 
receiving the tradition, if you will, builds on the immediate past, emphasiz-
es continuity and embraces the developments, constructions, and syntheses 
added by each successive generation, thus upholding the growth and devel-
opment of Islamic tradition by accretion. The most important manifestation 
of this synthetic posture has been the encounter of Islam with early Kalam, 
the Qadariyya and the Mu‘tazila and then the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist 
falāsifa and so on. It distinguished itself by synthesizing and accepting ele-
ments of these traditions while defending to their satisfaction the orthodox 
doctrine of the salaf. They acquired their distinct identities, as Ash‘aris or 
Maturidis, from this encounter. By the same process of synthesis, they in-
corporated Sufism into the mainstream. I call them accretist because they 
represented the tendency in Sunnism to synthesize and embrace construc-
tions and foreign influence through intellectual synthesis, inevitably involv-
ing compromises, and this attitude is quite common. In the legal domain, 
for instance, they accept the growing authority of the madhhabs—which are 
a fourth/tenth-century historical construction, of course. But rather than 
theological or legal doctrines, I want to highlight the mode of dealing with 
change as being a better index of this tendency in Sunnism. Others, the 
strict followers of Ahmad b. Hanbal and the salaf, the original Sunnism if 
you will, rejected Kalam. They came to be known as the ahl al-athar or ahl 
al-ḥadīth. They have been called “literalists” or “traditionalists” and so on, 
but these labels are inadequate. I have called them the “revivalist” tradition, 
because what sets them apart is their reception of any new developments 
with greater resistance, and their tendency to measure every change against 
the early Islamic model—and this juxtaposition is not necessarily literalist 
or rigid. For instance, the traditionalism of someone among the Hanbalis 
like Ibn Qudama and Ibn Rajab, or among the Shafi‘is like al-Dhahabi and 
Ibn Kathir, that are strictly anti-Kalam and averse to rationalism, is different 
from the traditionalism of Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Qayyim, or Ibn ‘Aqil, who 
were trying to rationally reconcile tradition with revelation but in a way 
they believed to be more faithful to the salaf than the strand of Sunnism I 
have called accretism. I call them “revivalists”—with some unease. 

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84 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

TA: Go back to where we started. How could one see both aspects of the 
followers of a tradition that you call accretists and revivalists as aspects of 
a continuing vital tradition? Because what you really want to say is that 
revivalism comes as a challenge to a declining or exhausted tradition that 
needs to be rejuvenated. I am still thinking myself about how to incorporate 
what one knows to be those waves of so-called “revival”. I am not sure if 
you know Ahmad Dallal, who has been wanting for years to write a book 
about eighteenth-century revivalists. We know also that there have been 
these movements of revivalism from very early on. 
 
OA: Right, I am familiar with Dallal’s article on the subject. I do not mean 
by revivalism the well-known tradition concerning the coming of a revival-
ist at the turn of every century. But rather, what I meant was to label a way of 
receiving tradition in contrast with the natural accretion of tradition—the 
development that is inevitable in any tradition. In legal as well as theologi-
cal domains one sees this construction and then a certain closing down of 
the doors of ijtihād around the fourth century. So I use “revivalism” less in 
a moralist, traditionalist sense—and more as one of the modes of Islamic 
tradition, almost inherent to it, that wants to hold the received tradition 
against the standard of the early tradition. 

TA: In that case I am not sure if revivalism is a good term. I wasn’t entire-
ly clear in what way you were approaching MacIntyre, either. At any rate, 
I think it might be worth your stressing that what he calls Encyclopedia 
should not be confused with what you mean by accretists, because there is 
a straightforward sense of progress that characterizes the nineteenth-cen-
tury Encyclopedia tradition—while the modern notion of “progress” is not 
present among whom you call the accretists. 
 
OA: Right, there is no sense of progress in the modern sense. Yet, there 
is some complexity. The accretist Sunni tradition differs from MacIntyre’s 
Encyclopedists in the essential sense that knowledge for the latter is univer-
sal and based on self-evident, universal reason, whereas Islamic tradition, 
certainly the Sunni tradition, never puts reason on that kind of pedestal. 
On the issue of progress, certainly moral progress above and beyond the 
generation of the Prophet is unimaginable. Yet on intellectual progress, 
there is something. For instance, the Kalam theologians famously tried to 
justify their involvement in the kind of theology that the early Muslims 
clearly didn’t by using arguments of necessity or of intellectual prowess of 



 85

later Muslims. Al-Juwayni, for instance, said in his early writings that the 
salaf knew that there will come people who will understand the scriptural 
texts better than they; in his later writings, he rejects this notion. Even more 
clearly, Ghazali says in his Iḥyā’ that had the Ṣaḥāba faced such intellectual 
opponents of faith as Islam faced in his time, they would have used Kalam. 
But in a later treatise, the very last one Ghazali wrote, he rejects this justi-
fication of Kalam, saying that the Ṣaḥāba indeed faced such opponents but 
still didn’t use Kalam. There is an aphorism that sums up this attitude: the 
way of the salaf is safer (aslam), whereas the way of the khalaf is better-es-
tablished or wiser (aḥkam). So whereas there is no sense of linear progress 
in time, and certainly scholars like al-Juwayni even entertained the possi-
bility of the “exhaustion of the Sharia” (futūr al-sharī‘a) due to the “absence 
of mujtahids”, yet there is an almost sporadic sense of the khalaf having 
surpassed the salaf—but this sense is far from the modern idea of infinite 
progress, just that there is still room to think about and argue for rational 
development and improvement. 
 
TA: It would be worth your writing a short article comparing Ibn Taymiyya 
and al-Ghazali in the way you have just done, without going into too much 
detail—I don’t know of anyone who is doing this kind of thinking.

OA: Well, I’d say scholars are beginning to pay attention to Ibn Taymiyya 
and rethink, very slowly, the trajectory of Islamic thought with greater nu-
ance. For instance, Professor Yahya Michot, who just moved to Hartford 
Seminary from Oxford, is a remarkable scholar working on Ibn Taymiyya. 
But a lot more needs to be done—and methodologically too, in recognizing 
the serious limits of and problems with Encyclopedia examining Tradition, 
as MacInyre would put it. Yet, seclusion or withdrawal from the secular 
university is hardly possible today, or even desirable, for all sorts of reasons. 
One must take Western knowledge as a point of departure, or at least the 
backdrop, for any serious rethinking of Islamic tradition, while recognizing 
that Islam has always been a networked tradition. Even in premodern times, 
when there was much less movement of ideas and people, Islamic tradition 
could not be localized for very long, there always came challenges from 
outside that local authorities had to account for and change in response to. 
One could only have transient formations that are governed or influenced 
by local conditions. So, rather than investing in something called “Ameri-
can Islam” (for example), one must take up Islamic tradition as it is, which 
is both an opportunity and a challenge for American Muslim intellectu-

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86 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

als. What I mean by this is that Muslim intellectuals from anywhere in the 
world, today as always, could criticize what I might have to say respecting 
Islamic tradition, and their location would not disadvantage their critique 
from a strictly traditional or moral or religious perspective, even if the aca-
demic demands on my work require paying far more attention to the kinds 
of critiques my American colleagues would offer. Only in the limited case of 
Islamic legal interpretation, which requires paying attention of local custom 
(‘urf), would locality matter—and in a globalized world, even that is quite 
limited.

Part of what I am calling to do is not to limit ourselves to seminar-
ies—granted their usefulness—but to nonetheless establish communities 
of Muslim academics writing as Muslim scholars committed to living and 
thinking Islamic tradition critically and in dialog with their disciplines. 
Though that may not go as far as MacIntyre’s desired moral community, 
which he requires as the ground for the development of virtue. MacIntyre 
seems to value the idea of community as the necessary cradle of virtue, in 
contrast with the Kantian ethics of categorical imperative. And the signifi-
cance, in the context of a community and its role-models, of the model you 
constantly aspire to and emulate but can never exceed. 

 
TA: I think that such a community is far more difficult if not actually un-
sustainable in the modern world created by liberal capitalism. It must be in 
After Virtue that MacIntyre says that the era of barbarism is upon us and 
there is nothing to be done but withdraw into small communities, or some-
thing to that effect. This may just be possible. But I take it that you accept 
MacIntyre’s idea of a community, up to a point, without thinking that that’s 
the answer to everything?

On Being a Muslim Academic 
OA: Indeed. More concretely, this means that Muslim academics working 
in secular universities should be willing to identify as Muslim scholars and 
contribute to the body of writings by Muslim public intellectuals who are 
proposing programs or particular reforms for Muslims, have conference 
and journals that take on the project of critically developing Islamic discur-
sive tradition. 

 
TA: I see that, and it is a good position to take. I would push you a little 
further, coming back to an enduring concern we’ve had. I think that it is 



 87

not simply that Muslims have a moral obligation to engage continually in 
dialogue, but to use dialogue as a way of exploring new possibilities of the 
politics Muslims might pursue. What is taken for granted by so-called Isla-
mists is the necessity for an Islamic state—and here, as I have said several 
times, I disagree. But I like the concept of “networks” as a way of exploring 
different kinds of politics.

But also kinds of democratic engagement, even to some extent through 
a party-system. As you know I am very skeptical of party politics, but that’s 
the way politics is largely organized in the modern state. Party politics is at 
present indispensable and yet it is a treacherous mode of politics. There is 
a very tricky line here between taking for granted what exists and trying to 
mitigate the worst aspects of the modern state. 

 
OA: Unfortunately, I have come to agree with your assessment in many 
respects, even though I think of myself as generally optimistic. We are al-
ready too late, it would seem, certainly with respect to developments such 
as climate change. 

 
TA: What is further disconcerting is that even some of the principal artifacts 
of modernity that one has come to value turn out to be treacherous. Take 
democracy itself, for instance. I can’t think of a better political system, and 
yet it is precisely because of democracy that we have a situation which can’t 
be resolved. Can you imagine a government actually telling an electorate 
that has voted it into power that people must learn to want less, lower their 
standard of living, curb their desires for material goods? Such a government 
wouldn’t last long. I’m not suggesting that a dictatorship is the answer—that 
would be much worse. I’m simply saying we are in an impossible situation 
and there seems no solution in sight.

OA: Muslim traditionalists have been talking about this for a long time, 
but only recently am I beginning to pay attention to them, to think beyond 
democracy: smaller communities, with some kind of shūra in place…

TA: But shūra is “consultation” rather than the right to elect and recall, and 
the authority to decide on the formation of policy. Is that what you mean?

OA: It could take a variety of forms, I think. But one thing that I find quite 
objectionable in modern democracy—that some modern Muslim intellec-
tuals are buying into—is that states are now government solely by institu-

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88 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

tions and not individuals. Traditional Islamic political thought has always 
required that rulers are exemplars of rectitude and piety, cultivated in vir-
tues, capable of ijtihād; their role is more moral and also more limited to the 
execution of the Sharia. The latter function in turn is divisible—thinking 
of the most developed form of Sunni political scholarship in the Mamluk 
period, in particular al-Qarafi and Ibn Taymiyya—into the siyāsa domain, 
based on generally agreed upon principles of Islam (and it is here that I 
see great room for democratic development), and the fiqh domain, where 
the juristic opinions, organized by traditional madhhab-communities, have 
reigned supreme. Governance—and I like your preference of this term over 
“state” to characterize premodern Islam—here was limited to defense, ex-
ecution of law and maintaining internal order, and zakat and possibly tax 
collection and distribution, and some administration.

Now this was not a perfect model—society was too apolitical and con-
sequently parochial, sectarian and unable to defend itself externally, unable 
to transfer power without violence and unable to hold the rulers sufficiently 
accountable. My book is precisely an attempt to point out these problems 
from within Islamic tradition. For some of these problems, some kind of 
democratic accountability looks extremely attractive, and that’s partly why 
early modern Muslim reformers so warmly embraced the modern na-
tion-state and the discourse on democracy.

So it is possible to think of alternatives to the current political insti-
tutions from within Islamic tradition. There are some transformations 
that would necessarily challenge the current form of the nation-state if the 
Sharia were taken more seriously: most directly, the transfer of authori-
ties (of interpretation, dispute resolution, family law, and so on) from what 
the modern state claims for itself into the hands of socio-religious leaders, 
namely the ulema. The economic dimensions of the Sharia, such as prohi-
bition of ribā and division of inheritance, both interpreted away or ignored 
by many modernizers, are in fact quite crucial in restraining the ambitions 
of capitalism while also allowing a relatively free market economy. Similarly 
for the law of homicide (for instance), which was set aside by the colonizers 
for being too lenient and averse to bloodshed, in that in many cases it gives 
the family of the victim the option to forgive the killer—thus compromising 
the powers of the state. So I think that in a society that would take the Sharia 
more seriously, rather than disfiguring it into a tool for a modern state, 
authority and power would become far more layered and community far 
more empowered vis-à-vis the nation-state. 

 



 89

TA: That's very interesting. I think you should continue to think along those 
lines. Also, I stress again that we are wrong in equating the Sharia with law. 
This equation is partly a retrospective categorization, the problematic use of 
a modern category to describe and use the Sharia. It is not enough to point 
to the gradual shrinking of the Sharia during the nineteenth century under 
colonialism. It seems to me that the Sharia also needs to be rethought in 
modern terms as something which isn’t law—and I am not sure if we yet 
have adequate ways of thinking about it. The Sharia is not just “law plus 
morality” because our modern idea of law is itself one that allows for its 
connection with ethics. So besides the problem with the idea of the Sharia 
being straightforwardly law, there is the issue of what kind of category “law” 
was prior to the modern period and in non-Western societies. One needs 
to trace the genealogy of “law” as it gradually comes to take the form of a 
universal category integral to the modern state. It is a commonplace that 
after the dissolution of the Roman empire people in Western Europe as well 
as in the Islamic Middle East took over arrangements from “Roman law”. 
But how did they understand and use what we now translate as law? How 
did it relate to what we would today call ethics? Anthropologists used to be 
very interested in such questions from a comparative cultural perspective, 
but not now. I think what we need is precisely enquiries into such questions. 
So that one aspect of rethinking the Sharia would require addressing these 
questions. 

You asked me whether I see any difference in my work over the last 
couple of decades. For me what's always been important is to look critically 
at the Western heritage. I do think that if one looks at Islam as a networked 
tradition and not simply as localized (American Islam, French Islam, and so 
on), one will have to engage critically with other traditions, be ready when 
necessary to draw on them. Because to some extent they are also partly our 
traditions. As far as my intellectual heritage is concerned, I don’t think of 
myself as having merely one (Islamic) tradition. There are several traditions 
of thought with which I am familiar, discursive traditions that are embed-
ded in the institutions in which I live, and in the state and politics of which 
I am part, and so I look critically at them. Of course the Islamic tradition is 
one with which I centrally identify. But it is a mistake, in my view, to think 
of the Islamic tradition as the only one to which people like us (intellectuals 
living in non-Muslim societies) belong. These traditions are part of one’s 
make-up, one’s sensibilities, one’s sentiments. 

I referred earlier to the difference between an argued-over, discursive 
tradition and a tradition which may not be articulable—motives, practices 

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90 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35:1

and attitudes for which one may not be able to give reasons and may not 
need to do so. It’s important to think of texts and discourse, of course. My 
simple point is that intellectual discourse is not the only important part 
of tradition, and that tradition in its entirety is not a coherent whole; its 
elements are interconnected, sometimes supportive, sometimes in tension 
with and sometimes contradictory to other elements—as human life itself 
is.

In Egypt up until the eighteenth century there used to a public practice 
during the Mawlid celebrations of reciting the whole of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, 
and they would celebrate the khatm al-bukhārī at the end. This was not 
primarily an intellectual exercise but an expressive, reverential one. It led 
people to try and embody things that were reminiscent of the Prophet: be-
cause the Prophet liked perfume, they would perfume themselves, because 
he liked honey, they would eat honey, etc. All that was part of an emotional 
bonding with the founder of the tradition that one mustn’t ignore—and it 
made up people’s lives, how these were shaped, colored, infused. But one 
couldn’t predict other aspects of people’s lives from this desire to bond with 
the Prophet. So I would urge you to look at that entire domain in your 
recounting of Islamic traditions, as a space that is dynamically intercon-
nected, as we proceed in our modern life with the dangers that threaten it 
and the promises it offers.

Interview conducted by Ovamir Anjum in June 2012
and edited by Basit Kareem Iqbal in January 2018