Drinking secularism: A critique of Shahab Ahmed’s what is Islam?

Abstract

In this 2023 Roy Rappaport lecture, I take up Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? as a point of entry to inquire into larger themes and questions—salient, hidden, to-be-pursued—in the study of religion and Islam. While Ahmed’s book has been hailed as “a new way of looking at Islam,” I demonstrate how his definitional enterprise is unoriginal because the problématique of Islamic orthodoxy it is tied to belongs to the long-standing Orientalist objectification of Islam. The first section summarizes Ahmed’s thesis. Taking the question of alcohol and Islam—one among six questions his book is organized around—as paradigmatic of his larger thesis, I argue that this question is markedly Christian and one already broached. Here I show how Ahmed disregards rich, diverse debate on alcohol to sustain his question as an “outright contradiction” between Islam as sharī‘a or principle and Islam as historical phenomena. In the third section, I comparatively outline an interim “pre-text,” a term central to his definition of Islam, of Ahmed’s own text. In the conclusion, I iterate why my critique of Ahmed is foundational. I end by suggesting how anthropological-sociological study of Islam can become richer when analyzed not in terms of being Islamic, as Ahmed adjectively does, but in terms of becoming Muslim, as a verb.