ISIM Workshop
organized in cooperation with FORUM and funded by ISIM, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development

Understanding Immanent Critique: Cultural Politics and Islamic Activism

For a detailed program, please click here.

28–29 November 2008 | Leiden

Like rationality and reason, critique has historically been often associated with Enlightenment. In the dominant narratives Islam thus appears as the other of reason; hence hostile to criticism. Ernest Renan wrote: ‘Islam is the disdain of science… restricting the human mind…to all rational research…’ (in Kurzman 1998:3). He indeed argued that Islam and knowledge could not go together (see Nomani 1955). This absence of critical approach is also manifest in Watt’s (1988) observation that Islam has been closed since the Middle Ages. Recently, Rushdie (2005) made a similar remark about the lack of criticality and pleaded for a Reformation of Islam (also see Langman 2005, Tibi 2002). Equating critique with Kant’s notion of Enlightenment, in ‘What is Critique’, Foucault averred that the cultural form of critique was ‘born in Europe’ and that critical attitude was a ‘specific attitude in the West’ (1996: 384, 386). Reformation was thus the first critical movement. The implication of such a position is clear. Critique is seemingly not part of the non-western traditions, especially the Muslim ones.

It is the premise of this workshop that critique has been integral to Islamic traditions. With new historical formations, it gained added salience since the 19th century in various projects –intellectual, cultural, political and so on. This workshop aims at exploring its myriad forms and functions throughout the Muslim world. We seek to extend and complicate the valuable works on practices of criticism in Muslim traditions (Asad 1993, 1996, Bowen 1993, Eickelman and Piscatori 1996, Fisher and Abedi 1990, Gaonkar and Taylor 2006, Kurzman 2001, Marsden 2005, Zaman 2002) and elsewhere (Heesterman 1985, Nussbaum and Sen 1989). Our focus, however, is on a specific form of critique: immanent critique or what Walzer (1987, 1988) calls ‘connected’ criticism. We use immanent critique to address a range of debates among Muslim intellectuals, movements, discourses which foreground Islam as an idiom to the center of public debate without necessarily arriving at a consensual position. Put negatively, we are not interested in detached criticism by atheists for they disregard Islam as a relevant frame.
What interests us then is how Islam is invoked by a multiplicity of competing and interlocking actors to make sense of the modern world. How do these debates among Muslim activists critically employ Islam to read their pasts and present; and how these readings affect and envision the future as criticism in general does (Said 1984). For example, how the activists of the Indian Jamaat-e-Islami discuss such Qura’nic words as maruf and munkar to arrive at different, even competing, conclusions about women’s participation in the public domain. In so doing, how they interpret Islamic cultures and traditions –written, canonical, oral or otherwise –to contest Maududi’s neopatriarchate (see Ahmad 2008). The workshop intends to explore the following questions in a variety of geographical and temporal contexts:

What are the forms of immanent critique employed by Islamic activists, intellectuals, movements, and ordinary subjects in multiple contexts?
How are immanent critiques exercised and for what purposes?
What is the function and effect of immanent critique?
Does it presuppose the notion of an authentic Islam and good life; if so, how do these notions animate the principles and practices of immanent critique? 
What are the theoretical and methodological premises which at once facilitate and hamper the possibilities of immanent critique?

In stressing the vitality of immanent critique, we register our skepticism to Eagleton (2005) and Habermas (1984) who believe that the 20th century saw the decline of ‘critical rational’ public debate. We hold that a thriving debate about the authentic forms and meanings of Islam continues in contemporary times. The workshop deals with the issue of immanent critique from many disciplinary angles –anthropology, sociology, Islamic studies, cultural studies, (intellectual) history, and political science, and it speaks to a variety of contexts (i.e., Muslim-majority, or Muslim-minority societies, including Europe) and time-frames. Themes include (but are by no means limited to):
-Popular cultures and intellectual traditions
-Everyday life and practices of critique 
-Debates on liberalism, feminism, secularism, nationalism, radicalism, traditionalism, transnationalism, citizenship etc.
-Ethical visions of Islam pertaining to self, society and the state
-Notions of history, time, cosmology and future
-Who is authorized to speak for Islam; who is a Muslim subject?

This seminar, convened by Irfan Ahmad, results from the post-doctoral fellowship of Irfan Ahmad at ISIM (August 2006 through September 2008). This fellowship was largely funded by the Rubicon programme at NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). Irfan Ahmad is currently adjunct lecturer of Anthropology, Universiteit van Amsterdam.

There is limited room for listeners. Please register before November 25 at registration@isim.nl