Mohammed Sulaiman - Between Text and Discourse - Re-Theorizing Islamic Orthodoxy PDF

Between Text and Discourse: Re-Theorizing Islamic Orthodoxy
Author(s): Mohammed Sulaiman

Source: ReOrient, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 2018), pp. 140-162
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BETWEEN TEXT AND DISCOURSE:
RE-THEORIZING ISLAMIC ORTHODOXY
Mohammed Sulaiman
Abstract: This article will examine the concept of orthodoxy as it appears in the work
of Talal Asad and two of his interlocutors, namely Ovamir Anjum and Shahab Ahmed.
In response to Ahmed’s critique of Asad which attempts to dislocate orthodoxy as con-
stitutive of Islam, this article employs the distinction Anjum draws between local and
universal orthodoxy and theorizes it from a discourse-theoretical perspective. Hence, it
will be argued that universal orthodoxy is central to Islamic discursive tradition because it
is the limit which preserves Islam’s singularity and allows it to exist as a unified universe
of meaning. Furthermore, against Ahmed’s contention that orthodoxy cannot account for
Islamic philosophy1 and Sufism as Islamic discourses because it is an inherently exclusion-
ary concept, I will demonstrate that exclusionary limits are necessary for the formation
of all discourses including Sufism and Islamic philosophy. Displacing orthodoxy effec-
tively amounts to subverting the singularity of Islam and reproduces the pitfalls of anti-
essentialist approaches.
Keywords: Islam, orthodoxy, discursive tradition, law, Sufism, philosophy, hegemony,

exclusion, limits
Introduction
The essentialist and anti-essentialist approaches continue to dominate the study of

Islamicate cultures and societies. Both, however, have been shown to falter at the
question of how the object of their studies, that is, Islam, can be meaningfully
conceived of. In brief, the essentialist (and Orientalist) view regards Islam as an
empirical object of analysis, defined by reference to a fixed and real essence. This
essence is typified by a set of qualities which are deemed to be intrinsic to Islam
and can be objectively “discovered” lying in classic Islamic texts and history. The
anti-essentialists criticize this view for ignoring the complex diversity of Islamic
lived experience. Therefore, they emphasize the empirical heterogeneity of
Muslim cultures and societies, past and present. For them, Islam has been inter-
preted differently by Muslims in their various localities. Rather than being a fixed
object external to Muslims, Islam(s) is embedded in the socio-historical contexts
University of South Australia, Australia
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BETWEEN TEXT AND DISCOURSE: RE-THEORIZING ISLAMIC ORTHODOXY 141
of Muslims and thus cannot be studied independently from these contexts. As a

result, it becomes impossible to study one, true Islam as universally applicable and
accepted by all Muslims. In fact, no such Islam exists.
While the essentialist view has been rightly discredited, the anti-essentialist
dismantling of Islam has been shown to be both unconvincing and inconsistent.
For example, the pluralizing gesture characteristic of anti-essentialists does not
logically lead to the dissolving of Islam as a singular category. As Diana Fuss
(1989: 4) explains in a different context, this characteristically anti-essentialist
maneuver of abandoning the singular in favor of the plural in order to empha-
size cultural and social heterogeneity and difference is not a sufficient safe-
guard against essentialism since while the plural term does signal diversity, it
also operates as a marker of a collectivity or a unity. Thus, the call to abandon
the use of “Islam” and use the pluralized form “Islams” is undercut by its ina-
bility to explain how the latter are meaningful without being a pluralized form
of a singular, that is, Islam, which then needs to be conceptualized (Ahmed
2015: 136).
Furthermore, a recognition of the multiplicity of Islam does not necessarily
lead to the dismantling of Islam as a category unless, as Shahab Ahmed (2015:
135) notes, “we cannot conceptualize or locate Islam in such a way as to meet
the challenge of the diversity of meaning, which is a task that . . . does not
require the resort to ‘essence’, or to ‘religion’.” In other words, to replace a uni-
versal, true Islam with multiple, local Islams is to operate in a “zero-sum game”
in which one has to make a choice between unity and diversity: either to con-
ceive of Islam in terms of an underlying, universal essence which constitutes the
truth of Islam or to reject this and recognize the multiple, local truths and mean-
ings articulated by Muslims in various local and historical contexts and which
cannot be made to correspond to a universal Islam, thereby substituting Islam
with local Islams (ibid.).
The epistemological lacunas which emerge as a result of these two approaches
have been extensively highlighted (Asad 1986; Sayyid 2003; Ahmed 2015).
Therefore, this article will not dwell further upon this critique. Rather, it takes as
its point of departure the projects which aimed to move beyond the conceptual
shortcomings of these two paradigms. Thus, it accepts that the primary challenge
to explain the relevance of Islam to Islamic societies, practices, and phenomena
(e.g. the emergence of Islamism, acts of violence by Muslims, Islamophobia, and
the rise of Muslim political identity more generally) is to theorize Islam in such a
way that both its singularity and the immensely varied and conflicting interpreta-
tions, beliefs, and practices of Muslims can be coherently maintained. If success-
ful, this theoretical undertaking will allow us to retain the category of Islam,
employ it as a useful, analytical term, and understand its significance to our object
ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals
142 REORIENT
of investigation. One way to do this is by harnessing Talal Asad’s (2009 [1986])

concept of “discursive tradition.”
Islam as a Discursive Tradition:

Universal and Local Orthodoxy
In response to a number of anthropological works on Islam,2 Asad (2009: 7–8)

cautions against the tendency to treat Islam as a distinct social structure or “a blue-
print for a social order,” yet at the same time, he avers that much more is required
than the recognition of, or even the emphasis on, the heterogeneity of Islamic lived
experience (e.g. pace the anti-Orientalists). More importantly, the study of Islam
should be geared toward formulating a coherent conceptual framework to organize
this empirical diversity by accounting for the relationship between Islam as a sin-
gular category, on one hand, the multiple local Islamic interpretations, beliefs, and
practices embedded within various socio-historical contexts, on the other hand. To
achieve this, Asad (2009: 20) states that “one should begin, as Muslims do, from
the concept of a discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding
texts of the Quran and Hadith.”
While it seems rather banal to deploy the concept of tradition in the analysis
of a “religious tradition” such as Islam, as Ovamir Anjum (2007: 660–1) points
out, the analytical efficacy of this concept lies in the way it has been rethought
and developed by Asad. On one hand, “tradition” is a term that conventionally
connotes conformity, imitation, and a lack of rational, critical reasoning and
change. On the other hand, it is thought to be so fluid and malleable so much so
that it can be arbitrarily imbued with almost any content. In this sense, tradition
is merely a fiction, an ideological ruse invented at times of crisis for the purpose
of legitimating one’s authority and domination in the name of real, given truths.
However, it should be clear that approaching “tradition” in this manner only
raises the age-old philosophical problem of reconciling the notions of structure
and agency (ibid.).
A deconstructive reading of this binary opposition shows that tradition should
be conceived of as neither one nor the other. Inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s
definition of tradition coupled with a Foucauldian notion of discourse, Asad
(2009: 20–21) reworks the idea of tradition in order to argue that Islamic discur-
sive tradition should be considered as being neither purely imitative of the past,
fixed, and irrationally conformist nor merely as a “fiction of the present,” a mask
made in reaction to the forces of change and modernity to conceal one’s ideologi-
cal aspirations for political power and domination.
Instead, as a discursive tradition, Islam refers to a set of historically changing
and materially embodied discourses which are connected to the past, occur in the
present, and are oriented toward the future. In other words, while Islamic tradition
is always connected to the past and has its own history, it is not purely mimetic
because and to the extent that it is inherently underpinned by the social and mate-
rial conditions of the present and is also equally oriented toward an Islamic future.
“The important point about tradition,” Asad writes, “is simply that all instituted
practices are oriented to a conception of the past” (ibid.). Thus, scholars of Islam
who wish to study Islam as an anthropological object must examine the Muslims’
discursive relationship with the past, namely, with the founding texts of Islam,
since that is all where Muslims begin (ibid.).
Central to this view of Islam as a discursive tradition is the concept of ortho-
doxy. In his lucid analysis, Anjum (2007: 671) notes that this concept has been
largely misunderstood, partly because of the subtle way Asad deploys it, which
gives it a double meaning. For instance, Asad’s conceptualization of Islam as a
discursive tradition has been criticized as yet another attempt to privilege tex-
tual Islam as the real Islam over lived, ritual, and folk expressions of Islam as
less real and authentic (Lukens-Bull 1999: 7; cited in Anjum 2007: 666). After
all, for Asad, defining Islam as an analytical object requires recognizing the
centrality of Islamic texts to the study of Islamic cultures, beliefs, and practices
(and this is precisely what anti-essentialist scholars of Islam set out to
repudiate).
This criticism, however, is a result of a partial understanding of Asad’s anthro-
pological concept of orthodoxy-as-power. To demonstrate this, Anjum (2007)
introduces a distinction between what he calls orthodoxy-as-power (local ortho-
doxy) and Orthodoxy (with a capital “O”) understood as universal “religious”
orthodoxy.3 It is often argued that due to the absence of an institutionalized reli-
gious center equivalent to the church in Christianity, there is no universal ortho-
doxy in Islam.4 However, while this view regards orthodoxy as a fixed and
universally accepted set of practices and opinions, recognizing that orthodoxy is
liable to change makes it possible to identify a universal orthodoxy in Islam.
Therefore, Anjum (2007: 667) concludes that Asad’s positing of the Islamic foun-
dational texts as central to Islamic discursive tradition underlines his recognition
of a universal orthodoxy in Islam (Wilson 2007).
Nonetheless, for Asad, Islam’s universal orthodoxy (namely, the founding texts
of Islam) does not determine the body of opinion, beliefs, and practices considered
to be Islamic for all Muslims in their various localities. The Muslims’ relationship
with the past, that is, with universal orthodoxy is not “determinative but interpreta-
tive” (Anjum 2007: 667). It is precisely this distinctive feature, that is, the Muslims’
discursive relationship with the past, which allows for a multiplicity of Islamic
local orthodoxies (understood here as relations of power) to exist. Consequently,
in response to the essentialist reifying of Islam as a fixed social order and the
144 REORIENT
nominalist, anti-essentialist conception of Islam as a label for separate, heteroge-

neous collection of phenomena (which denies that it can exist as an analytical
category), Asad’s point, Anjum (2007: 667) writes, is that (orthodox) Islam exists
because
Muslims all agree – to the extent that an agreement is possible in a complex

world tradition – to begin somewhere, even if, the agreement ends
there . . . [Islam] is a relationship with certain foundational texts and a particular
historical narrative of their origins. This understanding helps to avoid the
essentialist attempt to reconstruct true Islamic order merely through
philological studies of medieval texts and rehabilitates the living, thinking, and
arguing subject without ignoring these texts. This subject, a Muslim, by
definition relates to these texts through interpretation, argument and even
manipulation but may authentically construct a variety of social and political
understandings. While not everything said or done by Muslims is part of an
authoritative Islamic discourse, it is not limited to the juristic or theological
disputations among the specialists.
Having said that, Anjum contends that this formulation still falls short of
resolving the ambiguity concerning the relationship between local and universal
orthodoxy in Islam; that is, the relationship between local articulations of Islam
and its universal orthodoxy embodied in Islamic texts is still unclear. While Asad
rejects reducing orthodoxy to a “mere body of opinion” or a “specific set of doc-
trines at the heart of Islam” and points, instead, to the workings of power which
characterize the Muslims’ relationship to the foundational texts in different socio-
historical contexts, orthodoxy will always have a positive content, that is to say, it
always designates a body of opinion. While this content is not fixed and eternal,
and despite being open to the dynamics of power and resistance, at any one point,
orthodoxy always designates a range of acceptable beliefs and practices (Anjum
2007: 667; Asad 2009: 22).
Therefore, what is left untheorized is the relationship between the content
of these various orthodoxies produced through power struggles and Islam’s
universal orthodoxy; that is, why and how the content of a certain local ortho-
doxy comes to be represented by this body of opinion rather than another; what
underpins this continuity between such a complex range of local interpreta-
tions of Islam in their immensely varied contexts. Put otherwise, how can one
explain both the differences in the content of various local Islamic orthodoxies
and their common relationship to a universal Islamic orthodoxy in a way that
does not reduce these local articulations of Islam to their socio-historical con-
texts and material conditions? Whereas the concept of a discursive tradition
points to a universal Islamic orthodoxy (the important point about tradition,

for Asad, being its connection with a past), how this has historically produced
diverse local orthodoxies is not adequately explained – specifically if univer-
sal Islamic orthodoxy is not to, once again, collapse and be dispersed into its
local articulations.
This problem of thinking about orthodoxy (i.e. reconciling universal and
local orthodoxies) is, in my view, a consequence of Asad’s employment of a
notion of discourse taken from Foucault’s genealogy, in which Foucault treats
discourse as “one object of analysis among others,” that is, he conceives of
discourse as an entity explicitly distinct from that of power as another object
of analysis (Laclau 2007: 544). Admittedly, in his genealogical writings,
Foucault (1986, 1990) underlines the discursive character of power, but by
this he means that power is productive of and manifests itself in discursive
configurations, that is, he considers discourse and power as mutually consti-
tutive. Put differently, even though Foucault explicates the internal, and inex-
tricably linked, relationship between discourse and power, for him, discourse
and power are conceptualized as two separate entities. This conception of
power (i.e. power as a concept external to discourse) is the hallmark of
Foucault’s genealogical thought which he formulates to account for the emer-
gence of particular discursive formations and their ruptures and transforma-
tions by situating them within a discontinuous history and without appealing
to “a deeper principle of unification” (as is the case in his archaeological
writings; see Foucault 1985; Laclau 2007: 546). Thus, the formation of dis-
courses is a result of external and material power relations. The external (that
is, extra-discursive) character of power is evident in the way the formation of
discourses is accounted for, not out of the very elements which constitute
discourses, but by reference to a realm outside of discourse. While Foucault’s
genealogy deals with discontinuities, ruptures, and changes between dis-
courses, it becomes rather “a question of showing how linguistic regularities
depend on putting together elements which can only be conceived in non-
discursive terms” (Laclau 2007: 546).
As a result, this conception of discourse is inevitably inadequate to explain the unity
of various articulations of Islam without ultimately reducing them to their material
(non-discursive) contexts. Hence, the question of how to reconcile Islam’s universal
orthodoxy (the founding texts of Islam) with orthodoxy-as-power (material relations
and power struggles) reflects a broader lacuna that emerges in Foucault’s theory. This
can be resolved by broadening our notion of discourse so that it cuts across the distinc-
tion between the textual (orthodoxy as a body of opinion) and extra-textual
(orthodoxy-as-power). Discourse should be extended “to the point in which it embraces
its radical other,” (Laclau 2007: 546); that is, discourse is an all-encompassing totality
146 REORIENT
co-existent with the social world and includes both linguistic and non-linguistic ele-
ments. In Derridean terms, “everything becomes discourse” (Derrida 1978: 354).
Hence, power is discursive not only, as in the Foucauldian conception, because it pro-
duces and regulates our discursive formations (i.e. the production of statements and
practices) but because its elements (such as material institutions, technologies, eco-
nomic processes, gender relations, etc.) are themselves produced through systems of
meaning, that is, they are subject to the play of differences and internal to the totality
of discourse.
Therefore, instead of accounting for Islamic orthodoxy in terms of external,
material power relations shaping the Muslims’ embodied engagement with
Islam’s founding texts, orthodoxy, as I will illustrate below, can be more coher-
ently explained out of the internal elements which are constitutive of it.
Moreover, Islamic orthodoxy and tradition is discursive because, as Asad states,
it always relates itself to an Islamic past. This, however, is not to say that the
discursive character of Islamic orthodoxy is solely the outcome of direct herme-
neutical engagement with the founding texts of Islam, but that its meaning is a
result of its relations with and differences from other entities within a total sys-
tem of signification founded by the event of the Revelation. Thus, the Muslims’
relationship with the past (the point at which “Muslims agree to begin”) can, and
in my view should, be understood more broadly as the founding moment, or
event, of Islam (the Divine Revelation to Prophet Muhammad PBUH) rather
than be consigned to the textual elements of this event. The reason is, as it has
been pointed out, discourse is not reducible to the text, rather it includes textual
and non-textual elements. Finally, the character of orthodoxy as universal or
local depends on the relational position it occupies within this discursive total-
ity. Before I examine these points in further depth, I will first turn my attention
to another critique of the concept of orthodoxy as central of the Islamic discur-
sive tradition.
Against Orthodoxy
In his reading of Asad, Ahmed (2015: 270–4) rightly notes that the definitive
function of a discursive tradition is the institution of orthodoxy, understood as
the authorization through complex and multiple processes of reasoning and
argumentation, of certain practices and beliefs as correct and Islamic and others
as incorrect and thus less or un-Islamic. Islam is therefore an “authoritative dis-
course” in opposition to the anti-essentialist approach that considers Islam to be
whatever Muslims say it is. While Ahmed does not deny the presence of ortho-
doxy in or its significance to Islam, he argues that identifying Islam with ortho-
doxy is problematic because it restricts the domain of Islam to that of orthodoxy.
Whereas, Ahmed (2015: 273) argues, it is correct that when looking at a particu-
lar Muslim society or a Muslim practice or belief, one must investigate “the
kinds of reasoning and the reasons for arguing” which reflect the intricate rela-
tions of power (and resistance) through which Islam has been authoritatively
produced, maintained, or transformed in a particular socio-historical context, it
is incorrect to reduce the domain of Islam (what counts as Islamic) to the domain
of orthodoxy, that is, that which has been authoritatively constituted as Islam in
this context.
Hence, what Ahmed throws into question is the (central) place orthodoxy occu-
pies in the conceptualization of Islam as a discursive tradition. The reasons for
Ahmed’s attempt to de-center orthodoxy in Islam primarily stem from his under-
standing of orthodoxy as “the prescription and restriction of truth” (2015: 273). In
Ahmed’s mind, thinking of Islam in terms of orthodoxy reproduces, in the final
analysis, the duality of orthodoxy versus un-orthodoxy, which effectively allows
for the privileging of certain “powerful” conceptions of Islam as correct and
authentic and the exclusion of others as incorrect and inauthentic. Because the
essence of orthodoxy is the institution of truth through the “processual” dynamics
of power, this requires both the regulation and requirement of correct practices
(and beliefs) and the condemnation and exclusion of incorrect ones (Ahmed 2015:
274). Therefore, orthodoxy is inherently exclusionary and is predicated on “the
dynamics of coercion and restriction rather than dynamics of accommodation and
expansion.”
From Ahmed’s (2015: 282) perspective, underpinning the above tendency to
overemphasize orthodoxy and prescription in Islam is an “insufficient interroga-
tion of the category of authority.” Authority, he argues, should not confined to
the domain of prescription (i.e. establishing and regulating correct doctrines,
beliefs, and practices). That is, a discourse does not have to be “prescriptive”
and “orthodoxizing” in order for it to be authoritative. Rather, one should also
look into other forms of authority in Islam that “not only are not prescriptive, but
that are actually at odds with prescriptive authority,” namely, what he calls
“explorative authority” (ibid.). Ahmed (2015: 283) refers to a great and illumi-
nating range of discourses and practices from within the socio-historical phe-
nomenon of Islam, in which Muslims have viewed themselves to have the
authority to explore, that is, to search for meaning and value in Islam, without
seeking to “prescribe an orthodoxy – a singular, correct truth – on the basis of
this authority.” This encompasses the projects of Islamic philosophy and Sufism
as well as the practices and discourses informed by them such as (Islamic)
poetry, art, music, and so on. By way of example, the Muslim philosophers
assumed an epistemological mode of authority (namely, “reason”) which they
conceived of as “superior to” that of prescriptive authority and to the literal truth
148 REORIENT
of Islamic texts. Similarly, the form of authority at play in the Sufi tariqahs (e.g.
experiential or spiritual authority) aims precisely to free the Muslim individual
from the prescriptive authority of the law as the singular truth of texts (Ahmed
2015: 283–90). In sum, explorative discourses, unlike prescriptive ones, do not
seek to institute/authorize/prescribe a single meaning or truth as Islam/ic but
allow for the possibility of multiple meanings to exist as Islam/Islamic.
Meanwhile, the danger in thinking of Islam in terms of orthodoxy resides pre-
cisely in that it appears to foreclose the very possibility for multiplicity in the
meaning of what constitutes Islam and Islamic.
Ahmed’s perceptive criticism, like that of Anjum, points to a number of ambi-
guities in the conceptualization of Islam as a discursive tradition. However, I will
argue that the attempt to dislocate orthodoxy as constitutive of Islam is itself
undercut by unconvincing and limited understanding of the categories of “ortho-
doxy,” “exclusion,” and “truth/meaning.” By dissecting the notions of authority
and orthodoxy which form the backbone of his bold critique, Ahmed’s main con-
cern with the conceptualization of Islam in terms of discursive tradition is to cau-
tion against the reproduction of the dichotomy of orthodox versus heterodox
Islam, that is, the monopolizing or, rather, the restriction of the truth and meaning
of Islam to only what the powerful say it is. Whereas for anti-essentialists Islam is
whatever Muslims say it is, for Asad, Ahmed (2015: 272) writes, “Islam is what-
ever say it is authoritatively.”
Following his conceptualization of orthodoxy as prescription, one is rather
smoothly guided to conclude that positing orthodoxy as constitutive of Islam can
“easily” and “seamlessly” lead to the viewing of a single truth/meaning as what the
correct Islam is and other truths/meanings as false and therefore not Islam (Ahmed
2015: 274). Nevertheless, this conclusion is not as obvious as Ahmed suggests for
two reasons. First, it entirely leaves out the all-important distinction Anjum has
introduced above between universal and local orthodoxy.5 That is, when Ahmed
wishes to de-center orthodoxy as constitutive of Islam, which orthodoxy is he refer-
ring to? Is his criticism and overall accommodative project founded on the rejection
of the presence of a universal orthodoxy in Islam or the presence of multiple local
orthodoxies? The second reason, which I will address below, is that Ahmed’s analy-
sis rests on a conception of orthodoxy which is confined to discourses that are pro-
duced through textual engagement with the Quran and the Hadith. Thus, discourses
which are not primarily derivative of Islamic texts cannot be considered as orthodox
and Islamic.
In both cases, Ahmed’s critique seems untenable. On one hand, denying the
presence of a universal orthodoxy in Islam, in effect, amounts to a rejection of
the singularity of the category of Islam and conjures up the conceptual problems
of the standard anti-essentialist approaches, which deny a universal Islam beyond
its local articulations – a position which Ahmed himself flatly rejects. This univer-
sal orthodoxy (whatever its content is) is essentially an interpretative one, which
all Muslims and Muslim discourses refer to in order to articulate themselves as
Muslims and their hugely diverse discourses as Islamic (including the discourses
Ahmed extensively cites such as Islamic philosophy, Akbarian Sufism, Hafizian
poetics, wine drinking, etc.). Whether it is correct to identify, as Asad does, the
Quran and the Hadith as the content of this orthodoxy may be contested, but it
would be implausible for any Muslim to deny its presence for it is the name that
gives force and meaning to what a Muslim is.
Therefore, as I will demonstrate further below, this universal orthodoxy is the
condition of possibility of the existence of Islam as a universal, unitary, and
bounded entity. It is the privileged signifier of totality, which makes possible the
closure and coherence of Islamic meanings and truths. That is, its presence
marks the limits of this discursive community and allows for the production of
multiple Islamic truths. Denying a universal Islamic orthodoxy amounts to the
erasure of the limits which suture Islam as a discursive totality, and this effec-
tively subverts Islam as a unified field of meaning. Its presence, in turn, does not
predetermine what Islam is for all Muslims in their various contexts since, as we
pointed out above, it is an interpretive one; its interpretation is context depend-
ent, that is to say, it can be interpreted differently in various socio-historical
contexts.
On the other hand, the notion of local orthodoxy renders Ahmed’s disa-
greement with Asad superfluous since conceiving of Islam as a discursive
tradition seemingly allows for multiple (local) orthodoxies (i.e. truths) to
exist rather than one singular orthodox Islam that is applicable to all Muslims
in their various localities. That is, the danger Ahmed foresees in thinking of
Islam in terms of orthodoxy is misconceived. As a discursive tradition, Islam
does not reproduce the binary of orthodox Islam versus heterodox Islam but
allows for a range of diverse and conflicting orthodox expressions of Islam to
exist.
That said, in Ahmed’s defense, it can be argued that while the concept of
discursive tradition allows for the articulation and presence of multiple local
orthodoxies, any Islamic orthodoxy (as Anjum has pointed out) will necessar-
ily constitute a particular body of opinion (that which has been authoritatively
articulated) and in the process, it will exclude other divergent (less powerful)
expressions from its local articulations of Islam. In short, conceptualizing
Islam as a discursive tradition cannot, in the final analysis, coherently account
for the presence of a complex array of discourses as equally Islamic in their
different socio-historical contexts, mainly because it lends itself to the restric-
tive notion of orthodoxy which reduces the domain of Islam in a given local
150 REORIENT
context to the domain of what has been authoritatively constituted as Islam in

that context and, in the process, it excludes a range of other expressions and
practices from Islam.
This view, which, one suspects, is what Ahmed had in mind since it would be
in line with the normative, accommodative, and expansive tendency underpinning
his project, would be no less inadequate. For Ahmed, the problem with orthodoxy
is that it seeks to institute one correct expression of Islam, which inherently
requires the exclusion of other meanings from the domain of Islam. Ahmed (2015:
276) is wary of such a proposition because it is inherently exclusionary and can
virtually lead to an extremely narrow conception of Islam, in which the real Islam
is only what every individual Muslim believes it to be – which, he rather curiously
calls “the orthodoxy of one.”
Ahmed’s contention that the function of orthodoxy is the institution of truth is
an apt description of what orthodoxy is, but, as I will demonstrate in the following
part, the construction of meaning is inevitably an exclusionary act which requires
the drawing of limits and the exclusion of an outside (a range of other meanings).
Viewing this exclusionary feature as intrinsic to prescriptive-legal discourses (i.e.
juridical and theological) and absent in “exploratory” discourses (i.e. “the Sufi-
philosophical amalgam”; Ahmed 2015: 31) is, to use Ahmed’s (2015: 282) words,
a result of “insufficient interrogation” of how discourses and meanings are formed.
To demonstrate this, it is necessary, as I noted above, to (1) understand the discur-
sive in a way that is not closely confined to the textual or scriptural (and, in conse-
quence, orientation toward Islamic orthodoxy (i.e. the Divine Revelation to Prophet
Muhammad) should not be limited to direct textual interpretation of the Quran and,
by extension, the Prophetic tradition) and (2) understand orthodoxy in a way that is
not strictly attached to the prescriptive-legal discourses. As it will be clear, Ahmed’s
attempt to transcend “the Text” by introducing the categories of the “Pre-Text” and
“Con-Text” becomes redundant since discourse is not restricted to textual elements
but includes non-textual elements (i.e. the “Pre-Text” and “Con-Text”). These cat-
egories do not transcend the Divine Revelation for they acquire their meanings
from their relations with this founding event. Hence, in the following part, I will
employ a discourse-theoretical approach in order to (1) underline the exclusionary
nature of all meaning-making processes, (2) conceptualize the relationship between
universal Islam and its local articulations, and (3) flesh out the significance of
orthodoxy as constitutive of all Islamic discourses, prescriptive or otherwise.
Conceptualizing Islam: Hegemony and Orthodoxy6
According to Ferdinand de Saussure, language is a system of signs consisting of

a set of linguistic rules which regulate language use and make meaningful
communication possible. A sign is composed of a signifier (sound-image) and a

signified (concept), and the relationship between the signifier and the signified is
purely arbitrary (de Saussure 1983: 68–9; Sayyid 2003: 41). de Saussure’s (1983)
crucial insight here is that every signifier is related to a concept, for without a
concept, a signifier is merely a cluster of sounds which has no meaning.
Furthermore, signs are negative and relational. That is, the meaning of a sign is
not determined by its material referent, that is, not by reference to an external
object outside language (hence, Islam is not defined by its positive content, e.g.
set of features that can be found in Islamic texts or history). Rather, it is defined
by its relations with and differences from other signs within a system of significa-
tion (Sayyid 2003: 41).
Derrida shows that Saussurian linguistics, like Western metaphysics more
generally, constructs itself by a cluster of binary oppositions which make possi-
ble the concept of the structure. Derrida deconstructs these binary oppositions
and underlines their ultimate “undecidability.” For Derrida, the notion of the
structure presupposes the presence of a center, an origin, or “the transcendental
signified.” The center anchors the structure and makes possible its structurality.
It is the privileged term, which appears as given and fully present. Thus, in
Saussure, the center (e.g. the mind) escapes the play of differences within the
structure. Unlike other elements in the structure, the pregiven center stabilizes the
structure and makes possible the free play of differences between its elements
while it is not itself subject to the process of structuration (Derrida 1976: 61,
1978, 1981: 41–2).
As a result of Derrida’s deconstruction, and in the absence of a center, full clo-
sure is impossible, so structures become precarious and inherently unstable.
Derrida’s destabilizing move results in the infinite play of differences which can-
not be arrested by any totalizing gesture. As Derrida remarks, “in the absence of a
centre or origin, everything becomes discourse” (Derrida 1978: 354). Thus, the
fixity of the sign is thrown into question. Contrary to Saussure, a signifier is not
related to a fixed concept; rather it is subject to the infinite play of differences
which results from the opening of the structure. The result of the absence of fixed
truths is not complete flux or chaos, but partial fixation. This means that a sign can
be partially fixed through articulatory practices, which bring to a temporary halt
the infinite process of signification (or in Lacanian terms, the sliding of the signi-
fied under the signifier; Lacan 1977: 419; Sayyid 2003: 42). This partial closure
brings to a temporary end the undecidability of the sign resulting from its “floating
character” and its continuous oscillation between multiple differential positions.
At the same time, as a result of the articulatory practice, other possible meanings
of the sign are excluded. This “exteriority” undermines the structure and makes
full closure impossible (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 111).
152 REORIENT
From this, it can be concluded that (1) “Islam” is a signifier which signifies
something, (2) the signifier “Islam” does not have a fixed signified outside its
articulation, and (3) the meaning of the signifier “Islam” is decided by its articu-
lation in various contexts (Sayyid 2003: 42). However, this does not mean that it
is possible to articulate the signifier “Islam” to any possible signified (i.e. Islam
cannot mean just anything); that is, the signifier “Islam” is never found in a vac-
uum and then attached to a signified (or a chain of signifieds). As Sayyid explains,
every articulatory practice has a context, which means that every articulation
takes place in “a terrain where there are already relatively stable articulations”
(ibid.). Therefore, the signifier “Islam” is always already articulated to a signified
(or a sequence of signifieds). This, following Derrida, can be called the trace
(Derrida 1978: 62–5, 1981: 387–8). The trace is what gives a sign its specificity
because whatever articulated network a sign is inserted into, it will always con-
tain a trace of what it is not (“its originary lack”), which anchors its (differential)
meaning. Hence, even though “Islam” does not have a meaning outside its con-
textual articulation (it does not have a singular, transcendental signified), it is a
signifier that contains a trace of its founding moment, which can be historically
identified as the Divine Revelation to Prophet Muhammad (Sayyid 2003: 42–3).
Thus, the trace anchors the singularity of Islam by pointing to what Islam is
always not (since its meaning is generated through differences from other signs).
However Islam is articulated and interpreted, it always contains a trace of its
other(s), which mark its limits and preserve its specificity. These traces, as I will
elaborate below, mark the borders of “Islam,” its limits, without which Islam
ceases to exist as a category.
This explains why despite being discourse-contextual, Islam is never purely a
product of its contextual articulation. The reason is that articulations of Islam
occur in relatively stable discursive spaces; therefore, they always carry the traces
of Islam’s previous articulations (Sayyid 2003: 43). Hence, all interpretations of
Islam are constrained by an Islamic past (a universal orthodoxy), which retains the
singularity of Islam and prevent its dissolution into its specific articulations (local
orthodoxies). This could be seen as another way to theorize Islam as a discursive
tradition which points to the relationship between the signifier “Islam” and its
multiple articulations. However, what still needs to be adequately accounted for is
the specific universal character of the signifier “Islam,” which allows it to exist
beyond all its positive articulations. In other words, how can one plausibly con-
ceptualize a universal Islamic orthodoxy, even though it has historically produced
and manifested itself in multiple, and perhaps even mutually exclusive, local
orthodoxies?
It has been established that the construction of meaning is a product of articu-
latory practices, which suture a certain discursive field and allow for the
systematicity of difference, and relatively stabilizes the relations between its

articulated signs. The question that arises at this point is: how does articulation
happen and how are discourses formed? Following Lacan, it will be argued that
discourses are the outcome of halting the infinite process of signification (or the
sliding of the signified under the signifier) by the intervention of the point de
capiton (quilting or anchoring point; Lacan 1977: 149, Žižek 1989: 87). Since
there is no pregiven and objectively present center or ground, the process of
signification is extended infinitely. Nodal points are the privileged reference
points around which other signifiers are ordered into a particular, coherent space
of meaning.7 That is, other signifiers acquire their meaning retrospectively from
their relations to the nodal point which binds them together in a unified signify-
ing chain. By combining Lacanian quilting points with Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 112–13) refine and articulate both con-
cepts together; thus, a discourse can be defined as a hegemonic articulation,
which takes place in an undecidable terrain, through the production of nodal
points that function to arrest the flow of signification and bring to a halt its
undecidability.8
Following Sayyid (2003: 45), Islam can be described as a nodal point in a vari-
ety of discourses. This is to say, such discourses are sutured by the intervention of
Islam as a nodal point, so their constitutive elements are made meaningful by
reference to Islam. For instance, it can be argued that Islam is a nodal point in the
discourses of Islamic theology (kalam), Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), Islamic phi-
losophy (falsafa), Islamism and the various Muslim sects (firaq), and legal schools
(madahib). That is, the various local Islamic discourses (theological, juridical,
philosophical, etc.) are all equally Islamic because, in these discourses, Islam is
the privileged signifier which ties together the signifying chain and retroactively
gives meaning to its signs. These discourses would not be meaningful without
Islam as a nodal point that holds their elements together.
However, while “Islam” is a nodal point in many discourses such as the dis-
courses identified above, each discourse can have multiple other nodal points
which give it its specific character and separate it from other discourses. Sufism,
for instance, can be said to organize its meanings around the privileged signifiers
“spirituality,” “experience,” and “mysticism.” Therefore, it is different from
Salafism as another Islamic discourse that stabilizes the meaning of Islam around
the signifiers “the Shariah,” “the Quranic text,” and “the Sunnah.” Likewise,
Islamic philosophy acquires its identity by reference to “reason,” “logic,” “exist-
ence,” and so on as nodal points. The important point here is that these local
Islamic discourses have multiple nodal points which exist concurrently with
“Islam” and mark their limits from each other. In short, a nodal point (e.g. Islam)
can exist in multiple discourses, yet any discourse can have multiple nodal points.
154 REORIENT
Therefore, given that it can function as a nodal point in a variety of discourses,

how does the signifier “Islam” retain its singularity? Otherwise put, how does the
nodal point “Islam” acquire its specific universal character, which allows it to
function as a nodal point in multiple, distinct discourses without losing its
universality?
Although any discourse can have multiple nodal points, at its most universal
level, a discourse can have only one nodal point that delimits the signifying
system and totalizes the field of meaning as a unified whole. This “crucial”
nodal point is called the master signifier (Sayyid 2003: 45). The master signifier
represents the unified totality at its universal level and signifies its limits. Thus,
all the particular internal elements of this universal discourse acquire their iden-
tity from their relations to the master signifier “Islam.” In this sense, “Islam” is
the master signifier that ties together and totalizes the universal discursive ter-
rain of Islam and retroactively constructs the identity of its constitutive ele-
ments. “Islam” is the name that founds the universal discursive space inhabited
by the community of all Muslims and makes their various discourses meaning-
ful, while, at the same time, it prevents this terrain from dissolution because it is
the name invoked by this community to construct their identity and discourses
(Sayyid 2003: 43–4).
Moreover, this master signifier (and nodal points broadly) has a specific charac-
ter that allows it to anchor the signifying system and partially fix the meaning of its
constitutive elements. This character is its “emptiness.” Nodal points are essentially
empty signifiers (Laclau 1996: 43). This empty character makes possible the partial
closure of the signifying system (halting the signifying process) through the draw-
ing of limits and the exclusion of an outside.9 This is not to say that Islam has no
meaning. Rather, as a master signifier (a crucial nodal point), the meaning of
“Islam” cannot be defined from its direct relations with other signifiers within the
signifying system it totalizes. If this were the case, the signifier “Islam” would lose
its specific status that allows it to function as a nodal point; it would become merely
another element whose identity is acquired from its direct relations with other signi-
fiers in an alternative discursive chain sutured by another nodal point (e.g. Islam in
the discourse of comparative religion or in the discourse of liberal humanism or
multiculturalism). As a master signifier, “Islam” is partially emptied of its particu-
lar meaning (differential position in a certain discourse) in order to function as a
signifier of the totality. Thus, the master signifier has a paradoxical character: it is
split between its particular differential position in a discourse, on one hand, and the
universal role it assumes as a master signifier, that is, as a signifier of the totality,
on the other hand.
As a signifier of the totality, “Islam” signifies the limits of the universal field of
meaning constituted by its presence as a nodal point. Yet, limits, to be authentic
limits, cannot be directly signified (Laclau 1996: 37). That is, as a signifier of the
whole, “Islam” cannot be directly related to elements on either side of the limit of the
totality it unifies. Instead, it signifies a difference of another level (i.e. the constitutive
outside).10 “Islam” represents the totality indirectly, that is, by means of metaphors
and metonymy. Laclau clarifies this by introducing what he calls the logics of equiva-
lence and difference. As a crucial nodal point, “Islam” ties together the multiple dis-
cursive entities inhabiting a certain field of meaning in order to form a “chain of
equivalence” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 127–30; Laclau 1996: 46–9). The chain of
equivalence is composed of all the discursive entities which are bounded and retroa
ctively defined by the presence of this nodal point. However, this creates a paradoxi-
cal tension underlying all hegemonic articulations. On one hand, entities of a certain
signifying system are meaningful essentially because of their differences from other
entities (e.g. “Sunni,” “Shia,” “Salafi,” “Sufi,” or “Law,” “Theology,” “Philosophy,”
etc.). However, as entities of the same discursive space, they have an equivalent char-
acter (namely, they are all Islamic) which arises from their common differentiation
from what is outside this totality. Otherwise put, they are equivalent in that they all
belong on the same side of the frontier that marks the totality, unifies it, and relatively
fixes their identities (i.e. they are all articulations of Islam, so they are equivalent by
virtue of their common differentiation from what they are not, i.e. what is not Islam).
Thus, they are different and equivalent at the same time. This chain of equivalence
cancels out the particular differential positions of these signifiers since the only thing
that holds it together is their orientation toward what they are not. Islam is the name
of this chain of equivalence, it is a metonymy of the totality, a signifier of the univer-
sal field of meaning inhabited by its various local communities and discourses, all of
which bear the traces of what Islam is – and what it is not.
Re-Centering Orthodoxy
From the above, I argue that Ahmed’s criticism of orthodoxy as constitutive of the
Islamic discursive tradition is undercut by inadequate theorizing of the concepts of
orthodoxy and truth. Ahmed’s interpretation of forms of authority, specifically,
his concept of “explorative authority,” is highly instructive as it points to the mul-
tiple ways through which Muslims have historically made meaning of and through
Islam; nonetheless, it fails to perceive that the formation of discourses, as demon-
strated above, is the result of articulatory practices which inevitably require the
exclusion of other truths and meanings. Therefore, discourses informed by a desire
for exploration are no less exclusionary than those underpinned by a “prescrip-
tive” tendency. Islamic discourses are not only those that are produced through
textual engagement with the Divine Revelation (i.e. the Quran and the Hadith), but
all discourses which construct their meanings by reference to Islam as a nodal
156 REORIENT
point, that is, by orienting themselves toward an Islamic past, namely, the Divine
Revelation as the founding moment of Islam. The Divine Revelation is, as men-
tioned above, irreducible to the texts; rather, it is a “sign,” a discursive event,
which includes both textual and non-textual elements. This event can be histori-
cally identified as the founding event of Islam; thus, a statement or practice must
accept and be connected with this event so that “Islam” can function as its nodal
point and, in consequence, it can be considered Islamic.11 When our conception of
discourse is expanded to include the textual as well as the extra-textual, and dis-
cursive exclusion is no longer restricted to the law derived from textual interpreta-
tion, it becomes evident that (1) Islamic orthodoxy is crucial to all Islamic
discourses and (2) “explorative discourses” are also exclusionary.
As I have illustrated, Ahmed’s main contention is that thinking of Islam in terms
of orthodoxy fails to account for a multiplicity of historically widespread phenom-
ena intrinsic to many post-classical Muslim societies as authentically Islamic such
as Sufism and Islamic philosophy and the practices informed by these projects. The
reason is that Sufi discourses are explorative and not prescriptive, that is, they are
not “directed definitively towards correction and regulation and the authoritative
establishment of an exclusive truth” (Ahmed 2015: 277).12 Likewise, Avicennan
philosophy cannot be considered Islamic because it both contradicts many ortho-
dox Islamic truths and sees itself to be superior to the prescription of truth itself. In
short, both discourses seek a “truth more profound than the truth of the law”
(Ahmed 2015: 289). However, this view regards orthodoxy as exclusively restricted
to juristic and theological discourses; hence, orthodoxy is exclusionary primarily
because of its prescriptive and proscriptive tendency (i.e. it aims to authorize, regu-
late, and sanction certain meanings, beliefs, and practices as true and Islamic and
condemn and exclude others as false and un-Islamic; Ahmed 2015: 273).
Consequently, for Ahmed, explorative discourses which are not strictly prescrip-
tive or proscriptive in this sense (e.g. “the philosophical-Sufi amalgam”) are not
exclusionary and thus are outside of, or superior to, (Islamic) orthodoxy.
Exclusion, however, is not a feature specific to the prescriptions and prohibi-
tions of the law and absent in other discourses. As I have shown, exclusion is
necessary for the formation of all discourses. That is, exclusion should not be
confined to law and prescription in the above sense (authorizing, regulating, sanc-
tioning, prohibiting, etc.). Orthodoxy is exclusionary not only because it is “pre-
scriptive” but mainly because, as a hegemonic articulation, it inevitably requires
the drawing of limits and the exclusion of a range of other meanings (doctrines,
beliefs, practices, etc.). Thus, to conceptualize Islam in terms of orthodoxy is to
recognize that (1) regardless of its local articulation, Islam is a universe of mean-
ing which has its own exclusionary limits (its universal orthodoxy); in conse-
quence, (2) any Islamic discourse (e.g. “the philosophical-Sufi amalgam”) must be
constrained by Islam’s universal limits (or its universal orthodoxy) and will thus
inevitably involve the exclusion of a range of other meanings and practices, and
(3) in its specific articulation of Islam, any Islamic discourse will draw its own
boundaries around one or more nodal points other than Islam and will result in the
exclusion of other local Islamic discourses. I will now illustrate each of these
points with reference to the discourses of Islamic philosophy and Sufism.
First, orthodoxy is constitutive of the Islamic discursive tradition because, as
shown above, this discursive tradition has its limits which mark it from the outside
that is excluded by these limits. Whereas the discourses of Islamic philosophy and
Sufism, which Ahmed seeks to account for as Islamic, may well be part of the
Islamic discursive tradition, this does not negate the presence of Islam’s exclu-
sionary limits, for surely not any utterance, belief or practice can be described as
Islamic. For example, any discourse that is not certainly founded on the belief of
the presence and Oneness of God, the Prophethood of Muhammad and the Divinity
of the Revelation13 cannot be considered Islamic. These “truths,” it is safe to say,
constitute the limits of Islam as a universe of meaning. In fact, it is precisely
because of Islam’s exclusionary limits that we are able to call the discourses
Ahmed cites extensively in his work “Islamic.” Despite being in contradiction
with the literal truth of Islamic texts, Islamic law, and/or theology, Islamic phi-
losophy, Sufism, Islamic art, and poetry can be accounted for as Islamic insofar as
they recognize Islam’s universal limits; thus, they can exist within the universal
field of meaning constituted by the master signifier “Islam” and are meaningfully
constructed by their reference to it – even if their meanings are not primarily the
outcome of a direct hermeneutical engagement with the texts as such.
Moreover, recognizing orthodoxy as constitutive of Islamic discourses helps to
capture the process by which Islam is articulated in any given context through a
complex set of discursive processes and hegemonic struggles. Therefore, local
Islamic orthodoxies are hegemonic articulations, which are formed through the
exclusion of a range of other discourses (and practices). As I highlighted above,
the different Islamic disciplines, sects, theological doctrines, schools of law and so
on have different nodal points which define their limits and set them apart from
other (equally) Islamic discourses – equally Islamic, because they all inhabit the
same discursive space unified by the master signifier “Islam” and which binds
them together despite their differences.
In this sense, “the philosophical-Sufi amalgam” constructs itself with refer-
ence to Islam as its nodal point, which gives it its Islamic identity. In its specific
articulation of Islam, these discourses are constrained by Islam’s universal
orthodoxy which exclude a range of meanings and practices from any local artic-
ulation of Islam. Sufism, for instance, is a local Islamic orthodoxy which
excludes and rejects all non-Islamic meanings and practices which violate the
158 REORIENT
limit that gives Islam its specificity. Furthermore, Sufism constructs its meaning
on the basis of experiential or spiritual authority, rather than textual authority.
Hence, in its specific articulation of Islam, Sufism excludes a range of other
Islamic discourses such as those based on the primacy of the texts and the law
derived from the texts (e.g. the Salafi expression of Islam). Even if Sufism is not
necessarily prescriptive or proscriptive in the same way theological or juristic
discourses are (“it is not directed definitively towards the correction, regulation
and condemnation of beliefs and practices”), it is not without its own exclusion-
ary limits, which set it apart from non-Islamic discourses as well as from other
Islamic discourses.
In short, whereas Ahmed’s point is that Sufism and Islamic philosophy are not
prescriptive and hence non-exclusionary as they do not seek to prescribe one singu-
lar Islamic truth or deny the truth of Islamic texts or Islamic law, my point is that
they are as exclusionary as the prescriptive discourses of Islamic law and theology.
While Islamic philosophy and Sufism do not exclude or reject Islamic texts or
Islamic law, what they exclude from their specific articulation of Islam is, first, all
explicitly non-Islamic discourses (e.g. those which deny the Divinity of the
Revelation), and second, discourses founded on the primacy of the text and the law.
That is, they reject the truth ascribed to Islamic texts and the law derived from the
texts as “the highest (most accessible) form of truth” (Ahmed 2015: 257) and
the subsequent restriction of Islam to what text(s) says and to the law derived from
the text(s). By treating Islamic law as an Islamic truth co-existent with, and even
secondary to, other spiritual or experiential truths, Sufi and philosophical discourses
contest the truth of Islamic law as superior to their truths. By converging around
nodal points other than the text and the law, these discourses serve to challenge the
hegemony of prescriptive-legal discourses over the articulation of what Islam is; that
is, they, in effect, exclude from their local articulation of Islam another local Islamic
orthodoxy which arises out of the reduction of Islam to its legal articulation. It is in
this sense that they are also exclusionary.
Conclusion
In this article, I sought to demonstrate the centrality of orthodoxy to the conceptu-

alization of Islam as a discursive tradition. Building on Talal Asad’s concept
which largely moves beyond the pitfalls of the essentialist and anti-essentialist
paradigms, I argued that orthodoxy can be theorized as a master signifier that acts
to suture a multiplicity of Islamic entities in the same discursive chain. However,
this re-conceptualization of orthodoxy through Derrida, Laclau, and Sayyid was
not entirely uncalled for; rather, it was an attempt to resolve the theoretical tension
that emerges as a result of relying on Foucault’s genealogical theory of discourse/
power. Anjum’s reading of Asad has helped to clarify the notion of orthodoxy by
introducing a distinction between local and universal orthodoxy, yet what this still
leaves unresolved is the question of how universal orthodoxy continues to main-
tain its singularity without collapsing into its local articulations. Furthermore,
reconceptualizing Islamic orthodoxy from a discourse-theoretical perspective
helped to address the concerns raised by Ahmed in his critique of orthodoxy as
constitutive of Islam. Specifically, Ahmed viewed orthodoxy as legal-prescriptive
and hence exclusionary. Similarly, I argued that this is a result of viewing dis-
courses and exclusion in a limited sense, that is, as the legal-prescriptive dis-
courses which are the outcome of textual engagement with the Quran and the
Hadith. In response, I argued that discourse is a totality that includes textual and
non-textual elements and that exclusion is not restricted to legal-prescriptive dis-
course but is necessary for the formation of all discourses.
In particular, contra Ahmed, it has been shown that discourses informed by
“explorative authority” are meaningful because, even if they do not engage
directly with the texts, they look for meaning in and are located within the univer-
sal Islamic totality, not outside it. To borrow the Ottoman jurist Ebussuud
Efendi’s metaphor cited by Ahmed,14 when Muslim philosophers and Sufis, fur-
nished with their epistemological and spiritual authorities, respectively, leave the
shores of Shariah and dive in search for deeper truths/meanings beyond and
superior to the truths derived from Islamic texts, they must look for those mean-
ings in “the ocean of Islam,” in order for these truths and discourses to be mean-
ingful as Islamic. Islamic philosophy, Sufism, and other Islamic practices
informed by them are part of the Islamic discursive tradition because and to the
extent that they are constrained by Islam’s limits (its universal orthodoxy), even
if they are not themselves directly derivative of Islamic texts and are not legally
“prescriptive.” It is, again, for this reason that Islam cannot be reduced to being
merely a product of subjectivist acts of expression, free of socio-historical con-
straints. To say what something is and what it is not at any given time or place is
to be part of a certain language game and thus to be subject to the rules which
regulate language use and make meaningful communication possible. In the same
way, articulations of Islam have to be located within the Islamic discursive tradi-
tion. This, as Asad (2009: 23) has shown, does not mean being purely imitative
and repetitive, but at the same time, it means being located within this universal,
discursive community. This discursive community has its own defined limits,
which unify it and mark it from what it is not.
Consequently, orthodoxy cannot be dispensed with so that certain discourses can
be coherently included as part of the Islamic discursive tradition. This, if anything,
serves only to undermine the singularity of Islam as a discursive space, subvert its
limits, and reduce it to subjectivist acts of expression with no clear relation of
160 REORIENT
equivalence that binds these various expressions together. Conceptualizing Islam so

that it can coherently account for Islamic philosophy and Sufism as Islamic does not
require decentering orthodoxy in Islam. Instead, it requires questioning whether
Islam’s universal orthodoxy can be limited to the founding texts of Islam and the law
derivative of them. I suggested that the Divine Revelation as the founding moment
of Islam is a discursive event that is not reducible to the texts of the Revelation.
Therefore, the crux of Ahmed’s disagreement with Asad should not be whether a
(universal) Islamic orthodoxy exists or not, but what the content of this orthodoxy is
and whether it is correct to reduce the Divine Revelation as the founding event of
Islam to its textual elements (i.e. the text of the Quran and, by extension, the Hadith).
Notes
1. By Islamic philosophy, I only refer to the discourses which Shahab Ahmed (2015) extensively
discusses in his book What is Islam? namely Avicennan philosophy, Akbarian philosophy, and
the Illuminationist philosophy of Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi. Thus, I refer only to the philosophy
of Muslim thinkers who professed themselves as adherents of Islam and whose philosophy was
both founded on and a result of their hermeneutical engagement with Islam.
2. See, for example, Clifford Geertz (1968), Hamid El-Zein (1971), Ernest Gellner (1981), Daniel
Eickelman (1982), and Sami Zubaida (1995).
3. Henceforth, I shall refer to the former as local orthodoxy and the latter as universal orthodoxy.
4. Here Anjum is drawing on M Bret Wilson’s (2007) discussion of orthodoxy in Islam where the latter
criticizes the above view made by scholars such as W. C. Smith (1957) and Montgomery Watt (1985).
5. This critique becomes even more pertinent given that Ahmed cites Anjum’s article on orthodoxy
multiple times in his book; hence, the decision to entirely disregard the distinction between local
and universal orthodoxy is, to say the least, unjustified.
6. I would like to acknowledge my intellectual debt to S. Sayyid (2003). The following part of this
article is heavily influenced by his A Fundamental Fear.
7. “Any discourse” Laclau and Mouffe explain “is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of dis-
cursivity, to arrest the follow of differences, to construct a center. We will call the privileged discur-
sive points of this partial fixation, nodal points” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112; original emphasis).
8. As Laclau explains, the nodal point as an empty signifier is the product of a “structural impos-
sibility in signification.” By this, Laclau means that a closed totality is essentially required so that
meaning can be produced within a system of differences. This, in turn, requires limits which can-
not themselves be directly signified, that is, they must not be related to elements on both sides of
the frontier, for, in this case, the limits would not be limits at all but merely differences internal to
the signifying system. “The very possibility of signification is the system, and the very possibility
of the system is its limits” (Laclau 1996: 37).
9. This is because whereas the intervention of the nodal point sutures the discursive totality and
arrests the flow of differences, no one discourse can exhaust or nullify all possible meanings of
one sign. That is, there will always be something which escapes the differential logic of a certain
discourse; therefore, any articulation will necessarily result in the exclusion of an outside (i.e. all
possible differences/meanings which have not been articulated by these particular discourses).
The construction of meaning requires the drawing of a boundary in order to delimit the signifying
process by the exclusion of an outside.
10. Limits do not therefore signify another difference. The limits of a signifying system signify
the “interruption” or a “blockage” of the signifying process, which is required for discourse to
achieve closure. That is, authentic limits are not neutral but are essentially exclusionary, that is,
“they always presuppose an exclusion.” This exclusion is what makes possible the coherence of
a discourse. The excluded or what is beyond the frontier of the system is a difference of another
order which cannot be reduced to just another difference or else the limit would be blurred and
the system subverted. Therefore, the beyond becomes the signifier of pure threat and negativity,
and “it is only that exclusion that grounds the system as such” (Laclau 1996: 37–8).
11. Hence, when the first revelation of the Quran descended upon Prophet Muhammad by the archan-
gel Gabriel in 610 AD, the early Muslims immediately accepted the Divinity of the message and
the Prophethood of Muhammad. However, those who disbelieved in this event, namely polythe-
istic Quraysh, the Meccan tribe to which the Prophet belonged, treated the Prophet with hostility,
conspired to kill him, and turned him and his followers out of Mecca. Hence, this event functions
to found the community of Muslims by drawing a boundary or frontier (understood conceptually)
between Muslims (the inside) and non-Muslims (the outside). It is primarily in this sense that this
event is discursive.
12. Ahmed illustrates that the idea of “disagreement” between Muslims has been widely celebrated
and valued by Muslim scholars and intellectuals such as the Ottoman scholar Katip Celebi.
Similarly, “perplexity” is another notion that has been cherished by many Sufi saints and poets
such as Ibn ʿArabi and Nusrat Fatih. Because it functions to establish the truth, orthodoxy, he
concludes, cannot coherently account for these two ideals as intrinsically Islamic (Ahmed 2015:
279–83).
13. Of course, most Muslims consider the literal truth of the Divine Revelation to be central to Islam
and to being Muslim. Avicenna, however, considers the truth of the Divine Revelation to be sym-
bolic rather than literal, and thus as secondary to a more superior truth accessible to the superior
human intellect, a belief which seems to flatly contradict what the majority of Muslims believe
(Ahmed 2015: 11–12). My point is not to affirm or contest the literal truth of the Quran. Rather,
I am arguing two things: (1) that this Avicennan view does not deny that the Quran is the Word
of God, but on the contrary, as Fazlur Rahman (1963: 498) demonstrates, it affirms that it is the
Word of God and its truth must remain the literal truth for the masses; therefore, Avicenna phi-
losophy invokes Islam as a nodal point and relates itself to the Divine Revelation to the Prophet
even though it is not directly derivative of the texts and (2) that accounting for discourses such
as Avicennan philosophy which contest the literal truth (rather the Word) of the Quran as Islamic
does not logically lead to the negation of the presence of a universal Islamic orthodoxy. A uni-
versal Islamic orthodoxy (a limit that sutures the totality) would still exist, which would include
a belief in the Revelation and its Divine nature but not in its literal truth.
14. “Knowledge of Divine Truth is a limitless ocean. The Sharīʿah is its shore. We are the people
of the shore. The great Sufi masters are the divers in that limitless ocean. We do not argue with
them” (2000: 384, as quoted by Ahmed 2015: 289).
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Between Text and Discourse: Re-Theorizing Islamic Orthodoxy

Author(s): Mohammed Sulaiman

Keywords: Islam, orthodoxy, discursive tradition, law, Sufism, philosophy, hegemony,

The essentialist and anti-essentialist approaches continue to dominate the study of

University of South Australia, Australia

of Muslims and thus cannot be studied independently from these contexts. As a

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

of investigation. One way to do this is by harnessing Talal Asad’s (2009 [1986])

Islam as a Discursive Tradition:

In response to a number of anthropological works on Islam,2 Asad (2009: 7–8)

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

nominalist, anti-essentialist conception of Islam as a label for separate, heteroge-

Muslims all agree – to the extent that an agreement is possible in a complex

points to a universal Islamic orthodoxy (the important point about tradition,

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

context to the domain of what has been authoritatively constituted as Islam in

Conceptualizing Islam: Hegemony and Orthodoxy6

According to Ferdinand de Saussure, language is a system of signs consisting of

communication possible. A sign is composed of a signifier (sound-image) and a

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

systematicity of difference, and relatively stabilizes the relations between its

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

Therefore, given that it can function as a nodal point in a variety of discourses,

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

In this article, I sought to demonstrate the centrality of orthodoxy to the conceptu-

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

equivalence that binds these various expressions together. Conceptualizing Islam so

ReOrient 3.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

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