Der Islam 2020; 97 (1): 233–296

Reviews

Ali Altaf Mian*

Shahab Ahmed’s Contradictions: A Critical
Engagement with What Is Islam?
Review essay on Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2015, 624 pp., ISBN: 9780691164182.

https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2020-0009

Introduction
There was a time in Anglophone Islamic studies when the name “Shahab Ahmed”
and the phrase “Satanic Verses” went hand-in-hand, reflecting Ahmed’s con-
tribution to the study of orthodoxy in the history of Islamic theological sources
and discourses.1 In my graduate school days, we read Ahmed to understand and

1 Shahab Ahmed, “Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic Verses,” Studia Islamica 87 (1998): 67‒124;
Mohammed Shahab Ahmed, “The Satanic Verses Incident in the Memory of the Early Muslim
Community: An Analysis of the Early Riwāyahs and Their Isnāds,” PhD dissertation, Princeton
University, 1999; Shahab Ahmed, “Satanic Verses,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur​ʾ​ān, ed. Jane Dam-
men McAuliffe, 6 vols., Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004, 4:531‒535. For a rich account of Ahmed’s
Satanic Verses project beyond his Princeton years, see Elias Muhanna, “Contradiction and Diver-
sity: What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic,” The Nation, Jan. 6‒11, 2016. See also the
posthumous volume: Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam, Cam-
bridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2017. One can find an excellent engagement
with this book in Sean W. Anthony, “The Satanic Verses in Early Shi​ʿ​ite Literature: A Minority
Report on Shahab Ahmed’s Before Orthodoxy.” Shi​ʿ​i Studies Review 3 (2019): 215‒252. Anthony
sees his own contribution as a mustadrak or “supplement” to Ahmed’s Before Orthodoxy. This
“supplement” draws on “the earliest, relevant Shi​ʿi​te sources,” which, unsurprisingly, “offer
important insights that can serve as a corrective to some of the mains theses of Ahmed’s study”
(215). As Anthony points out, “what Ahmed’s audit [of the citational life of the satanic verses
narrative in Sunni discourses] reveals is that the story originated in two centers of early Islamic
scholarship, Medina and Baṣra, and that the story disseminated by way of the two dominant
literary genres produced by those centers: literary prophetic biography (al-siyar wa-l-maghāzī)

*Corresponding author: Ali Altaf Mian, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA,
alimian@ufl.edu
234   Reviews

engage with the “distinctly fluid and mutable nature of the historical constitution
of orthodoxy in Islam.”2 Before the 2015 publication of What Is Islam? The Impor-
tance of Being Islamic, it would have been hard for many, but not all, scholars of
Islam to imagine that Ahmed’s intellectual legacy would be defined more so by
how he exploded the notion of orthodoxy than by his careful study of this discur-
sive formation.3 What Is Islam? has enacted nothing short of an ‘explosion’ (read:
ex contradictione quodlibet) of extant academic representations and definitions of
‘Islam.’ Sadly, the brilliant author departed the world before he could watch the
fireworks – “To God we belong and to God we return,” says the Qur​ʾ​ān (2:156).4
The present essay is not a “book review” of What Is Islam? Scholars from a
variety of disciplinary perspectives have already composed useful summaries of
and critical observations on the volume (see the following section). This essay
offers me the opportunity to articulate some of my concerns about the volume’s
conceptual presuppositions and methodological limitations by fixing my criti-
cal gaze on the notion of contradiction. At the outset, let me say that like most
readers of the book, What Is Islam? has enriched me in numerous ways. At the
same time, to honor the late Shahab Ahmed and the immense intellectual energy
he put into the composition of What Is Islam? demands that we engage with his
ideas critically and candidly. It is this type of engagement that marks his success
in prompting us to rethink and to reconsider our own taken-for-granted truths
about ‘Islam.’

and qur​ʾ​ānic exegesis (al-tafsīr), respectively” (220). Anthony furnishes us with several textual
fragments from Shī​ʿ​ī sources that contain alternative, sometimes ingenious, narrative accounts
and theological explanations (some of these sources refute the authenticity of the satanic verses
“event” and others offer alternative explanations). Shī​ʿ​ī scholarship, in turn, yields “a broader
panorama of insights into the reception history of the satanic verses story and into the theologi-
cal approaches to its interpretation than one would acquire from merely focusing on the books of
the ḥadīth-folk and Sunni traditionalists” (240). For a review that draws attention to the literary
dimensions of the Satanic Verses’ narratives, and also relates, albeit in passing, these stories to
“Satanic temptation” in Christian sources, see Peter Webb, “Review of Before Orthodoxy: The
Satanic Verses in Early Islam,” Journal of Arabic Literature 49 (2018): 162‒167.
2 Ahmed, “Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic Verses,” 122.
3 Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton and Oxford: Prince-
ton University Press, 2016.
4 For a moving obituary, see Noah Feldman, “An Extraordinary Scholar Redefined Islam,”
Bloomberg Opinion 20 September 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-09-
20/an-extraordinary-scholar-redefined-islam.
 Reviews   235

A Brief Reception History of What Is Islam?

The critical commentary on What Is Islam? contains manifold insights that are
relevant to Islamic studies writ large. In this section, I register certain responses
that have shaped my engagement with Ahmed’s tome, prompting me to think not
only about the historical and theoretical content at hand but also the ethics and
politics of scholarship. I start with the Marginalia/Los Angeles Review of Books
forum and highlight points of critique and constructive engagement instead of
appreciation and acclaim (which pervade almost all responses). In their introduc-
tory post, the co-curators of this online forum, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and
Kristian Petersen, offer a sound interpretation of Ahmed’s “verbose prose” and
“vertiginous explanations”: his style is symptomatic of “the bewildering amount
of history, interpretations, texts, and contexts in which Islam has been defined,
deployed, and utilized, by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”5 This explanation
invites readers to approach the book’s unruly organization and grandiloquence
as reflections of the author’s sources, many of which rely on hyperbole.
Tehseen Thaver takes up the theme of canon-making, arguing that instead
of offering a “sustained critique of the very notion of canonicity,” Ahmed replaces
one canon with another.6 Thaver nimbly challenges the “conceptual implica-
tions and analytical value of the very exercise of establishing influence through
such yardsticks as volume of reading, circulation, copying, etc.”7 Addressing
Ahmed’s critique of the idea of Islam as a religion of law, Mohamed Fadel argues
that given the historical realities in which they find themselves, “it would be
shocking if modern Muslims did not gravitate toward a theology that made law
central to what it means to be Muslim.”8 Zareena Grewal casts light on Ahmed’s
misreading of Talal Asad and argues, “The latent and undeveloped question
which haunts Ahmed’s formulation of Islam/Islamic is the question of power;
what is the relative power of one claim to orthodoxy, made perhaps in legal-moral
terms, relative to another claim to orthodoxy, made in aesthetic terms.”9 Anna

5 Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Kristian Petersen, “What Is Islam? Forum—An Introduction.”
Marginalia 19, August 2016, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/islam-forum-introduction/
6 Tehseen Thaver, “Three More Questions about What Is Islam?,” Marginalia 19, August 2016,
http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/three-questions-islam-tehseen-thaver/
7 Ibid.
8 Mohammad Fadel, “The Priority of the Political: Politics Determines the Possibilities of
Islam,” Marginalia 22, August 2016, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/priority-political-
politics-determines-possibilities-islam-mohammad-h-fadel/
9 Zareena Grewal, “The Problem with Being Islamic: Definitional and Theoretical Limits and
Legacies,” Marginalia 23, August 2016, https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/problem-islamic-
definitional-theoretical-limits-legacies-zareena-grewal/
236   Reviews

Bigelow rightly emphasizes the significance of Ahmed’s cosmopolitan orienta-

tion for engaging with difference and diversity in Islam.10 Yet, there is a need to
think meta-analytically about the presuppositions of the book’s key questions.
Sajjad Rizvi thus draws attention to the persistent timelessness implied in the
question, “What is Islam?” and the “objectification” enacted by the question, “Is
X Islamic?”11 The Marginalia forum concludes with a set of insightful comments
by Peter Gottschalk. He identifies the limitations of Ahmed’s unstated but
implied Protestant theory of the intentional subject (using as an example how for
Ahmed the non-Muslim Punjabi intends his utterance “Yā ʿ​ ​Alī” as an instance of
being Islamic).12 Gottschalk also critiques the sui generis character of Ahmed’s
approach to “being Islamic.” The lack of a comparative religion framework in
What Is Islam? constructs Muslims as exceptional and unique (a construction
that is often mobilized in Islamophobic discourses and policies).
In a thoughtful essay, David Nirenberg also de-centers the exceptional-
ity of Islam by connecting Ahmed’s observations about revelation and mean-
ing-making to the history of religions. Nirenberg draws on an unpublished
manuscript of the late Marshal Hodgson, who called Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam “kerygmatic life-orientational traditions – those that call for ultimate
commitment on the plane of the historical.”13 The idea is that believers derive
meaning (and feeling) by reflecting on the past, which “becomes a form of revela-
tion of divine truth, and the historian becomes…a theologian.”14 Yet, Nirenberg
advances this explanation of the so-called Abrahamic traditions to its logical con-
clusion: “for good or ill, the practice of history will remain for these religions a
form of prophecy, revealing and re-veiling potential meanings of God’s words to
humanity.”15 The importance of engaging “history,” the necessity of conceptual
clarity, and the need to pay greater attention to matters of context are emphasized
in Youshaa Patel’s review. The latter remains unpersuaded by Ahmed’s jettison-

10 Anna Bigelow, “What Is Islam? A Celebration and Defense of Contradiction, Perplexity, and
Paradox,” Marginalia 24, August 2016, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/islam-celebration-
defense-contradiction-perplexity-paradox-anna-bigelow/
11 Sajjad Rizvi, “Reconceptualization, Pre-Text, and Con-text,” Marginalia 25, August 2016,
https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/reconceptualization-pre-text-con-text-sajjad-rizvi/
12 Peter Gottschalk, “The Interpretive Pivot: Hermeneutics and the Contemporary Decline
of Islamic Pluralism,” Marginalia 26, August 2016, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/
interpretative-pivot-hermeneutics-contemporary-decline-islamic-pluralism-peter-gottschalk/
13 David Nirenberg, “What is Islam? (What is Christianity? What is Judaism?),” Raritan 36.2
(Fall 2016): 1‒14, at 13.
14 Ibid., 13.
15 Nirenberg, “What is Islam? (What is Christianity? What is Judaism?),” 14.
 Reviews   237

ing of ‘religion’: “If the category of Islam can be rehabilitated, why not the cate-
gory of religion?”16 Patel also calls into question Ahmed’s dyadic deployment
of prescription and exploration: “prescriptive discourses of scripture and law
can be explorative while exploratory discourses of Sufism and philosophy can
be prescriptive.”17 This point raises another set of questions: Does Ahmed pre-
scribe Sufism and philosophy to his readers? In other words, does Ahmed actu-
ally become a theologian, to re-invoke Hodgson via Nirenberg? These ques-
tions, however, cannot be addressed without attention to positionality and
the relationship between subjectivity and scholarship, which are themes that
Wendy Shaw addresses poignantly. She writes: “His framework is neither his-
torical nor geographical, but the mental world of a Muslim engaged with the
numerous intellectual traditions of his culture. This Muslim may or may not be
the author…Rather, this Muslim is a figure brought to life through these discours-
es.”18 Shaw affirms the theological project implied in What Is Islam? when she
writes, “it gives us the space to be Islamic in our catholic embrace of the power
of human faith outside the limits of our own confessional relationships with the
divine.”19
Shaw’s attention to positionality and subjectivity takes us to another feature
of What Is Islam? The book captures the sometimes mournful but mostly upbeat
song of a Muslim thinker who struggles to find analytical frameworks that can
make sense of his cosmopolitan experience and historical study of Islam. In his
review essay, Michael Pregill registers the various notes of Ahmed’s significant
song but also identifies how “the most troubling omission from What Is Islam?
is Ahmed’s near-total neglect of gender.”20 In a footnote, Pregill points out
how What Is Islam? ignores the “work of seminal figures like amina wadud.”21 I
would add to Pregill’s comment the further remark that the exclusion of amina
wadud is one of the book’s major flaws, precisely because wadud has engaged so
innovatively with revelation and meaning-making in her now-classic Qur​ʾ​an and

16 Youshaa Patel, “What is Islam?,” The Journal of Religion 98.1 (January 2018): 114‒120, at 116.
17 Patel, “What is Islam?,” 117.
18 Wendy Shaw, “Review of What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic,” Journal of Islamic
Studies 28.3 (September 2017): 378‒382, at 381. Shaw’s assessment finds evidence in What Is
Islam? when its author says, for example, “When we/Muslims think of human and historical
Islam, it is incumbent on us/Muslims to think also of a human and historical phenomenon of
exploration…” (303).
19 Ibid., 382.
20 Michael Pregill, “I Hear Islam Singing: Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of
Being Islamic,” Harvard Theological Review 110.1 (2017): 149‒165, at 164.
21 Ibid, 164.
238   Reviews

Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective.22 Let me note that
other crucial voices are also missing in What Is Islam? Khalil Andani’s review is
instructive here: “Any analysis that ignores Shi​ʿ​i traditions cannot claim to tell
us ‘what is Islam’ in a definitive way. This is because the predominantly Sunni
doctrines and practices analyzed by Ahmed were actually shaped and influ-
enced through an engagement with Shi​ʿ​ism.”23 For Alireza Doostdar, Ahmed’s
approach to Islam in strictly “semiotic” terms “fails to make sense of all kinds of
phenomena: the inculcation of virtues, the development of embodied sensibili-
ties, the achievement of spiritual states, and so on.”24
Frank Griffel relates Ahmed’s preoccupation with the notion of orthodoxy,
and then its explosion in What Is Islam? to broader Orientalist debates about
postclassical Islam. Griffel’s critical summary of this volume is a tour de force
in its own right.25 His following summary of Ahmed’s definition of Islam justi-
fies my above usage of the logical term, explosion (ex contradictione quodlibet,
that is, “from contradiction anything follows”): “If Islam is any hermeneutical
engagement with the pretext, text, and context, then Islam permeates everything
in majority-Muslim premodern societies…If even Maimonides’ philosophy is
‘Islamic Jewish’, one should not expect any cultural product not to be Islamic
given that it all belongs to the context. In fact, not only everything in majori-
ty-Muslim societies is Islam, the whole world is Islamic.”26 Despite this critique,
Griffel acknowledges that What Is Islam? “makes a valuable contribution by
pointing to multiple phenomena that are indeed Islamic but that have not always
been acknowledged as such.”27 He also identifies two further “strengths” of
Ahmed’s magnum opus. First, Ahmed’s well-informed critical analysis of extant
definitions of Islam makes the “urgent plea that Islam is much more than its
sharī​ʿ​a” and that the structures and sources of the normative in Islamic history

22 Amina Wadud, Qur​ʾ​an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective,
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
23 Khalil Andani, “Review of What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic,” Islam and Chris-
tian-Muslim Relations 28.1 (2017): 114‒117, at 116.
24 Alireza Doostdar, “Review of Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being
Islamic,” Shi​ʿ​i Studies Review 1 (2017): 277‒282, at 281. Yet, I would suggest that Ahmed’s excel-
lent exposition of poetry and its various genres can be read as a theory of how lyrical language
produces meaning but also mystical feeling. But I agree with Doostdar’s broader point about
Ahmed’s fixation on meaning and disregard for both power and practice.
25 Frank Griffel, “Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity: Two New Perspectives on Premodern
(and Postclassical) Islamic Societies,” Bustan: The Middle East Book Review 8.1 (2017): 1‒21.
26 Griffel, “Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity,” 13‒14.
27 Ibid., 21.
 Reviews   239

have exceeded formal jurisprudence.28 Second, What Is Islam? paints a “refresh-

ingly different picture” of postclassical Islam, one that draws attention to the
vitality of philosophy, Sufism, poetry, and the arts, from the 1300s to the middle
of the nineteenth century.29

Contradiction in What Is Islam?

I now turn to my concerns about the volume’s conceptual presuppositions and
methodological limitations. In so doing, I concentrate on the notion of contra-
diction, which is a term of remarkable significance in What Is Islam? Ahmed
attempts to answer the question, “What is Islam?” by “keen diagnostic atten-
tion…to the prolific scale and definitive import of the phenomenon of internal con-
tradiction to the constitution of the human and historical phenomenon of Islam.”30
Ahmed insists on the “integrity and identity” of an internally split system, or
in his words, “the coherence of an internally-contradictory phenomenon.”31 In a
recent article, Shahzad Bashir challenges the desire, on the part of scholars, for
coherence. He posits Islam “as an ever-changing set of arguments” that “do not
cohere into a system and their possible interconnections must be documented on
a specific basis rather than being presumed from any kind of phenomenological
or conceptual universality.”32 Bashir’s methodology challenges the primacy of
definitions and indicts Ahmed’s answer to “What is Islam?” as “ahistorical and
unnecessarily constrictive.”33 Notwithstanding its self-contradictions, Ahmed
argues, Islam retains its coherence because rather than a law, religion, culture,
or discursive tradition, Islam is “hermeneutical engagement” with the Pre-Text,
Text, and Con-Text of Revelation. For Ahmed, this approach defines Islam on its
own terms. But can ‘Islam’ be separated from its others, such as Judaism and
Christianity? I believe Ahmed’s definition falls short precisely because it fails
to define Islam on its own terms, which necessarily include Islam and Muslims’

28 Ibid., 16.
29 Ibid., 16.
30 Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 72. With reference to the scale of contradiction in Islam, Doostdar
writes, “Ahmed’s argument that the scale of contradiction in Islam is somehow unique is unper-
suasive” (“Review of What Is Islam?,” 279).
31 Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 109.
32 Shahzad Bashir, “Everlasting Doubt: Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past,”
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 20 (2018): 25‒44, at 42‒43.
33 Bashir, “Everlasting Doubt,” 29.
240   Reviews

relationship to the religious other, the very source of Islam’s identity (there is no
identity without difference).
To relate Islam to other religious traditions does not necessarily imply a
negation of its self-representation; rather, this methodological move deepens our
understanding of Islam. I would say that intra-Islamic vectors of diversity and the
different modes of ‘being Islamic’ are in fact less ‘self-contradictory’ than the rich
experiences of the indigenous peoples of the Americas who at once embrace their
‘native cosmologies’ and Christianity, without always seeing or sensing “contra-
dictions” between these traditions of feeling, thought, and ritual.34 In my view,
most of the “contradictions” that Ahmed identifies are better described as struc-
tural tensions or divergent affective tendencies rather than oppositions to the
principle of non-contradiction. This sense of ‘contradiction’ (as affective rather
than logical) is actually found right at the beginning of What Is Islam? where
Ahmed cites the following words of Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes).

These poetic lines posit a speaker who is engaged in the narcissistic labor of self-re-
flection. The speaker inhabits a divided self: an “I” that contradicts “myself.” Yet,
this self-division does not provoke agony; rather, it is ‘very well’ a cause of inner
contentment. The sense of ‘contradiction’ that permeates Whitman’s words and
Ahmed’s vision of Islam is not that of formal logic. Rather, the idea is to live with
contradictions and to be content with opposing tendencies and tensions.
I am not denying the possibility, and in fact historical instances, of logical
contradictions in Muslims’ interpretations of and relations to revelatory dis-
courses and practices. Rather, my concern is that the confusion proliferated
in What Is Islam? between ‘contradiction’ and a host of other terms (such as
paradox, ambiguity, ambivalence, difference, and diversity) precludes a rigorous
engagement with ‘contradiction’ as a useful analytical framework. How might
we approach “contradiction” otherwise? Here, I have benefited from the work of
anthropologists and theologians. Specialists in both fields of study have devel-
oped advanced ways of interpreting the messiness of the ontological as well as
the tensions and paradoxes that occur in the daily lives of religious folk.35

34 See Robin M. Wright and Aparecida Vilaça, eds., Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Chris-
tianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, New York: Routledge, 2009.
35 I should mention that the study of “contradiction” in philosophical traditions as diverse as
logic, continental philosophy, and analytical philosophy, not to mention Avicenna’s writings on
 Reviews   241

In the field of cultural anthropology, several scholars address the theme of

contradiction and inconsistency.36 Katherine P. Ewing’s work on Sufi saints and
institutions in Pakistan is instructive in this regard. She puts together a viable
theory of the subject that reflects both her ethnography and her deep investments
in psychoanalysis as well as the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
In her own words:

The individual as subject can never fully avoid the ultimate contradiction at the heart of all
human projects: that signs are human constructions, that no social order is ever permanent,
and that death brings an end to all projects and obliterates the subject. This awareness
of the arbitrariness of ideologies and the class-based interests that are represented by the
hegemonic discourses that dominate public talk is particularly acute in historical situations
in which alternative discourses confront one another, producing a reflexive consciousness;
yet it is not an exclusively modern phenomenon.37

Ewing is at once attuned to the contingencies of semiotics as well as social struc-

tures and the undeniable finitude of the subject. The experience of contradiction,

logic, forms the background of my own fixation on this concept in What Is Islam? I believe that
in addition to the principle of explosion and the law of non-contradiction, Ahmed’s approach
can be productively related to two additional conceptualizations of contradiction, namely, para-
consistent logic and Hegel’s complicated view of contradiction in The Science of Logic. For Hegel,
contradiction is the condition of possibility for life itself. As he put it in The Science of Logic:
“Something is…alive only in so far as it contains contradiction within it, and moreover has the
power to hold and endure the contradiction within it” (Hegel, The Science of Logic, 440). The
German philosopher holds that this feature of life is not opposed to logic, or the “distinctive
[linguistic] expressions specifically set aside for thought determinations”; rather, logic, for the
human being at least, “is the supernatural element that permeates all his natural behavior, his
ways of sensing, intuiting, desiring, his needs and impulses.” In his discussion of the law of
non-contradiction, Hegel uses his understanding of the structure of temporality to explain dou-
ble negation as the condition of spatiotemporal possibility: “Something moves, not because at
one moment it is here and at another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here
and not here, because in this ‘here’ it at once is and is not” Logic, then, helps us to understand
the vitality of a moving thing: “motion is existent contradiction itself.”
36 David Berliner, ed. “Anthropology and the Study of Contradictions,” Hau: Journal of Ethno-
graphic Theory 6.1 (2016): 1‒27. Berliner writes, “Religion appears to constitute a site privilégié
for the investigation of contradictory statements, feelings, and practices” (3). For a fascinating
study of ritual’s capacity to resolve contradictions for religious folk, see Gregory M. Simon, “The
Soul Freed of Cares? Islamic Prayer, Subjectivity, and the Contradictions of Moral Selfhood in
Minangkabau, Indonesia,” American Ethnologist 36.2 (2009):258‒275. See also Deana Jovano-
vić, “Ambivalence and the Study of Contradictions,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6.3
(2016): 1‒6.
37 Katherine P. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997, 37.
242   Reviews

in this analytical framework at least, is an integral part of being human. The par-
ticular vectors of contradiction are manifold; Islam, for Muslims, is a single such
vector, but it does not constitute the totality of social order. A robust engagement
with Ewing’s analytical insights into contradiction and the incoherence of the
subject was warranted in a book that attempts “to provide a coherent account of
contradiction in and as Islam.”38
A productive engagement with the academic discipline of theology also yields
helpful insights into the meaning of contradiction. The English philosopher of
religion and theologian John Hick (1920‒2012) studies competing truth claims in
his writings on religious pluralism. He draws on different analogies to show how
opposing statements can be true. This exercise helps him to construct a theol-
ogy of religious pluralism. He thus affirms the existence of “an ultimate ineffable
Reality which is the source and ground of everything.”39 This metaphysical pos-
tulation serves as the broader framework in which different religious traditions
elaborate diverging but not necessarily disputing “conceptions of the Real, with
correspondingly different forms of experience of the Real, and correspondingly
different forms of life in response to the Real.”40 While not all readers will accept
the metaphysical presuppositions of Hick’s theology of religious pluralism, he
does model an interpretation that can maintain the validity of contradictory truth
claims without violating the principle of non-contradiction.
Ahmed proposes a different solution to interpreting multiple truth claims.
He holds that “meaningful ambiguity and meaningful contradiction are inher-
ent to, and arise directly from, the structural spatiality of the very phenomenon
of Revelation itself.”41 Yet, “the structural spatiality” of revelation as Pre-Text,
Text, and Con-Text is not the sole meta-textual typology of revelation in Islam.
The very definition of and approach to revelation changes as we move from genre
to genre in Islamic scholarship; moreover, who gets to decide which discursive/
disciplinary account of revelation ought to be privileged? The methodological
problem here is that instead of concentrating on the historical context and liter-
ary features of the Qur​ʾ​ānic text, Ahmed commences with “contradictions” that
he sees as inherent in Muslim intellectual traditions as well as lived religion. He
then devises a typology of truth claims based in different forms of revelatory tex-

38 Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 542. Note that Ahmed does mention Ewing’s scholarship in pass-
ing, but does not incorporate this view of contradiction into his broader conceptualization of
Islam as contradiction.
39 John Hick, A Christian Theology of Religions: The Rainbow of Faiths, Louisville, Kentucky:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, 27.
40 Hick, A Christian Theology of Religions, 27.
41 Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 544.
 Reviews   243

tuality as a satisfactory explanation of how such contradictions do not disrupt

the coherence of Islam as a capacious framework for meaning-making. However,
his explanation remains unpersuasive. The “tensions” present in the Qur​ʾ​ānic
text and lived Muslim reality, past and present, are historically contingent and
constructed. These tensions do not arise from a timeless typology of revelation
but from the messiness of our worlds. To put it differently, the ‘contradictions’
Ahmed sees in Islam are neither caused by the intrinsic nature or spatiality of the
Qur​ʾ​ānic revelation nor experienced by Muslims in exceptional ways. The idea
that a text has potential latent meanings (pretext), apparent meanings (text), and
relates to the world in multiple ways (context) is hardly unique to the Qur​ʾ​ān.
It is a general feature of literary texts to include multiple truth registers and to
elaborate different modalities of relating to the world. Readers enter texts from
different thresholds and bring to their hermeneutic endeavors both intentional as
well as unconscious investments and the imprint of their sociohistorical forma-
tion and personal disposition.
In conclusion, it is important to interrogate the meaning of ‘contradiction’
in What Is Islam? since the author’s answer to this question hinges on this term.
Simply put, Ahmed argues that the existing definitional approaches to Islam fail
to account for its self-contradictions. According to his alternative definition, again
simply put, we should view as Islamic all hermeneutic engagements with the Pre-
Text, Text, and Con-Text of divine revelation (hence, “the importance of being
Islamic”). Thus, the contradictions Ahmed identifies in both Islamic discursivity
and Muslim practice are allowed to stand because the revelatory text is internally
differentiated between the philosophical-mystical domains of pre-textuality, the
legalistic-normative registers of textuality, and the broader cultural-social worlds
of con-textuality. In critically analyzing Ahmed’s alternative definition, I have
called for a nuanced approach to contradiction, one that resists the rhetorically
convenient conflation of the logical sense of contradiction and affective tensions
as well as perspectival divergences. On my reading, the contradictions, tensions,
and divergences (as well as a range of other terms that denote gaps and fissures of
representational schemes) are historically contingent and thus call for case-spe-
cific analytical frameworks. In this way, a nuanced approach to contradiction
frees us from defining a complex historical phenomenon such as “Islam” through
the singular prism of revelation. Otherwise, do we not risk reifying orthodoxy
once more?42

42 My thanks to Sajjad Rizvi and Hunter Bandy for their feedback on this review.