Political Theology

ISSN: 1462-317X (Print) 1743-1719 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypot20

Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from

Mecca to market place

Abdul Majeed Ottakandathil

To cite this article: Abdul Majeed Ottakandathil (2019): Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking
from Mecca to market place, Political Theology, DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2019.1571665

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2019.1571665

Published online: 25 Jan 2019.

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POLITICAL THEOLOGY

BOOK REVIEW

Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from Mecca to market place, by Irfan
Ahmad, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 270 pp., $29.95
(Paperback), ISBN 9781469635095

Irfan Ahmad’s Religion as Critique makes an important intervention in the study of critical
thinking in Islam and Western philosophy. The book provides four inter-related arguments.
First, Ahmad argues that critique – Western or non-Western – is an immanent practice; it
should be understood in relation to a given tradition and history. He develops this argument
by building on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, who contends that the ideal enlightenment
notion of critique predicated on the assumption of autonomy of reason is an illusion.
Ahmad offers evidence for this notion of the historical embeddedness of critiques in
Western philosophy in his discussion of Immanuel Kant’ and French philosophes’ writings
in the first chapter of the book. These philosophers’ texts, Ahmad says, were by no means uni-
versal; instead, they were immanent critiques of Christianity intended not so much to reject it
as to reevaluate it. Going one step further, Ahmad argues that the enlightenment was an ethnic
project aimed at showing the uniqueness of Europe in relation to its others including and most
prominently to Islam. Accordingly, paradigmatic philosophers of the enlightenment such as
Kant and Voltaire, treated their vocation as a security project that drew and guarded the
borders of Europe, and contrasted its characteristic upholding of reason, intellect, and hard
work with the “enthusiastic and irrational mystagogues” (p. 38) in the Muslim-Arab or
Mongol world.
The second argument of the book pertains to the relationship between critique and religion,
often conceived in the dominant narrative of Western philosophy as a critique of religion. This
implies that critical thinking rooted within or inspired by religion cannot qualify as critique.
Anthropologists of Islam also tends to subscribe to this narrative. This tendency is evident in
their reasoned reluctance to employ the term “critique” when referring to contemporary
Muslims’ reflective engagement with their tradition as the logic of their approach is grounded
within the revealed sources of Islam. Likewise, Urdu literary criticism reproduces this relation-
ship but goes one step further: it projects the relationship between Islam and critique as that of
mutual exclusiveness. For instance, the most celebrated modern Urdu literary critic, Shamsur
Rahman Faruqi is not only unequivocal in dismissing Islam as a source of inspiration for cri-
tique but also treats them as antagonistic.
Against this reigning narrative, Ahmad charts an alternative genealogy. In the field of Urdu
literary criticism, he explores this in an “enterprise” identified as “constructive literature” that
see literature and religion as connected (p. 76). Likewise, Ahmad also introduces the readers
with an elaborate classificatory system developed by Islamic scholars like Maududi, Vahidud-
din Khan, and Shahnavaz Faruqi to differentiate approved forms of critique in Islam from the
disapproved ones such as mockery, refutation, denunciation, distortion, and glorification. In
doing so, Ahmad shows how Islam acted in the works of these scholars and literary figures
as an agent of critique.
The three chapters in the second part of the book are replete with examples that illustrate
this form of critique. Ahmad shows how Maududi identified his own initial engagement with
Islam as a “critical and investigative study of Islam” (p. 100) and considered “reasoned debate”
as an essential part of the pursuit of knowledge in Islam (p. 101). Ahmad’s account of Maud-
udi’s writings on questions of women and “(in)equality” (p. 154), and the state in Islam, as well
2 BOOK REVIEW

as his followers’ and detractors’ responses on these matters, compose a rich exposition on the
substantive contents, governing principles, modes and telos of critique in Islam.
Once proved that religion may not only be an object of critique but also an active agent of it,
the argument that critique is a product of the Enlightenment becomes untenable. Thus,
Ahmad stretches back the origin of critique to a breakthrough period in the history of religions
across the world: the axial age, a period from800 – 2000 BC. The axial age, Ahmad argues, fol-
lowing Karl Jasper, opened a new era in which philosophers like Buddha and the Prophets of
Israel subjected the existing religious traditions to criticism and presented alternative cosmol-
ogies. For Ahmad, making this claim is crucial because Islamic reformers like Maududi and his
interlocutors trace the origin of their mission to reform and critique back to Moses and
Abraham – prophets of the axial age. Hence the third argument of the book: critique is
older than what it is thought to be.
After temporally widening the scope of critique, Ahmad expands the scope of critique ver-
tically to ordinary people in their mundane social and cultural practices. This is the fourth line
of inquiry of the book, corresponding to its last chapter. Ahmad examines the aims, agendas,
and activities of the movement Khudai-Khidmatgar which emerged in the North West Fron-
tier Province of colonial India as a reform and protest movement. The critique enacted in this
movement was located in the ordinary peoples’ embodied resistance against the British colo-
nial administration. Islam served as the source of inspiration for this resistance and provided
the vocabulary to envision and perform their reformist agendas. The second part of this
chapter discusses how the hawkers in the city of Aligarh that Ahmad met during his field
work performed critiques of the insensitivity of the rich against the poor through Urdu pro-
verbs. Thus, he ends the book by saying “The hawker was a critic” (p. 201), instantiating the
critique in “the marketplace” – a point he made in the title of the book.
As a final thought, Ahmad makes an important intervention in “anthropology of philos-
ophy,” methodologically speaking. The anthropology of philosophy, Ahmad contends,
drawing on Kai Kresse, treats philosophy as a “social practice” (p. 35). Anthropologists
have studied philosophy in this sense, however, only insofar as they belonged to primitive
societies. The novelty of Ahmad’s interventions lies in that he treated the writings of Immanuel
Kant as well as French philosophers and encyclopedists as an object of the anthropological
inquiry. Therefore, the book constitutes a significant contribution to both the study of critique
and the anthropology of philosophy.

Abdul Majeed Ottakandathil

Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
abdul.ottakandathilputhenpeedika@mail.mcgill.ca
© 2019 Abdul Majeed Ottakandathil
https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2019.1571665