For the Session on Islam at the Conference of the Evangelical Missionary Society, Oct 14-16, 2016 in Dallas, TX
Robert L. Canfield, Emeritus Professor
Washington University in St Louis
This note is addressed to anyone wanting to understand Muslim belief and practice, to suggest some works for them to read [or in conversation listen for]. My only credentials for this project are that I spent nine and half years in Afghanistan, including two years of anthropological field research, and have since then taught courses on the Muslim world, and also have sought to understand the material I collected while in Afghanistan.[1] This suggestions are my own, and reflect my professional interest in Afghanistan and other countries of Central Asia. Essentially these are works and perspectives that have helped me, but since I have been out of circulation for three years some of them have become dated. Even so, some of them are in my opinion fundamental or seminal and still be useful.
Fundamental sources on Islam
It is common to consider the Quran as fundamental to Islam, but it is important to realize that the Hadith, the reputed activities and sayings of Muhammad, are for some Muslims what they actually know. And they have in the past been regarded as spiritually powerful and sacred. In Afghanistan and Central Asia, at least, Hadith used to be highly prized. A specialist in Hadith was accorded great reverence: Early in the eleventh century, when a notable scholar of Hadith journeyed to Baghdad from his home in Central Asia he was greeted by thousands of people lining the streets, just to see him.[2] Sultans “received” Hadiths on their knees. Ideally one should memorize the “isnad” of a Hadith along with the story itself, the “isnad” being its provenance, the line of authorities back to the original source of the story. Such practices are no longer current but stories of the prophet do circulate in common discourse, perhaps more than quotations from the Quran. You and I need to listen for them, and for what they reveal about proper Muslim behavior.
My impression is that many Muslims know little about what the Quran says; even if they can recite the Quran they don’t know what they mean. At the same time some stories about the prophet are broadly known. What they know about original teachings in “Islam” comes from Hadith.
Of course the standard and best source on Islam is the Encyclopedia of Islam, which I think is generally accessible on line. The first edition was produced between 1913 and 1926; the second edition 1954-2005; and a third edition is now in process. However, there is a problem with using EI in any of its editions: All entries are in Arabic, so unless you already know Arabic you can’t find the topics you are interested in. But there is a way around that: Gibb and Kramer produced a Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, which consists of selected entries from the first edition [the publisher [Brill] describes it as “an unequalled reference work of all subjects which concern, or touch on, the religion and law of Islam”]. In the back pages of that work is a list in English that directs you to the Arabic topics in the book. If you contact me at canfrobt@wustl.edu I will send you a pdf copy of those pages. From them you will be able to look up titles in any of the versions of the encyclopedia.
On Islam and early and medieval Muslim history
Marshal Hodgson’s Venture of Islam [3 volumes] still seems to me a fundamental resource. I am impressed that, even though Hodgson was much admired, few people actually make use of his critical distinctions; I still feel his concept of “Islamicate societies” is useful.
Ira Lapidus’s History of Islamic Societies was a great work for a very cheap price when it came out. Perhaps the reason I like this work and Hodgson is that they are trying to describe how Islam took form as social realities; they are not primarily theological works even though the conceptual issues are well addressed. Both are encyclopedic in their coverage.
Islam and Muslim practice have been discussed, debated about, sometimes fought about, for 1400 years. Islam is a literate religion. Theological and historical and literary writings abound in Muslim writings: I found them to be a huge bottomless pit. Muslim scholars have debated many issues in writing, and the history of their debates still resonate in contemporary Muslim society. This is why the above sources are so valuable; they lead you into their debates and social concerns.
Non-Authorative Works widely read by Muslims
I had a friend in Afghanistan who introduced me to another body of writings of importance to his community. Muhammad Ali [MA] was Shiite in background from Ghorian, a mostly Shiite area of western Afghanistan. He was bright, and had inherited a set of “religious” works from his mother’s uncle who was a Sayyed, [claiming descent from the prophet] and had used his works to do charms and divination to “cure” people. The books contained diagrams and incantations considered spiritually powerful and certain sayings from the Quran by which he claimed [or in his case pretended] to cure many maladies, spiritual/emotional and physical. This tradition of Muslim practice is widely disclaimed by the trained scholars of Islam but it exists in many forms throughout the Muslim world. Related practices include worship at shrines to get cured or delivered from evil influences, etc. and the wearing of amulets for curing or protecting, etc. MA took this material literally at one time [he was not a believer when I knew him]. For example, he said had tried to recite an incantation that, if repeated all day and every day for 40 days, was enable you to see Muhammad, “but it didn’t work for me,” he said. I know this kind of material is broadly disapproved by the learned – and some of it, the curses, are and were broadly distrusted and condemned by the peasants I knew – but they were being practiced when I was in the field. It is not rare that folks, even if educated, to turn to such “cures” in extremity. Elizabeth Fernea, professor at the U. of Texas, once in desperation turned to such cures for her daughter. [I have written an extended article about such matters in Central Asia, in which very helpful material collected by Dudley Woodbury in Kabul in included.[3]] Below I append a brief note regarding that article.
MA also helped me understand the topics that the people who were literate had read. I had found a number of such books in the bazaar and wondered was they said. Some were in Arabic but most were in Farsi, of course. I asked him to summarize several of them. Here are some examples:
- Qassas ul Anbia [“Stories about the prophets”]. This work includes many stories about various prophets recognized by Muslims; most are accorded great miraculous powers.
- Qiyamat Naama [“Book of Judgment,” or of The Judgment Day]. This book describes beliefs common among Muslims about the last days: It will be a terrifying time. A great final battle will take place when the armies of “Dujall” [an anti-christ figure, whose infidel troops will be blue-eyed] fight the armies of Islam. When that terrible war is over Jesus will come back to declare that Islam is the true religion, and then the final judgment will take place. This, by the way, is the appeal of ISIS: They invite young Muslims to join them in what will be the final battle for Islam. For them the final days are near.[4]
Note that this discussion has drifted away from the more formal features of Islam to the more informal sources for religious knowledge widely used in Muslim societies. Take, for example, what children actually learn about their faith in school. The best source I know is an article by Nazif Shahrani for the book Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective: “Local knowledge of Islam and social discourse in Afghanistan and Turkistan in the modern period.” I had to prompt him on what to write in this chapter because he had difficulty conceiving of what might be interesting and significant: it was too ordinary to him. As it turned out, many scholars regard the article as unique. He of course had a class on Quran [which entailed reciting it in Arabic, which few Afghans understand], but the works that he read with understanding were collections of works in Farsi: The Chahar Kitab [Four books], and the Painj Kitab [Five books], which included the great religious poems in Farsi. Such works constituted an education for young children in Afghanistan villages.
Private Devotional Notebooks
Another kind of interesting written material of importance to Afghan Muslims were the devotional notebooks they had copied for themselves. These works were generally produced with great care, elegantly calligraphed. Many of the texts they copied in these notebooks consisted of sufi poems, and the poetry of their great writers which in Farsi bear a huge amount of religious content. Many handwritten books had the text of one poet written down the center of the page which the poems of another writer were written on the margins. The general appreciation of the works of the great Farsi poets — Hafiz, Jaami, Rumi [whom the Afghans call Balkhi], Bedil, Firdusi, etc. – suggests how hungry these Muslims were for significance and meaning in their lives. I brought several of them back from the field and was dismayed to discover that no one, not even a great library, thought they were worth collecting. There appears as yet to be no tradition of scholarship on such works even though there are many of them in many forms.
The most notable devotional book we have found was bought by a friend in Ghazni. It was carefully, artfully, caligraphed and wrapped in a green silk cloth. Pages were well-worn. Clearly it was a treasure to someone who had prepared it with care and read it many times. This was the contents of the book: there were several pairs of articles, each consisting of a story in Farsi followed by an Arabic prayer. Each Farsi text described a situation in which someone did something shameful and tragically sinful, at the end of which there was a statement that if someone would recite the Arabic prayer that followed they would be forgiven their sin. As far as I know there is virtually no scholarship on the quest for forgiveness in Islam. I hope to resume a paper I once started on this ms. someday. There is more out there, I’m sure.
Works on Muslim Practice in the Contemporary World
Now, works on the way Islamic categories and agendas are deployed in modern social practice. Of course we have to be reading such works because we want to know what is going on in the world, and in the case of the Muslim world, how many Muslims understand and practice their faith. A central preoccupation of Muslim scholars for more than two centuries has been how to deal with the onslaught of the West. Of course radical Islamic movements have arisen out of such discussions. I have often recommended The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright as a good start into the study of modern social life among Muslims, because it is so well researched, beautifully crafted, and eminently relevant to our contemporary world. It tracks the rise of Al Qaeda and the ways that Osama Bin Laden was socialized into radical Islam. The modern Islamist movements seem to have arisen out of the general sense of malaise and doubt about how to cope with the overwhelming cultural power of the West. [Cf. Emanuel Sivan, Radical Islam, who was surprised many years ago to discover that young people in Egypt were turning back to the writings of Ibn Taimiyya, a thirteenth century scholar who criticized the Mongols because they were not strict enough in the practice of Islamic rituals.] There is a lot of stuff we should be reading about the practice of Islam in our time: works on the recent history of Muslim-dominated regions such as [for my part of the world] Taliban by Ahmad Rashid, Descent into Chaos by Ahmad Rashid, The Wrong Enemy by Carlotta Gall, etc.
There are many other useful works on the modern history of Muslim affairs but because I am a few years out of date I hesitate to recommend anything I have not looked at myself. You want to read works on the modern history of affairs in the Muslim world because the struggles that have taken form in recent times have shaped the sensibility of contemporary generations.
Some General Points
I want to urge two conceptual issues. One is to point out how seamless our progression has been, from highly formal works such as the Quran and the western scholarly works on the history of Islam to the various forms of writings and Muslim practice that I have called “informal” Islamic works. This issue, how informal or peasant religious practices relate to the Quran and the [reliable?] Hadith, has been much debated. When I tried to get help on such writings from Prof Fazul Rahman [U. Chicago] he was totally dismissive of all of them. Note, however, how difficult it is in the world of real people to distinguish “true” Islam from folk [“Informal”] Islam. For the peasants I knew, their knowledge of Islam came from the sources I have called “informal.” I have often been told by Afghans what “Islam teaches”; I don’t remember anyone telling me what “Quran teaches.” Whatever the Quran says, many Muslims don’t know it as such but as they have acquired knowledge of it from other more accessible sources.
Which is to say that the study of the Quran as a crucial basis of understanding Muslim practice may be of some value but it’s not the same as learning what ordinary Muslims know about their faith and actually do. For many folks, the non-Quranic works – stories, maxims, poems – are the main sources of their religious knowledge. And some of the things they believe and use as “Islamic” devices of efficacy are scorned and scouted by the learned elite. [Anyone who knows the story of Farkhanda, who was beaten to death by a mob for condemning the use of magical “Islamic” cures in Kabul, will recognize how powerful the “informal” world of practice is; NB: it turned out that the person who started the riot had other agendas than theological but he used the issue to instigate the riot.]
That is, to state my second conceptual, and biased, claim: The study of Quran and Islamic theology is one thing, but if we are to understand what Muslims actually know, believe and practice we need to study the sources through which they acquire their religious sensibility and the ways “Islam” [as Muslims know it] is being used in actual life. This means how it is practiced in the modern period by Muslims today. I have known Western “experts” to give a series of lectures on Islam without ever mentioning Sayyed Qutb, a tragic figure whose ideas have profoundly influenced the modern understanding of Islam. This is why, for example, I encourage people to read the Looming Tower, and other works on contemporary issues in the modern Muslim world.
[1] Also, I spent one term at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where Islam and Muslim practice in the Middle East were the main topics of my interest. I attended the tutorial sessions of Professor P. J. Vatikiotis, the plenary sessions of Professor Bernard Lewis, lectures on the history of Muslim peoples by several members of the faculty, and the seminar presentations of a couple of doctoral students.
[2] Roy Muttahedeh. 2001. Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society.
[3] 2010. Efficacy and Hierarchy: Examples from Afghanistan. New Games in Central Asia: Great and Small, ed. by R L. Canfield and Gabriele Paleczek. Note that I owe a great deal to Dudley Woodbury for contributing several valuable illustrative stories which he collected on religious topics in Afghanistan.
[4] See my discussion of Zoya’s Story in: [2004.] Review article on Searching for Saleem by Farooka Gauhari, Zoya’s Story by Zoya, Veiled Courage by Cheryl Benard, and The Sewing Circles of Heart by Christina Lamb, with an Appendix on other works on women in Afghanistan. Iranian Studies 37(2): 323-333.