Friendship, Sovereignty, and Translation
Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst
Part of Perilous Intimacies: A Forum
SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire is a book of sweeping breadth and incredible depth, one worth reading (and rereading). He chronicles historical figures within a mostly Urdu-speaking (and Urdu-writing) South Asian Muslim milieu as well as offers a detailed, pointed, sustained examination of theoretically complex topics like sovereignty, translation, and friendship. It is unique scholarship that deliberately and almost languidly submerges the reader within this South Asian Muslim matrix of writing, speeches, commentary, and history across several centuries while holding, at its core, a central question: how do Hindu and Muslim relationships function—as friendship, intimately, and with the conceits of closeness?
Tareen’s work necessarily addresses the perils of intimacy, sovereignty, and translation, but none of these terms are as straightforward as we may expect. I’ll begin with questions about those central ideas before circling back to what, I think, Tareen is accomplishing by foregrounding those terms and their impacts. First, if intimacy might mean closeness, in what ways does the intimacy of Hindus and Muslims assume closeness in location or perhaps as part of culture or history or language? What Tareen is doing in this book is far more interesting than simply suggesting Muslims and Hindus are near each other and therefore intimately connected; in fact, it’s pretty obvious he wants us to imagine intimacy as relational, familial, friendly. Yet, I think that Hindu and Muslim nearness is also necessarily geographic, contextual, and rooted.
Second, I was deeply affected by the languages of sovereignty as it relates to intimacy but was left wondering if any group or political entity is or can be fully sovereign—since we live in histories and as socialized beings within political, linguistic, cultural hegemonies—which is farther afield than there is space for here, but relevant nonetheless. More expressly, however, it does beg how or whether sovereignty is necessarily conditional, and if so, how does that impact how we imagine the intellectual debate about the sovereign self, group, or state?
Third, and finally, I’m curious about what intimacy and sovereignty tell us about translation—and not merely translation between tongues, but also between ideas, ideologies, histories, identities, and contexts? The distinctive multilingual, multi-textual, multicultural location of northern South Asia demands that we imagine translation beyond just interpreters, beyond dictionaries. What can translation, as a framework of interaction, tell us about this composite, complex region that Muslims and Hindus historically share?
I have found this matrix—intimacy (especially as it gets framed as friendship), sovereignty, and translation—utterly generative, a genuine push-back against the pervasive use of binaries to describe South Asian religions and history, both provocative and innovative within South Asian, Islamic, and religious studies alike. Readers, I am sure, will find its almost dizzying engagement with a preponderance of texts, thinkers, languages, histories, religious frameworks, and concepts something to mull over well after they have finished the book.While Perilous Intimacies boasts a wealth of sub-arguments—each chapter tackles a major theme, citing both better and lesser-known South Asian Muslim thinkers—one of the central conceits of Tareen’s work is the broader notion of friendship.
Drawing on famed theorist Jacques Derrida, Tareen delineates friendship beyond the Euro-American connotations of amicability and even tenderness. He posits that friendship is “a relationship or encounter of intimacy, collaboration, cooperation, or hospitality with the other that, while affording particular benefits, opportunities, and forms of power and pleasure, also renders untenable exclusive claims to the purity and sovereign ownership of the self.” This requires some unpacking, but Tareen is, alongside Derrida, arguing that friendship is a location of the possible—possible augmentation, possible growth, possible benefit, and also possible influence, possible deviation, possible devolution. It is here, in this sticky, tricky area of relationship that we also see the other major conceit of Tareen’s work, namely, sovereignty.
If friendship is in many ways a wager of the autonomy—the sovereignty—of the self against the possibility of massive change, for better or worse, then these intimacies between individuals and groups are perilous indeed, especially as they occur not between individuals but between individuals, in groups, as political landscapes shift radically. It may seem curious why Tareen prioritizes friendship in English, when relationship is right there, has a bigger umbrella of conceivable styles of connection, and doesn’t necessarily carry the same positive connotation that friendship does, commonly. As in his other works, Tareen’s book is brimming with careful and deep reads—and he readily cites the vocabularies of his historical interlocutors justifying the word “friendship.” Some, he suggests, use the common dosti in both Persian and Urdu, while the Arabic term muwalat appears both significantly and more commonly. Significant because this term is a bit more complicated—not that any term, really, is simple, but muwalat carries valences that better suit Tareen’s argument that friendship is more than being buddies or palling around, but rather a complex relationship that can be intimate, transactional, and hierarchical or competitive, even. These are within the realm of friendship—even in contemporary English, we might say “frenemies” to explain the sometimes-explosive, sometimes-competitive nature of particular friendships. Yet, this wide array of interpersonal modalities strike me as a constellation of relationships. So, I suppose one might ask: what work does “friendship” do that “relationship” doesn’t?
As Tareen suggests throughout this book, these conversations rely on intimate knowledge. Sometimes these conversations are actual, as in the exploration of the Shahjahanpur polemic, where Muslims, Hindus and Christians “debated” each other. Sometimes these were almost purely textual, as in the writings of Jan-i Janan (d. 1781) that translated Hinduism for fellow Muslims as well as within an interreligious landscape. And, sometimes these were both, as in the debates around cow slaughter and tashabbuh, or imitation. Regardless of their form, these conversations, despite taking place in differing locations and in different periods, rely on intimate knowledge—and I think this is the work “friendship” is doing. The language of friendship, the use of Derrida’s germinal work to re-think and re-locate not just what Muslims think about themselves as themselves and in relationship to Hindu Others, but how they come to know what to think.
In that way, Tareen’s work is rather provocative to insist that friendship is not just an amiable relationship, but one inherently assumes the possibility, if not probability of volatility, heartbreak, despair, violation, jealousy, even sublimation. Friendship and its intimacies are producers of change; Tareen tells us that we may not be able to say if it is for good or bad, but, he insists that it is lasting, it is powerful, and in this particular context, it is something South Asian Muslim actors understood.
As I think about how deploying friendship and its assumed or inherent intimacy speaks to both account for and claim places of contention and fracture as well as exchange and influence between Hindus and Muslims in the early modern and modern period, I am struck that affect, too, is part of this big-picture thinking. As Jenna Supp-Montgomerie has argued, affect can be understood as a mode of investment through which social meaning—including emotions—are organized, which itself is a way to talk about difference without succumbing to notions of totality or reifying identities in opposition. She contended that affect theory marks a shift from individuals to societies, and I am curious about how, if, or when something like friendship—with all its hills and valleys of relation—fits into this other, broader category of theoretical analysis. I am reminded, too, of both Margrit Pernau’s semi-recent book, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor and our forum organizer J. Barton Scott’s brand-new and incisive book Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India; both take up the mantle of affect theory within colonial South Asia, emphasizing emotion, especially affection, insult, and outrage. If friendship is an innovative way to frame Hindu-Muslim relationships, and if intimacy and friendship assume an emotional, affective response not only between individuals but also communities, how might Tareen’s work fit into the realm of affect theory—in and beyond religious studies?
For me, the question of friendship and how it relates to sovereignty—of the self, of the group, within or as political institutions—is the lasting, thought-inducing remnant of Perilous Intimacies. Tareen argues early on that he cares less about the institutional examples of sovereignty, like the state, and instead is interested by “a notion of sovereignty … that animates and is animated by the desire for and attachment to supremacy over the religious Other through the maintenance of embodied distinction in everyday life.” I am intrigued by the idea that sovereignty, here, is about both difference—that which I am, that which I am not—as well as preeminence, superiority—in which I am key. When we apply this not only to the individuals Tareen examines but their notions of community—that which we are, that which we are not—we are, once again, in that realm of friendship, relationship: where do we end and they begin, despite being so intimately connected, so logistically close.
I found these ideas best rooted in the chapters on tashabbuh, or imitation, an important doctrinal category in that prohibits Muslims from adopting the practices (forms of worship, attitudes, behaviors) of non-Muslims. In these chapters—5 and 6, to be precise—Tareen traces how colonial-era South Asian Muslim intellectuals are fundamentally invested in Muslim distinction, ideas and conversations that were originally rooted in Muslim empires while these intellectuals are experiencing the brave new world of British colonialism. In short, Tareen is asking how Muslims thought about preserving a distinctive identity amid difference as well as political vulnerability. And, of course, there was no one answer; the folks Tareen cites and interrogates vary on what to do, while all seemingly agree that something must be done.
The the final content chapter on Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Qari Tayyib, which I found absolutely refreshing considering how much ink has been split on both of these influential thinkers (including by my own pen). But instead of going too deep into the weeds, I want instead to ask about how intimacy and sovereignty line up with translation, one of the other major frameworks of Tareen’s work. I tend to think about translation in its broadest terms; I think all communication is an act of translation, where our norms, mores, customs, and languages are mediating how we think what we think. I think what’s provocative about Tareen’s framing around these crucial nodes is that translation would be all but impossible without some form of intimacy; but it would be unnecessary if individuals or groups were truly sovereign. That squishy, grey middle area—where there are things that distinguish us from one another but still offer plenty of overlap so that we remain legible, comprehensible—is the space which Perilous Intimacies asks us to set up shop, to remain, to see both in the early modern and modern periods as well as in our own moment.
Tareen’s book to be monumentally informative and impeccably researched—he has done a wonderful job of showing us how his historical interlocutors navigate friendship, sovereignty and translation. My questions are less about the technical, and more around how transformative Tareen’s work can be both in and beyond Islamic, South Asian, and religious studies.
The stakes here are about what differences comes to be salient so as to signify sovereignty and which similarities can either be celebrated (as we might within friendships) or overlooked (as we establish that which makes us, well, distinct). This matrix of friendship, sovereignty, and translation seems portable, applied across fields, making it all the more compelling. The refractions of Tareen’s contentions show up in the contemporary moment—and I think it would do us well to dwell a bit on the stakes and possibilities of friendship, of closeness, of how we shape and are shaped by each other. It could very well move us beyond the overly simplistic, binary models currently available and seemingly endlessly popular in scholarship and rhetoric about Hindu-Muslim relationships and histories.
lyse Morgenstein-Fuerst is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont and the author of Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad.
