The Politics of Intimacy and the Intimacy of Politics: A Response
SherAli Tareen, author of Perilous Intimacies and current member of the Institute for Advance Studies, responds to our forum
I want to begin with my extensive gratitude to Barton Scott for proposing the idea of this forum and for his generous time and labor in making it possible. My many thanks, as well, to the team at Marginalia Review of Books for carrying the forum on Perilous Intimacies following the 2022 forum on my first book Defending Muhammad in Modernity. I am also profoundly grateful to the forum discussants—Elaine Fisher, Supriya Gandhi, Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst, and Noah Salomon—for their brilliant and thought-provoking reflections. Each of their essays wonderfully clarifies the book’s argument and implications and presents questions and critiques that extend far beyond the book or the specific fields of Religion and South Asia.
In Nuce
Conceptually, Perilous Intimacies is a book about the productive tension between friendship, a relationship that binds the self to the contingencies of the Other, and sovereignty, an ideal that assumes the independent mastery and ownership over the self. In what ways does this underlying friction between friendship and sovereignty emerge as a site of intra-Muslim scholarly contest on the question of Hindu-Muslim friendship during a historical moment— that of the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century— marked by the loss and eventual absence of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia?
This is the central question of the book. And its central argument is that at stake in these intra-Muslim debates on the limits of Hindu-Muslim friendship were competing conceptions of Islam and Muslim sovereign power in a world defined by immense moral and political precarity. Although these rival narratives of normative Islam cannot be reduced to liberal secular binaries like tolerant/intolerant, inclusivist/exclusivist, and modernist/traditionalist, their hermeneutical designs and assumptions did correspond to certain signature divisions between Islamic modernism and traditionalism. In my comments below, I will try responding to some overlapping questions and critiques offered by all discussants, and focus on larger themes to do with central concepts and categories of the book.
What is an Imperial Muslim Political Theology?
I want to begin my response to the forum participants with Supriya Gandhi’s discussion and critique of the category of an “imperial Muslim political theology” as it operates in the book. As Gandhi writes: “by widening the concept of the ‘imperial’ well beyond the specificities of Muslim empires in South Asia, I wonder if Perilous Intimacies does not inadvertently flatten the complex range of discourses prevalent in premodern Muslim societies.” And elsewhere: “premodern Muslim scholars, nobles, or rulers may well have professed the truth of Islam. Yet, they also operated in an intellectual and social world that was far removed from that of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), Nazir Ahmad (d. 1912), or Abu’l Kalam Azad (d. 1958), who feature prominently in Tareen’s book.” Gandhi’s concerns are generative not only because they will allow me to further clarify a key category of the book, that of an imperial Muslim political theology, but also because they add further layers of depth and complexity to that category. At the outset, I should clarify that I do not mean to equate or consider the same premodern and modern colonial Muslim imaginaries of an imperial political theology. In fact, the dissonance between them is precisely what makes the hermeneutical and political labor of seeking to align modern normative problems and conditions (institutional, political, and epistemological) with premodern discursive resources grounded in the contextual assumption of Muslim political sovereignty so contentious, so messy, and yet also so enormously interesting. Though my interest in the category of a premodern Muslim imperial political theology is primarily related to the question of interreligious friendship in Islam or, more specifically, to how a premodern imperial political theology informs Islamic legal discourses on the limits of interreligious friendship, the discursive reach of this concept clearly extends beyond the domain of law.
My mobilization of a figure like the tenth-century scholar Abu al-Hasan Al-‘Amiri’s (d. 992) and his conception of Muslim politico-theological superiority over non-Muslims was meant precisely to punctuate the wide intellectual expanse of a premodern Muslim imperial political theology not limited to the sphere of law and jurisprudence, but also integral to disciplines like philosophy and Sufism, as Gandhi very correctly and helpfully points out. In other words, I am interested in the question of how a normative tradition invested in regulating the boundaries of Islam and difference, and informed by an assumed background picture of Muslim political sovereignty, is negotiated and wrestled with in the early modern and modern colonial contexts when that background picture and the possibility of its resurrection are no longer available. Thus, my intent is neither to posit a generalized or uniform premodern Muslim imperial sovereignty nor to establish the identicalness of premodern and modern visions and aspirations of Muslim sovereign power.
Rather, my primary interest is in exploring the intellectual creativity and tension involved in negotiating the normative pressure exerted by the weight of a discursive tradition that takes the assumption of Muslim political sovereignty for granted in a context where that assumption is no longer tenable. The space of that intellectual creativity and tension is the space of intra-Muslim disagreement, the space of competing interpretive schemes, and the space where opposing aspirational projects of sovereignty, intra- and interreligious translation, and interreligious friendship become visible. It is this fraught yet fascinating space that is at the heart of this book. One final comment on the category of an imperial Muslim political theology: the initial impetus for this book did in fact come from a pattern I observed in South Asian ‘ulama’ (Muslim traditionalist scholars) texts from the modern period (not just on the topic of interreligious friendship): very often, categories like Dar al-Islam (place of Muslim political sovereignty), Dar al-Harb (place of non-Muslim political sovereignty), Dhimmi (protected non-Muslim living under Muslim rule) or Muharib bi’l fi‘l (active aggressor against Islam) are deployed without much recognition of the radically different context of Muslim imperial sovereignty from which they emerged or that they took as a given.
The persistence of a Muslim imperial hermeneutical framework in the aftermath of Muslim imperial sovereignty though, as I insist throughout the book, does not mean that modern Muslim ‘ulama’ were somehow stuck in the fiction of a Muslim empire from the premodern world. Rather, the varied normative goals invested in that persistence, such as the restoration of the institution of the [Ottoman] Caliphate or the protection of public markers of Muslim ritual distinction over non-Muslims (sha‘a’ir) were argued and fought for precisely through the possibilities opened and the limits imposed by the modern colonial political and conceptual terrain. To give one quick example from the book (among many possible examples) to illustrate and specify this point: the founder of the Barelvi school, Ahmad Raza Khan (d. 1921), argued that cow sacrifice was obligatory on Indian Muslims because it represented a distinctive marker of Islam in the Indian context and thus indexed Muslim sovereign power over non-Muslims— an argument clearly steeped in an imperial Muslim political theology that considers dominance through distinction as an underlying purpose of the shari‘a or Islamic law. But, in making this argument, Khan also drew heavily from the colonial discursive economy by emphasizing that any pressure or coercion on the part of Hindus that Muslims abandon cow sacrifice would contravene the colonial promise of religious freedom for all communities. It is these sorts of encounters between the desires and aspirations of a Muslim imperial political theology and the categories and discursive fields of colonial modernity—encounters, though uneven in their power relations, but yet sites of tremendous intellectual fermentation—that are of primary interest to me in Perilous Intimacies. And the concept of an imperial Muslim political theology represents a heuristic tool through I which I have tried to clarify and highlight such encounters, rather than posit any kind of a homogenized unity of the varied instantiations of this concept in the premodern or the modern contexts. I am also thankful to Gandhi for her question and critique as they allow me to thwart a potentially pernicious Hindu-nationalist misreading of this concept and my book as a whole as somehow attributing to Islam and South Asian Muslims an unchanging naturalized tendency toward an intolerant imperial sovereignty. This obviously is not among my arguments.
Translation and Friendship
The previous discussion connects nicely with the question of translation raised in different ways by Elaine Fisher and Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst. The theme of translation operates in three distinct but connected registers in my book. One, closely connected to what has just preceded, relates to the translation of a premodern Muslim normative tradition, grounded in a political context of Muslim imperial sovereignty, in conditions of colonial modernity— or “after empire” as it were. This is the work of translation within the parameters of a discursive tradition conducted by its authoritative actors. In this labor of translation, translating the heritage of the normative tradition in a manner that responds effectively to the moral questions and conundrums of the present becomes a primary means of assembling and displaying one’s religious authority and normative fidelity to that tradition. Second, the category of translation operates in my book, to draw on Fisher’s comments, in the sense of translation between different languages. Language in this scheme represents not only individual languages like Persian and Sanskrit, but also the histories, assumptions, and normative baggage carried by particular deployments of language in particular discursive moments and arguments. I will explain this further in a moment while answering more specifically Fisher’s questions about such a modality of language and its relationship to translation. And third, translation signifies the process and mechanism of translating the Other by rendering the Other intelligible, acceptable, amicable, detestable, heretical, or a combination of these and connected qualities ranging between different degrees of hospitality and hostility.
But as Morgenstein-Fuerst aptly puts it—and this statement very effectively describes a key aspect of the theoretical apparatus of this book— “translation would be all but impossible without some form of intimacy; but it would be unnecessary if individuals or groups were truly sovereign.” Translation thus, much like friendship, sits in tension with the promise of sovereignty. The gesture and desire to translate the Other signal the unavailability of sovereign ownership of the self. Translation thus, following Derrida, is not only “the condition of all hospitality,” but also a mode of hospitality that reveals most glisteningly the contradictory law of hospitality: the hospitality accorded to the “Other,” the guest, or the object of translation is premised on the condition that the privileged authority of the host, the self, or the translator is not disturbed. This law of contradiction is most apparent in the first chapter of Perilous Intimacies on Indian Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, but it percolates with different vectors throughout the book.
Fisher’s questions about the place of language in projects of translating Hindu thought and practice for Muslim audiences, such as the one conducted by the noted eighteenth century Sufi master in Delhi Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan (d. 1781) (the focus of chapter one), are difficult to conclusively answer from the available evidence. It is unclear through what specific source was Mirza Mazhar accessing Hindu texts such as the Laws of Manu, and it is most likely that he primarily relied on oral sources in Delhi and on whatever Persian translations of Sanskrit texts he might have had at his disposal. Nonetheless, the language of the translation project of a thinker like Mirza Mazhar is still enormously important because it validates the availability of a mutually intelligible discursive reservoir between Islam and Hinduism not yet colonized by what Arvind Mandair, borrowing from Derrida, famously termed the modern colonial philosophy of “generalized translation.” Extending Derrida’s tantalizingly productive question “what if the religio remained untranslatable,” Mandair had shown how the assumption of the generalized translatability of the Sikh tradition as “religion” made way for a late-nineteenth-century conception of Sikhism as fully monotheistic, thus distorting and disfiguring the polyvocality of the precolonial Sikh tradition. A Muslim thinker like Mirza Mazhar and his translation of Hinduism, I would contend, resist such a practice of “generalized translation” that services the modern-colonial discursive scheme of “world religions.”
As I emphasize in Perilous Intimacies, even in instances of seeming overlap between Mirza Mazhar’s and later nineteenth-century British-colonial translations of Hinduism, such as in their shared focus on Hindu law as a primary object of interreligious equivalence, the languages and normative purpose of their translation projects were considerably different. Tellingly, even though Mirza Mazhar approached Hinduism as a religious tradition with a well formulated law, theology, and set of ritual practices, he did not deploy the word din to mean religion, let alone in the meaning of a distinct world religion neatly displayed on a clearly defined hierarchy of competing religious clubs. Rather, with the word din, he primarily referred to elite Hindu knowledge traditions that he contrasted with a’yin or Hindu customs. Similarly, in distinct contrast to British-colonial translation enterprises, despite their superimposition of Islamic legal and theological vocabulary, the underlying purpose of Mirza Mazhar’s translation choices of rendering dharma shastra as ‘ilm-i kalam (Ar. ‘ilm al-kalam) and karma shastra as ‘ilm-i fiqh (Ar. ‘ilm al-fiqh) was not the formulation of uniformly abstracted religious subjects conducive to liberal secular governance. Rather, Mirza Mazhar was primarily interested in establishing the normative coherence of the Hindu tradition in a language that would be both legible to his Muslim audience, and that would convince them about the normative legitimacy of the goal to cultivate an ecosystem of interreligious relations whereby Indian Muslims would not rush to anathematize their Hindu neighbors. His was not a modern secular project of tolerance towards the Other for concerns of state governance but rather an attempt to make normative space for the Hindu Other as a way to secure baseline integrity and harmony of interreligious relations. To be sure, Mirza Mazhar certainly upheld the supremacy and exceptionality of Islam. Moreover, his generous admiration of Hindu scholastic traditions was juxtaposed with an equally scathing rebuke of Hindu devotional popular practices (like Diwali and Holi) and of Muslims (especially women) who partook in them. Nonetheless, his program of interreligious translation and understanding did not replicate and in fact provides an alternative to a liberal secular logic of managing religious difference for the assemblage of modern state sovereignty.
So, to briefly sum up, one may respond to Fisher’s excellent question “what does language really have to do with anything at all” with the observation that tracking the specificities of language offers a pathway to excavate and detail avenues of interreligious translation that interrupt the conceptual and political juggernaut of secular power and the power of secularity. Such a process and practice of excavation is particularly critical, I would submit, in the contemporary South Asian context where recourse to the language of secularism as a prophylactic remedy to religious excess and interreligious violence is still quite pervasive, in the academy and beyond.
SherAli Tareen, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire. Columbia University Press, 2023. 360 pg. $35 (paperback)
Intimacy, Affect, and Distinction
Next, I want to bring together connected points about the category of intimacy and its valences in the modern moment raised by all the discussants. And for that, I want to take as my point of departure the fabulously profitable observation by Noah Salomon that “intimacy and alternative politics beyond the state are not unrelated: indeed, it is through alternative modes of belonging, requiring an upsetting of the abstraction of the modern state, faces instead of facelessness, that makes intimacy of all sorts—straight, queered, unqueered—subversive.” Salomon continues with a productive question: “is intimacy a modern condition, as well as a public modality as much as a (or more than) a feature of the private within which it is usually situated?” There are two interconnected aspects of Salomon’s statement and query regarding intimacy and its operation in this book that I would like to emphasize: intimacy as a subversive phenomenon that offers an alternative to a state-centered notion of politics, and intimacy as a public phenomenon which is subversive in modernity precisely because and when it is public. Notice that other than disrupting the state project of abstracting uniform citizens from the messiness of human relations, intimacy (or rather the threat of intimacy with the Other) also disrupts the theological project of cultivating distinct and sovereign religious selves from the messiness of interreligious encounters. Intimacy thus renders impossible both political and theological sovereignty. Moreover, intimacy is the dominant symptom of friendship, ripe with potential and peril; it holds the potential of transforming the self and the peril of erasing the self and its distinction in cross-pollination with the “Other.”
The perceived threat of interreligious intimacy in the public sphere also holds the key to answering one of Fisher’s questions: why does something like imitating the customs and practices of non-Muslims (tashabbuh) become a matter of such intense debate and immense investment among South Asian Muslim scholars from the late nineteenth century onwards, even though this concept bears a much longer premodern genealogy within and beyond South Asia? For a number of authoritative ‘ulama’, it was specifically the specter of Hindu-Muslim intimacy in the public sphere (made visible through Muslim participation in rituals and festivals such as Diwali, Dussehra, and Holi, and further affirmed through the cessation of practices like cow sacrifice) that posed a grave threat to the distinction of Muslim identity and thus to the promise of Muslim sovereign power. The intensification of the everyday as a site of pastoral regulation and protection that held the promise of sovereign decision and distinction also corresponds with Supriya Gandhi’s perceptive observation about the evolution and expanded role of Indian ‘ulama’ in modernity as the custodians of the public performance of religion more broadly and of interreligious intimacies more particularly. The regulation of everyday intimacies in turn emerges as a preoccupation both highly gendered, whereby women are seen as especially vulnerable to the threat of contagion, and heavily focused on the sensoria as the underlying vestibule that carries and transports the contagion of the Other to the body of the self.
As Salomon nicely sums up: “the fear of loss of self is not just about Muslims and Hindus but a certain kind of protection of gendered and class norms that are equally constitutive of normative Muslim identity as is religious doctrine.” Salomon’s comment can be productively folded with Morgenstein-Fuerst’s astute point regarding the centrality of affect to the anxiety associated with interreligious intimacy. Indeed, problems such as imitation of non-Muslims (tashabbuh), cow sacrifice, participation in Hindu festivals and devotional rituals, or everyday friendship and political collaboration with non-Muslims are not just connected to law, theology, and hermeneutics, as important as those variables are. The potency and urgency of these problems lie in their capacity to affect the senses, seen most noticeably in concerns such as contagious effects of Hindu chants emanating from temples or at Hindu festivals; the embodied nature of rituals like Holi; the allure and attraction of tempting sweets at Dussehra; and of course, the deleterious consequences of abandoning beef for the Muslim body. Indeed, intimacy with the religious Other represented a danger mainly, and at many times solely, when it involved affective intimacy.
There is another way to frame this point via the key argument of my book: the discursive arena of debates on the limits of Hindu-Muslim friendship represented a major fault-line between Muslim modernism and traditionalism in South Asia. As I particularly show in Chapter Six, the significance (or lack thereof) of affective intimacy between Hindus and Muslims was among the central lines of division and contention between the Muslim modernists and traditionalists, notwithstanding their other substantive differences on what constituted the normative tradition and how it was to be interpreted. For most authoritative Muslim traditionalists or the ‘ulama’, including those from otherwise rival ideologies such as the Barelvis and Deobandis, affective intimacy with the Other if left unchecked was sure to swallow the distinction and hence the identity of the self, leaving the Muslim individual and society in a state of ontological and political ruin. For modernists such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) though, the alleged danger contained in modes of interreligious intimacy with affective consequences was but a fiction concocted by the traditionalists that in turn represented one of the key impediments to Muslim civilizational progress or taraqqi. Of course, the question of what is the role of the body in how Muslim life must organize itself in relation to non-Muslim others remains to this day a question of avid contest and controversy among Muslim scholars and commoners, in South Asia and elsewhere. Perilous Intimacies in a certain sense thus outlines the discursive details and infrastructure of the early modern and modern beginnings of this immensely critical contemporary intra-Muslim disagreement.
Interreligious Friendship Beyond the State and Imperial Theologies
Finally, all discussants either explicitly asked about or offered productive comments that speak to the last sentence of the book in which I call for imagining “a horizon of interreligious and Hindu-Muslim friendship that is not imperiled by pathological inheritances of imperial political theologies, nor leavened by the seductive yet frequently sour promises of modern secular power and state sovereignty.” What did I mean by this statement and, as Supriya Gandhi asks, would not a practice of history that calls for “dismantling past inheritances and offering a glimpse of new possibilities” by its nature represent an inescapably “secular form of critique’?
One way I would like to think about Perilous Intimacies as a project is that at its core it’s a critique of any notion of sovereignty, regardless of its source or agent. Sovereignty is a powerful and deeply productive but ultimately asymptotic desire that can never be realized or materialized. And though I devote considerable space elaborating the lineaments of this category for the purposes of the book in its Introduction, it bears clarifying that when I employ phrases such as “Muslim sovereign power,” I do not mean to suggest the actual possession of sovereignty by a particular agent or actor as in the “’ulama’s sovereignty’ or the ‘sultan’s sovereignty’ and so forth. Sovereignty in this book operates as an aspirational desire for dominance and distinction that despite being impossible is yet pregnant with political possibility. Moreover, the desire for sovereign power is always concentrated in the force and capacity for decision.
Whether located in imagined bulwarks of Muslim political solidarity such as the Ottoman caliphate or in the distinctive markers of everyday ritual life (sha‘a’ir), critical to these contrasting visions of sovereign power is the capacity for decision. Can Indian Muslims decide that their identity as Muslims is inextricable to the institution and theological mandate of the caliphate? Or, notice that despite their strong and substantive difference of views, both Ahmad Raza Khan and Maulvi ‘Abdul Bari (d. 1926) of the Farangi Mahal school considered Indian Muslims’ decision to voluntarily abstain from cow sacrifice (rather than being pressured or coerced to doing so) as a critical index of their sovereign authority. Other than yet further clarifying my use of the category of sovereignty, I say all this also to register the important clarification that divesting such a capacity for Muslim political decision or the possibility of imagining Muslim sovereign futures is not what I intended with the phrase “pathological inheritances of imperial political theologies.”
What I had in mind instead are the potentially dangerous and unjust consequences that can result from the unfiltered application of Muslim jurisprudential concepts and categories of religious difference informed by the assumption of a premodern Muslim imperial political configuration through the legal structures of the modern state. On this point, though one might find reasonable faults and quibbles with Wael Hallaq's pessimistic view of an Islamic political program centered on the modern state, I do agree with his underlying push to recognize the dissonance between the scope, purposes, and moral imaginary of the Islamic legal tradition and the political structuration of the modern state. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, as Saba Mahmood has convincingly shown, abdicating the problem of religious difference to the governance calculus of the modern state—whether self-avowedly secular or Islamic—can only exacerbate rather than ameliorate that problem.
So, in terms of the politics of this project, my insistence is that any path towards reconceptualizing interreligious (including Hindu-Muslim) friendship in Islam beyond imperial theologies or the management of the liberal state must engage substantively, sympathetically, but also critically with the resources and heritage of Islamic knowledge traditions. The tradition, especially those aspects of it that don’t sit comfortably with modern secular notions of interreligious tolerance and coexistence, cannot be bypassed and must be taken seriously on its own terms, even if, in fact especially if, they are to be reexamined through the labor of critique. But such a labor of critique cannot be secular because it must not participate in the signature secular assumption of approaching religion, especially Islam, as an object of life that must be tamed and moderated, lest its excess spill into violence. A form of critique that does not depend on secular logics of life cannot, explicitly or otherwise, privilege Muslim actors, past or present, who seem to reaffirm contemporary liberal notions of good religion or good Muslims, and deprivilege those who don’t fit that bill so easily.
My focus in the epilogue of Perilous Intimacies on the thought and politics of a Muslim actor like Sharjeel Imam who exhausts the limits of contemporary Indian secularism and who has so eloquently diagnosed and dissected the anti-Muslim racism integral to the constitution of the Indian state was meant precisely to punctuate the conceptual importance of foregrounding the critique of secular power even while engaged in the critical analysis of religious/Islamic thought. To be clear, I do not come to such a conceptual orientation from the vantage point of any particular theological or faith commitments. My primary intellectual commitment rather is to the interdisciplinary discipline of Religious Studies that offers an excellent avenue and possibility to reconsider the widely assumed assumptions and virtues of secular power precisely through close readings of intra-religious and interreligious traditions of moral argument, such as the ones conducted in Perilous Intimacies.
SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and currently a Patricia Crone member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for the academic year 2024-25. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. His second book, the topic of this forum, is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023) which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Textual Studies category.
