Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Hi everyone. And welcome to history. Speaks a series of the maiden podcast that is curated by Saudia Yakut and focuses on how the Islamic historical tradition speaks to contemporary concerns. My name is <inaudible> Ali and I am your host for today. In this episode, I sit down with Ariana Kesa, a scholar of law and religion and Muslim societies at Washington university in St. Louis to discuss his book, the anthropology of Islamic law, education, ethics, and legal interpretation at Egypt's LSR. The book explores how the rules of the Sharia are transmitted over time. It attends to the subject through the lens of Islamic jurisprudence and traditional Islamic education weaving in analysis of the Sonic legal texts with an ethnography of higher religious education in Cairo. Welcome aria. And thank you so much for joining us today. It's such an honor to have you here.
Speaker 2 00:01:04 That's an honor to be here. It's always very exciting to have opportunity to share your work with a broader audience, and I very much appreciate your help in doing so
Speaker 1 00:01:13 To start us off. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your background. So for our listeners, aria and I are actually colleagues at Washington university in St. Louis, but we teach in different departments. And so obviously I can rattle off your professional appointments and your training. Um, I know you teach in the departments of Jewish, Islamic, middle Eastern studies and anthropology, but I'd love to hear you share with our listeners a little bit of your own background and walk us through the journey of how you came to be an anthropologist, as well as a legal expert in religion in Muslim societies, who also happens to have a law degree as well.
Speaker 2 00:01:49 So I've always been very interested in religion and morality. They're very exciting topics. I think for a lot of people they're never boring. They cause a lot of controversy. I come from a multi-religious household on my mom's side, they are kind of American Catholics on my dad's side. He's an immigrant from Iran. So kind of a Muslim background from Iran. And yeah, I was interested in understanding these different forms of life, these different traditions that have these religious and moral aspects to them. Uh, in fact, uh, when I, in my earliest childhood, the religious traditions that I was most interested in were actually anxious, Egyptian religion and ancient Greek religion. So I used to read all of these books about the ancient Egyptian myths, Greek mythology as well. And then by the time I got to high school, my favorite classes were those on politics.
Speaker 2 00:02:43 And we also had like a history of religions class that I really liked. We, we use this book by Houston Smith called the world's religions that I really love that kind of started, uh, got a little bit of a more background information on each of the religious traditions. But by the time I was close to the end of high school, I had resolved resolved on this desire to learn more about the Islamic tradition. I was especially interested in Islamic law as opposed to let's say Islamic mysticism or Islamic theology, Islamic art though. Islamic tradition is obviously a very rich tradition, but I was specifically interested in law because that enabled me to combine my interest in religion with, uh, legal systems. And I was especially interested in the comparative question, like, why are there certain similarities and differences between Islamic law and contemporary Western norms like contemporary, Western human rights norms?
Speaker 2 00:03:36 So for that reason, I went to college, I took a lot of classes. One of my majors was in comparative religion, but I also took a lot of classes which dealt kind of in the anthropology of different moral systems across the world. And I also took a lot of classes on the intellectual, on the intellectual and cultural history of the west. And then I applied to graduate school. I applied for a law degree where I thought, you know, I'm not going to be a tax lawyer. What I'm going to do is at this law school, I'm going to study Western law and Islamic law and learn how to compare them. And then I also want to be an anthropologist. So I can, I can have the theory. I can also have the opportunity to visit some of these places that I'm interested in. Like maybe I'll as hard on Egypt and kind of learn directly learn directly about these tradition about this tradition.
Speaker 1 00:04:27 That's a very unique scholarly profile that you have. And it's always interesting to me to hear how folks with multiple types of training came to pursue their particular scholarly trajectories. So it's interesting also to hear how early these interests started for you. So the history speaks podcast is invested in understanding the Islamic intellectual tradition within its own context, as well as within the contemporary moment. And as I read your book, the anthropology of Islamic law, I read it as very invested in a very similar objective because of the way that you analyze selections of pre-modern and modern legal texts to explore the development of a Sonic legal doctrine through the lens of religious education and curriculum reform at all as her. So I wondered if you could share with us your aims and writing this book and highlight for our listeners, why in particular I'll as her and Egypt are important sites for exploring Islamic legal doctrine.
Speaker 2 00:05:23 So I think a lot of people today would say, I mean, the conventional view is that L as hard, at least today is the most important center of religious scholarship in the Muslim world. So of religious scholarship and learning, it probably has been that way for a couple of centuries, although even before then from the time of LSR was founded in the 10th century. So, but if we talk about the distant past of L as hard, then it's one important center of Islamic scholarship and learning a use to train elite scholars. It's one among others, but certainly by the time we get to the modern period, it is widely considered to be kind of the preeminent center. So one reason to pay attention to L as har is just that, that it has this enormous influence on defining Islam, especially in its more Orthodox and authoritative forms.
Speaker 2 00:06:23 So one reason why, if you're interested in Islamic legal history, why you'd be interested in studying L as har is because it has a good reputation. Uh, it has this kind of unique reputation to this day. It's like a magnet. It attracts scholars from across the world, uh, from west Africa, from Indonesia, from central Asia, and many of them, they bring with them, these rich, local, uh, traditions of learning. And some of them are very modernist and orientation. Some of them are also very traditionalist and orientation. So you'll find it a place like I'll as hard as har over the course of, uh, since the late 19th century has undergone a series of reform. And for that reason, actually the dominant methods of teaching and learning are not super traditionalist in character. And they've really been transformed by modernity, but even at a place like Ally's hearts, a big enough organization, and it attracts enough people such that regardless of what your interests are.
Speaker 2 00:07:23 So if you're interested in, in more modernized ways of Islamic church teaching and learning and scholarship, that's there for you. But also if you're interested in more traditional methods, there are top scholars from across the world who are teaching use using those methods often on the margins, uh, sometimes not to marginal, uh, but you can, you have a good variety. So it was a good place for me to learn about modern Islamic scholarship, but then also the remnants of some of these older traditions that you only read about. Otherwise they're kind of still, uh, live traditions at a place like L as har, uh, another reason why I'll as hard as a significant for people interested in the past and interested in the present and future of the kind of Orthodox Islamic traditions is that L as har has been at the center of modern efforts to transform the Islamic tradition, not only within an Egyptian context, but from basically the late 18th century to the mid 20th century, large areas of the Muslim world were under colonial control.
Speaker 2 00:08:29 The most important of these colonial empires was the British empire. And one of the things that the British tried to do was foster a certain types of Islamic reform, a modernization of the Islamic religion through these different universities, through different educational institutions. So a famous example in late 19th century would be like Mohammed Anglo Oriental college. They establish Gordon college in Sudan. They establish Katsina college in Nigeria, but kind of some of their most important arguably their most important reform efforts happen in Egypt where they reform L as har and they reform my last horror. So you have kind of like your Lord Cromer and he's working hand in hand with a figure named Mohammad Abdul and do become seen, uh, or as widely recognized as the father of kind of the modern day L as our university and the preeminent kind of the exemplar of reformist Islamic current to this day.
Speaker 1 00:09:29 That's really interesting to think about sort of the, the global currents of Alessandra that's affecting, not just what's happening in Egypt, but really globally and defining sort of these global shifts in authority and also education around the world. I wondered if we could zoom out a little bit and talk a little bit about some of your aims in writing the book and sort of who you were writing it for and what are sort of the primary goals that you were trying to achieve.
Speaker 2 00:09:56 And this book, I try and engage with two primary approaches to Islamic studies. So one of these approaches is a kind of historical, it's a particular type of historical approach often associated with the discipline of Orientalism. Uh, so that involves a history of Islamic societies, which is very much attentive to textual traditions, mastering various languages, especially the Arabic language and Arabic or Persian, uh, textual traditions, and really getting to understand the doctrine. Um, so getting to understand, uh, for instance, Islamic doctrine in the field of law. So what are the exact rules rulings of Islamic law? How did they change over time? What is the theory of interpretation that guides, uh, legal reasoning, uh, also orient a kind of this historical approach. Islamic tradition has paid a lot of attention to legal manuals and the history of legal institutions like allies are. So what exactly did last har look like in the medieval period and how is that reflected in teaching manuals from that era?
Speaker 2 00:11:11 So obviously that approach is very rich. It has some good aspects to it. It has also like any approach. It has some weaknesses. Uh, so sometimes it doesn't really pay attention to the kind of information that you can only get on the ground. So information which isn't recorded in texts. So if you were interested in talking about L as har, but you wanted to talk about the institutional structure, this social backgrounds of students, their career trajectories, the relationship about as har with different media or security or governmental agencies. Those are things that aren't necessarily reported in texts. So that's kind of one shortcoming of this more orientalist, uh, historicist approach, another area where there could, where there's, which isn't necessarily a strength is a lot of times I don't want to generalize, but a lot of times there is a reluctance to deal with broader theoretical questions.
Speaker 2 00:12:15 And, uh, anthropology has a different set of kind of, uh, strengths and areas, uh, which are not quite as strong. So one really strong area of anthropology is kind of long-term ethnographic research that you can actually go inside institutions, get information like how many students there are, how many students are there in any class? How long do these class last, when do the classes meet? What do students do outside of the class? How do students dress? How do students interact with one another? So, so ethnography is one great merit of anthropology. And during this book, I kind of spent over two years inside L as our, which isn't as easy as one might imagine, because you need a lot of security clearances. So you can't just say, okay, it's not like walking on to campus, let's say wash U and just sitting in and auditing some courses, although there's red tape involved there as well, but it is kind of fenced off.
Speaker 2 00:13:12 And it's like a security issue. You have to show some kind of ID to get in. And that getting that kind of permission isn't necessarily an easy thing. So I got permission to basically attend classes and hang out. That allows har, uh, for a couple of years, there also a number of, uh, study circles surrounding L as har mosque that are kind of traditionalist and character. I spent some time there as well. And then there's also an institution called <inaudible>, which is very important in modern Egyptian religious history, which is related to L as har. And I got a permit to kind of observe their classes as well, and compare them with what was going on at LSR. So that was some ethnographically important material. And then there was also a theoretical question that I was interested in addressing in the book. And that theoretical question has been given a lot more attention and anthropology than at least kind of orient traditional orientalist Islamicists history.
Speaker 2 00:14:10 So it's a basic question about what are we interested in doing when we're doing Islamic studies and there are a couple of different approaches. So one approach that I talk about it's often often goes under the heading of hermeneutics, a hermaneutic approach. And what you're interested in in a hermeneutic approach is interested in basically determining someone's psychology, determining their inner mental states. So what do Muslims believe? What do they desire? What kind of emotions do they have in reaction to particular events? How is that reflected in their bodily behave here? How is that also reflected in the texts that they, so it's very much a question of looking at things like statements and actions to understand the psychology of a particular group, because ultimately their psychologies invisibly can get direct access to it. And then kind of a practice theory approaches. Okay, well, we're not so interested in getting inside of people's heads.
Speaker 2 00:15:11 Uh, what we're interested in is thinking about not how someone's statements or actions might give us evidence that we can use to discern their hidden inner mental states, but rather how particular forms of action can change, can alter your psychology. Especially when these forms of action are imposed by social institutions, powerful social institutions, like Islamic schools, or Islam courts, sort of slum governments, or simply families, or let's say a Sufi disciple, or parents teacher, or a parent child relationship. How might, how might for instance, certain practices. So for instance, it may be, if you want to change, someone's desires such that they like to eat vegetables. You can require the vegetables since the time that they're a child, and that can change their psychological states. Maybe if you want to deepen their belief in God, you can get them to pray, and that will change their psychological states.
Speaker 2 00:16:08 So when we're examining Muslim societies, the more hermeneutic approach, the question is basically, how can we look at the actions of these Muslim peoples at places like El as hard understand what's going on inside of their head, the practice theory approaches, how do their actions affect their psychology? So how are there these actions guided by powerful institutions in such a way to affect their psychology, their interstates often this, this is referred to as habitus or a Hawk. So yeah, it kind of looked at things from both of those approaches. So to sum up, I was interested in addressing kind of historian, uh, audience that is composed of people who have been influenced by an orientalist traditions. I was also interested and addressing an anthropological audience as well of people who have an interest in Muslim societies, but more broadly, this study of law and morality, uh, and religion in different cultural and social contexts.
Speaker 1 00:17:07 I want to return back to the anthropological aspects of the book specifically about your field work. And I wonder if you could share some reflections, you started talking about this already in terms of just gaining access to this space at LSR and even during the loom. And I wondered if you could share some reflections on your experiences doing field work in Cairo, in general, specifically thinking about, you know, what were your interlocutors perceptions of you and what they, what did they think you were doing there?
Speaker 2 00:17:34 Uh, I mean, I tried to explain to them what I was doing. So I said, you know, what I'm doing is I'm trying to write a book on Al as har and how it fits into this broader Islamic tradition. Did they believe that, uh, probably some did more than others? One thing that foreign researchers face for reason for good reason is that they're often suspected of one of two things. So one is they are suspected of being affiliated with foreign intelligence agencies. Another is, they are suspected of having the aim of somehow portraying the Islamic tradition in, in a negative light for the sake of advancing some kind of a political or human rights or media related project. And I can't say that they're wrong, actually, a lot of people they're very right to be suspicious about those kinds of people. So one of the things that I tried to do was explain that, you know, no, that's not really what I'm doing, although even if I was doing that, that's the exact kind of thing that I would say.
Speaker 2 00:18:44 So I get, I got a sense that people were much more reluctant to open up to me, but upon meeting me for the first time, however, uh, in other cases, just spending time with people over, you know, a six month long period, one year long period, it allows you to build up a certain measure of trust. And that enables you to kind of enter into people's lives a little bit more. So just by getting these, just by getting the permits to go to the universities, I thought, okay, well, at minimum, what I have at this at minimum, I can go to the administration. I can ask about the curriculum, like how the curriculum works every year, like which classes are taught for the different degrees, how long the degrees take, how many students are in the classes, how many students are at the universities? I can describe the buildings, like how they're structured, what kind of facilities and rooms and services do they have that they don't have.
Speaker 2 00:19:40 The trickier part though, is kind of getting people to trust you enough to say, okay, well, after classes over, you can spend time in our homes and we'll invite you to our religious events and we'll introduce you to our families. That's what takes a little bit more trust. Although I can say that I had this working in my, uh, in my favor, Egyptians are very hospitable people, very kind hearted people. So it wasn't as hard. So even though I had to deal with certain suspicions, that there weren't necessarily the same type of barriers that there might be in other places. So one of the things that I came to learn is that for at least certain types of scholars, tradition, traditionalist scholars, they came, they had this approach to religious knowledge that was unfamiliar to me. So one of the reasons why one of these permits, I thought, okay, where all the action is happening.
Speaker 2 00:20:36 If I want to understand Islamic learning, it's about getting into these classrooms and kind of learning, making notes about what the lectures are like and what the assignments are like and what exactly books are taught and that's important. But I came to recognize that at least among the more traditional minded scholars that they had, this idea that learning involves some kind of basically initiating yourself into a Suna or Shiria oriented form of life. That was kind of like all encompassing thing, not just the material that you're learning in a classroom, but the clothes you wear a year form of worship, who you're spending your time with what you're eating, uh, your relations with the other gender, kind of like all of these very much day-to-day, uh, practices. And they had this idea that the way you internalize, the way that you learn to appropriately practice a Suna guided Islamic lifestyle, and the way that you have it affect your norms and your character and your psychology is to do it over a long period of time.
Speaker 2 00:21:43 So basically you have to do two things. You have to spend a lot of time with other people who are committed to this form of life, like other students, and you should also have the guidance of some kind of religious scholars. You can do, you, you ideally, you could do both, uh, ideally you should do both, but at minimum you should spend your time with all these other, uh, pious Muslims. And this is talked about and kind of pre-modern Islamic legal texts. They refer to it as Saba or companionship, and they believe that it is modeled on the way that the prophet Muhammad taught the earliest Muslims. So the prophet Mohammad didn't have like a school or a university like L as har. He didn't have a written curriculum. Rather, the way that people learned is they just spent time with him over his two decades or so long mint mission sharing, and his travels in his expeditions, eating with him, praying with him in the mosque and what these scholars, traditionalist scholars affiliated with L as are they try and do the same thing.
Speaker 2 00:22:46 So I was thinking, you know, look, I'm wasting a lot of my time, just, you know, eating with people and running errands and traveling around with him from city to city. Uh, but then later on, I came to recognize that no, um, this is actually a very important aspect of a traditional learning and is ideally supposed to have an, a profound, a psychological or a pro I would say, so I would describe it as a psychological transformation, but they would say transformation in your ethics or character, your awful lock, your naps, or they would, they basically have this notion that if you live like the prophet externally, it will affect your mind, such that you start thinking like the profit, you have the same kind of character traits. You have the same kind of beliefs. You have the same kind of norms. You have the same kind of emotional reactions in terms of shyness or discussed or love. Uh, and that has a really big impact on how you under not only how you practice these Lama tradition, but also how you understand Islamic texts and the Islamic tradition. So it's important, not only. So yeah, on the one hand, it's important, it is a religiously meritorious to transform yourself. So you don't just resemble the profit and all the profit externally, but also that your heart is modeled on his heart. Uh, but it's also important for actually learning and interpreting inappropriate under understanding Islam, religious texts, like the Koran, for instance,
Speaker 1 00:24:21 I'm glad you bring this up in terms of thinking about teaching and spending time with others on teachers as sort of a way to transfer these inward dispositions. I was really struck by. So I'm glad you brought up this pedagogy of companionship. I was really interested in the way that you talk about it in the book. And so you've talked a little bit about how it works in terms of spending time with teachers spending time with others, emulating particular behaviors, and thinking about sort of religious scholars and teachers as proxies for the prophet Muhammad, who Muslims are supposed to emulate. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit, I mean, it's interesting that this is a, um, a traditional method of Islamic learning that has persisted into the contemporary period. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that practice has transformed over time, you talked earlier about reform and modernization, and so how a lot of traditional methods are sort of marginalized or sidelined, even at places like I'll ask her.
Speaker 1 00:25:17 And I wondered how that specific practice of a pedagogy of companionship has transformed, especially with respect to how it might not necessarily be legible to contemporary actors. And you mentioned this to yourself, right? There's this wonderfully rich anecdote, which you just alluded to where you described your own brief foray into companionship with a religious scholar, and you later sort of reflect with this tinge of regret that you felt like it was wasting time and not recognizing it as significant maybe in the moment. And so I wonder if you could reflect a little more on the ways that it might not necessarily be legible to contemporary actors, and it might even be read as inefficient or nepotistic even.
Speaker 2 00:25:56 So contemporary education tends to focus on at least in so far as oh, and so far as it transmits knowledge generally, but specifically knowledge of religious and cultural traditions. The idea is that you go into a classroom, your assigned readings of a particular text, and then you learn to analyze that text. There's no notion that your ethics or your own psychology are transformed in the process. And certainly Islamic education in the modern period had there has been a trend to reform things in that direction, but what the true traditional Islamic scholarship is based on this assumption, that the type of understanding that a person has, is partially based on what can be gained from the text, the text itself, but it also requires a particular type of reader. So different types of readers are going to read a text like the Koran or the heady in a different way, in different ways.
Speaker 2 00:26:58 They're going to come to very different understandings of Islamic, uh, legal rules, for instance, which is going to reflect their underlying character, their underlying psychology. Uh, so in the pre-modern period, there was this notion that we are going to organize education in such a way that we transmit a text. So we transmit the Koran or the Hadeev or certain works of FIC, but we also transmit set of ethics or a psychology or a way of viewing the world. And when we transmit both of those things together, we're able to transmit an appropriate understanding of the Islamic tradition, because if you just were to transmit the texts alone, and you were to transmit these texts, then the readings that you're going to get of those texts are just going to be based on whatever that person's psychology happens to be. So you give a, imagine you give a text like the Qur'an or you give a text like, uh, like a FIC text, for instance, and you give it to a hundred different people.
Speaker 2 00:28:03 And these people all come from different cultural backgrounds. They all come from, they all have different sets of norms, or, uh, they all have different sets of emotional sensibilities. Uh, uh, they're going to come up with very different interpretations of those texts. Uh, but the idea in traditional Islamic education is that you give someone the texts, but you also have to shape their minds, or they would say their heart they're called shaped their minds in such a way that they can approach that text in this, in the way that the prophet and his companions and the Muslims would have approached that text. And in fact, if you just give people the texts alone it's going to produce, or it was believed in the pre-modern people and the pre-modern period to be very conducive, to misunderstandings, even heretical misunderstandings, uh, because, uh, when that tech starts interacting with a new type of psychology, it's going to give emergence, it's going to produce new readings that have no precedent in the Islamic tradition.
Speaker 2 00:29:07 So in the medieval period, it was seen as very much stigmatized. It was believed that you couldn't become a real scholar and less, you had participated in a very specific type of education, which involved a teacher giving you a text, but also you had to participate in a type of Saba type of companionship and submit yourself in a disciple hood relationship to a scholar. And that was designed to over a long period of time, decades to gradually refine your character. And if your character and your heart and your psychology, uh, wasn't refined in that way, then you were seen as not competent to be a scholar. Now, the way that people teach Islamic studies in a Western classroom, once again, it's focused on teaching people texts, but not necessarily transforming their psychology, transforming, uh, their character precisely because, uh, the, uh, what education involves is let's say meeting in a classroom for three hours per week, and then reading texts outside of class.
Speaker 2 00:30:14 But there's no notion that you have to change your entire form of life, that you have to change how you eat, how you dress, how you pray, how you interact with the other gender, what kind of economic transactions you engage in, or don't engage in. And there's no like accountability system. You don't, you're not your behavior. Isn't monitored heard by a scholar, right? Nor are you joining a specific community that you're going to be constantly interacting with outside of classroom hours. Now, this is obviously easy to perceive if we talk about a modern Western university, but ultimately since the late, not basically between the late 19th century and the mid 20th century, I'll as hard as mainstream education is much more moved in that type of model. So it is primarily geared towards classroom instruction. If you want to initiate yourself into a form of life, become a disciple of a shape that's optional and certain traditional minded scholars will do this, but this is no longer required.
Speaker 1 00:31:17 You know, I think a lot about the different approaches to reading sacred texts and this idea of deriving ethical and legal norms from those different kinds of readings. So in my old work on how contemporary American Muslims, and also Muslims around the world, generally, who are invested in sort of gender egalitarian readings of the Islamic textual traditions, I explore what other scholars like Saudia shake, for example, have named at the Sierra Praxis, which is an exegetical method that's rooted in women's experiences. And I think in some ways it's tempting to categorize these kinds of feminist modes of EDS of Jesus as, as distinctly modern or even new. I'm really struck by, you know, your explanation just now and the way that your book addresses this way, that in the pre-modern Islamic tradition texts for, as you just explained, ever sort of read plainly as it were. Um, but really read it, interpreted through ethics through the emotions and the particular ethics of specific teachers as, as a part of discipleship as a part of the companionship. And I wondered if you could talk some more about just different methods of reading and learning texts in these traditional modes of learning, and then really how the role of print and the wide-scale accessibility of religious texts for the education of lay Muslims really transformed these methods of reading and, uh, you know, traditional religious education more generally.
Speaker 2 00:32:38 Yeah. I mean, you're very right in saying that a lot of theoretical or scholarly work on interpretation, which emphasizes the fact that reading is in a sense perspectival, that people are always going to consciously or unconsciously bring their experiences, bring their upbringing to the reading of a text. So sometimes this is seen as a type of modernist or postmodernist development. However, there are certain there's certainly precursors in the premodern Islamic tradition and probably arguably also, uh, other traditions like a Christian Hindu Buddhist, which also, uh, require that, uh, to become a religious authority, you have to have kind of a period of discipleship through an unbroken kind of chain of transmission. I think maybe one of the differences is, is that in the modern period, when people are talking about how the character or the psychology of the interpreter shapes how he or she interprets a text, this is often put forth to support the idea that okay, since different psychologies produce different readings of the text and people have different psychologies, that means that they're going to be different valid readings of the texts that whether it's right or wrong is not quite the view that we find among pre-modern Muslim thinkers, because the pre-modern Muslim thinkers would say, oh yeah, your character, your psychology, what's in your called what's in your heart.
Speaker 2 00:34:08 What's in your mind. That very much affects how you interpret the text. But that doesn't mean that every interpretation is equally valid. Rather there is one particular type of psychology or character or call that you're supposed to have. And you will only be able to properly understand this text if you acquire this, if you acquire this very specific psychology. And in fact, the educational system and its practices, uh, are geared towards requiring, uh, that you undergo this psychological transformation. What, what might be some examples of how that psychological transformation might work out? So for instance, you can have emotional reactions about being shy, for instance, at which are very much influenced by culture, whether it's for men or women. So let's say if you're a man, you know, is it permissible? If you're a man to like wear very tight jeans that, you know, kind of show, show the form of your, of your body, of your legs and other areas of below your abdomen, these aren't the type of things that you will have specific legal rules on in many cases, but what people will say when you have Quranic texts, which talk about the importance of shyness and in the importance of modesty, people interpret those and lights of in light of an understanding of what should cause you to feel shy and what should not cause you to feel shy.
Speaker 2 00:35:41 And that is largely dependent on their upbringing. So if you have grown up in an environment where all the men are wearing skinny jeans, you're probably going to feel less shy about wearing those types of jeans. But if you're on the type of environment where everyone's been wearing kind of a very loose flowing Jollibee, then you probably would be a more sensitive. Another example might be to what extent are you obliged to serve your family? So the Koran talks a lot about family bonds, for instance, but you know, general notions of <inaudible> Dane, like taking care of your parents or family bonds, they can be interpreted in a variety of ways. And individuals might come to different understandings about how they should balance their familial obligations against their individual freedom and where exactly you strike. That balance is very important for how we interpret this urea, but it's going to be that people are going to strike that balance in different ways, depending on their upbringing.
Speaker 2 00:36:43 So for instance, if you've been brought up in an extended household, where from the time you are a child, you are doing things like working, helping your parents clean the house, making sacrifices for your brothers and sisters, you might say, well, even if I'm older, I have this obligation to share my wealth with my parents, to take them into my household, take my grandparents into my household, that care for them, sacrifice job, offer two entities to live with them. All of this is required by the Sharia, but if you live in a nuclear family or in a familial relationship where there aren't those kind of expectations, and there aren't those kinds of practices, you're probably going to have a very different understanding of what the Sharia requires with respect to family bonds. So these are ways in which practices overall form of life very much how affects how we look at the different, uh, Sharia rules.
Speaker 2 00:37:39 Now, one of the things that print does is in the past, it was very hard to get access to texts because without print print makes texts much cheaper, right? Uh, so in the past, if you want it to get access to a text, the way that Muslim students would usually get access to the Texas, they would sit in a study circle and a shape, or a religious scholar would read out the text and then they would copy out this text. And the basic understanding was that you could only acquire the actual text itself and an appropriate understanding of the text. If you sat with a religious scholar and then got the religious scholar to sign off on it. So he would sign off that you had knowledge of a particular texts by issuing a certificate known as an ijazah. So basically, oh, you have this text and you have appropriate knowledge of this text.
Speaker 2 00:38:30 Print changes that because people are no longer dependent upon scholars get texts. So you no longer have to submit to a scholar because that scholar might say you're only allowed to come to my study circles and take texts with me or listen to my commentary. You're not going to get any Jaza from me, unless you basically submit to this particular regimen of ethical discipline in Shiria guided lifestyle for one or two decades for, or at least for some extended period of time. Right now you can get texts without doing that. Uh, so in the past, since you could only get a text from a scholar, if you underwent this process of psychological transformation, this ensured that the text that when someone got the texts, they got the Shiria shaped psychology that caused them to interpret the texts in a particular way. With mass print, you have anyone, anyone with $5 or an internet connection can now get access to these texts. And these texts are now being subjected to all different types of unprecedented readings, which reflect the diversity in the evolving, uh, psychology of populations, Muslim populations across the book.
Speaker 1 00:39:43 I really appreciate how you laid that out in terms of reflecting contextually specific sensibilities. But also it seems like in a way, the introduction of mass print and wide-scale accessibility of texts enables one to sort of divorce the ethical practice from knowledge. And so there are some really thought-provoking sections throughout the book where you're contrasting methods of traditional Islamic education to the contemporary Western university setting, or even the secular university setting in Cairo. And so here, uh, I'd like to ask you to talk a little more about that relationship between knowledge and ethics in traditional settings, and specifically in your view, if you see any parallels in the American academy or, you know, in other words, you know, what is the relationship between knowledge and ethics as you've sort of explained in traditional Islamic education versus in secular settings like Cairo university, or even at our loom, or even at wash U or where we are.
Speaker 2 00:40:40 So it's a, it's an interesting question, because in one sense, I would say that universities, and maybe I would have said this a little bit more at the time I was conducting this research that the ethical lifestyle component of the university is very different from what is being taught so that whether you're teaching a class on Islamic wall or you're teaching a class on American history or mathematics or computer science or whatever, the idea is that look, students come to the classroom, they listen to the instructor. None of them are going to become this instructor's disciples and like follow him around and inter marry into his family that would be seen as that would be seen as legally problematic and, uh, what their, there, a lot of their learning is just, they're going to take texts home with them. So due to print, and now due to the internet and like PDF files, I'm just going to like read stuff at home and do some exercises at home.
Speaker 2 00:41:44 But ultimately in order to get a degree from a Western university, you don't have to undergo a particular psychological transformation. That is the view that I really have in the text, because what my, basically my argument is that as har between the late 19th century and the mid 20th century, but continuing on in this direction, it becomes more and more of a impersonal, bureaucratic institution where people don't engage in these personalistic long-term relationships with scholars and aren't required to undergo any psychological transformation. They're just simply asked to master a particular set of materials and at the graduate level to generate some new type of knowledge. So like some new type, some masters or some PhD where they talk about a subject where they say, oh, I'm the first person to do a work on, let's say a to fees, legal Corpus, or I'm the first person to go ahead and talk about how a Razi explores the theme of, you know, God's creation of the world.
Speaker 2 00:42:50 And maybe, maybe no one wrote a systematic dissertation on that before. That's very different because obviously in the, or in a premium and the pre-modern Islamic period, the aim of education, especially at the highest levels, is not primarily to prepare you to write new works of research. You can become in the traditional Islamic system in order to be a good teacher, like a high, high level of religious authority. This means that you have a certain character, so you can act as an exemplar for other students that you're good at guiding them. And also that you faithfully preserved a tradition from the past. But when we talk about a Western university, the idea is that what defines you as your scholar is primarily your capacity to produce research on new topics and to produce new opinions that have never existed before. So in pre-modern Islamic context, they actually had, if anything, kind of an overall negative view of unprecedented opinions on the Sharia or unprecedented opinions in Islamic theology.
Speaker 2 00:43:55 So certain exceptions aside, they stigmatize these, they said, this is a bit odd. This is an innovation. This isn't something that we want you to produce, but in the contemporary Alaska university, not only do you see to a much larger extent, kind of a deemphasis emphasis on a personal psychological transformation, but at education at the highest levels becomes not enabling someone to faithfully transmit a tradition, enabling someone to act as a model that can be emulated by students, but rather the capacity to produce kind of novel research, innovative research, which is unprecedented. Those are things that I see as entering Western Islamic education and as her right education from the west. So kind of a restructuring of L S R U U uh, education along Western lines at the same time. I think that one can say that at Western universities, yes, there isn't the same explicit emphasis on adopting a particular form of life and psychological transformation.
Speaker 2 00:45:04 Yes, there's still this explicit emphasis on producing new types of research, rather than just becoming an exemplar, which can transmit a specific tradition. One could argue that more and more people, uh, at Western universities, people have become conscious of the Western university, perhaps it's become more urgent in recent decades and maybe even the last decade, maybe even more so the last five years, but the idea is that in fact, the university should model a personal transformation and practice and kind of a psychological transformation in terms of a gender and sexual relations in terms of showing respect to people of different religious or racial backgrounds in terms of social structure. So like how, what types of hierarchies are allowed to exist or not allowed to exist in terms of even, you know, everyday practices with respect to, let's say health, I think perhaps in recent years, universities have more emphatically embraced that role of kind of shaping students in a particular way. Uh, and in that sense, we can see some parallels with the traditional Islamic education.
Speaker 1 00:46:24 That's really helpful to kind of think about where the dis differences between sort of traditional Assamese education and the Western university, or perhaps the most pronounced are, as you mentioned, those objectives have to produce new knowledge in the Western setting, but as you were just alluding to, I, you know, I'd like to think that our teaching in the secular American academy does or should come from Memorial place, certainly not to inculcate specific religious or, or political values, but to inculcate a sense of civic responsibility. And I think that's implicit in so many ways in general, but maybe more so in the, in the humanities. And also if we think about sort of universities have to as providing social capital and indicates the members of a particular university have some kind of moral standing as, you know, as a part of that community. So it's interesting to think about that and to use your book that traces the history of how religious education has transformed as a way to reflect on our own sort of positionality situated within in the secular west American academy. I wanted to end our conversation by returning to one of the primary aims of the history speak series, which is to think about how the Islamic past speaks to contemporary concerns. And with that in mind, I wondered if you could reflect on how the pre-modern Islamic legal tradition and its modern reform, as we've been talking about speaks to contemporary Egyptian politics and society and wider Muslim societies today
Speaker 2 00:47:56 At L as har you see certain developments which really characterize, uh, the entire Muslim world and which reflect social political and technological changes that you find across the globe in Muslim and non Muslim societies. So I think one of the things that you see, especially over the past 20 years is this idea that in the future religious knowledge and political discourse are going to be more and more influenced by the internet and social media. So there have been changes at all as hard to kind of, you know, open up institutes that are engaging with the internet and social media. And in this sense, we can talk about kind of a third chapter in the evolution of the transmission of Islamic knowledge and its effects on Islamic authority. So you can say, okay, well, in the medieval period, we were in a system where the way that people would transmit knowledge is it would kind of ride out these texts in the context of study circles while they were engaged in kind of building and sustaining a personal bond with a scholar and undergoing a particular psychological transformation.
Speaker 2 00:49:14 And then after that, you get to the print, the era of print, which starts, you know, it may be impacting Europe 15th and 16th century, but which really starts impacting the Muslim world in the 19th century. So then you get this impact of print, uh, where all of a sudden these religious texts become more accessible to populations as a whole, even people who aren't undergoing these companionship relations and also print becomes a more and more central to, or proportionally. It becomes more and more central to education, even kind of institutional education. So at L as far in the past, yeah, maybe understanding a text or a studying a text was a component of the teaching, but the personal relations were an even bigger component now at a place like LSR. So they basically teach the text in class and they give the students printed texts that they go home and they read after class.
Speaker 2 00:50:10 So it's kind of a more texted dominated thing. Now you have the internet changing things even more. So right now, uh, the internet enables more and more information access. So in the past, at least things like, even in the era of print, you still have some kind of control exercised by universities, over people, reading printed texts and missense of courses. And you also have newspapers exercising, some kind of control over which ideas are going to be expressed or which ideas aren't going to be expressed. Whereas if you talk about the internet and social media, all of a sudden their courses online, you have people more and more willing to get their education online as informally or somewhat more formally through Coursera than at a university where you no longer have giant media operations like newspapers exercising, the same kind of censorship over content. So now you can have kind of an individual using YouTube or Facebook to build up an enormous audience, which outstrips that of a traditional Islamic scholar, or even an entire university or media operation.
Speaker 2 00:51:20 So you have Muslim societies across the world grappling with these changes because when you open things up, this is going to lead to a situation where some people read these Islamic texts interact with the Islamic tradition and they develop views, which are similar to those endorsed by a hegemonic power structures, and which are kind of liberal and character at this moment in history. But you're also going to have many people developing alternative views, which very much critique the types of views, which are endorsed by powerful institutions across the world. And that's going to lead to all kinds of conflict and social instability. So what you see at places like L as har and other places in the Muslim world is you increasingly see government ministries cooperating with religious scholars, cooperating with human rights in geos and cooperating with social media companies to shape the Islamic legal tradition.
Speaker 2 00:52:21 So that involves, for instance, I'll as hard as content is increasingly being broadcast over the internet. So they'll have kind of video tapes of classes at Alaska university now made available over the internet. We'll have more Al as har websites and also L as har and people from Al as Harwell, go ahead and cooperate with the security agencies to go ahead and monitor and take down problematic Islamic content. Uh, so for instance, the social media companies are now exerting an enormous role in the reform of Islam. Going hand in hand, working hand in hand with government agencies working hand in hand with human rights NGOs. So for instance, they will do things like say, okay, and your YouTube recommendations, which Islamic videos are being recommended to you and which aren't. So you want to boost certain views and you want to either be outright ban or at least limit the impact of other views. And that's also like affecting your searches. So for instance, if you do like a Google search for, let's say G hat or women's rights, some other issue, the search results you're getting are under control. So you see this across Muslim societies, including Egypt, including Indonesia, including kind of the American Muslim community and institutions of Islamic learning like I'll ask are, are, are participating in this. Those are some connections. One could draw.
Speaker 1 00:53:46 Thank you so much aria for this rich and informative discussion on your book. The anthropology of Islamic law, education, ethics, and legal interpretation at Egypt, for which we will link to in the show notes. And of course, thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into this episode of history speaks out of the Maidan podcast, generously funded by the Henry Luce foundation.
