ISLAMISM AND POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Irfan Ahmad's Islamism and Democracy in India analyzes the transformation of Jama‘at Islami, the most prominent Islamist group in South Asia, since its inception in the middle of the twentieth century. The Jama‘at Islami was founded by the towering Indian and later Pakistani Muslim scholar-cum-political activist Sayyid Abu'l ‘Ala Mawdudi in 1941. During its early years, the ideological platform of the Jama‘at-i Islami was premised on establishing a state that actualized divine sovereignty in the temporal world. In pursuing this promise, Mawdudi and his followers shunned secular democracy, calling it antithetical to Islam. More recently, however, certain members of the Jama‘at in India have not only embraced secular democracy; they have, at times, even championed secularism and democracy as divine blessings. It is this transformation in the political attitude of the Jama‘at-i Islami in India (henceforth, Jama‘at) during the last few decades that forms the focus of this book.

In explaining this transformation in the Jama‘at, Ahmad proposes three interconnected arguments that can be summarized as follows: (1) in post-colonial India, the Jama‘at has considerably “moderated” itself and its attitude towards the merits and normative legitimacy of secular democracy; (2) this moderation is a product of the Jama‘at's exposure to and participation in the secular democratic traditions of post-independence India; and (3) elements within the Jama‘at that remain disenfranchised from democratic processes of electoral politics have become increasingly radicalized, even as they continue to “yearn” for democracy. Through this specific case study of the Jama‘at in India, Ahmad advances two larger conceptual arguments about the intersection of Islam, secularism, and democracy: (1) while inclusion in secular democracy leads to the “moderation” of religion and religious movements like Islamism, exclusion from secular democracy has the opposite effect of radicalization, and (2) Islamism should not be understood as a static or unchanging movement. Rather, as the example of the Jama‘at in India shows, Islamists can transform and become “moderate,” provided that they operate in a secular democracy like India. I will have more to say about some of the problems attached to these arguments momentarily, but let me first describe the architecture of Ahmad's project a bit further.

In assembling his arguments, Ahmad first discusses the career and thought of the Jama‘at-i Islami founder Abu'l ‘Ala Mawdudi. In an arresting analysis, Ahmad convincingly shows that even as Mawdudi's reform program was animated by the desire to retrieve a “pure” and “authentic” Islam unadulterated from modern corruptions, this desire for authenticity was itself thoroughly modern. In calling for a state that manifested divine will, Mawdudi radically departed from established tradition. Moreover, although Mawdudi presented his ideology as a pristine translation of the Qur'an that represented a perfect antidote to the moral and social ills of Western modernity, his thought was in fact inspired by a confluence of intellectual currents including Marxism, Western philosophy, and German idealism. Most importantly, at the heart of his social imaginary was the drama of a perpetual conflict between Islam and a society that reflected the conflict between the sovereign will of the divine and jahiliyya (the condition of ignorance) exemplified by any political order (including secular democracy) that arrogated to humans the sovereignty of the divine. Concomitantly, Mawdudi not only denounced participation in the electoral politics of a secular democracy, he also chastised habits and practices that in his view perpetuated a corrupt, modern, Western social order. For instance, such habits and practices included coeducation in schools, listening to music, watching films, wearing Western clothes, and playing Western sports.

The bulk of Ahmad's book is devoted to a discussion of ways in which the Jama‘at has departed from Mawdudi's positions during the last few decades, as it has become more “moderate.” In addition, internal debates and disagreements within the Jama‘at over critical questions of politics, ethics, and everyday practices also receive substantial attention. The focus of Ahmad's analysis is two student groups affiliated with the Jama‘at at Aligarh Muslim University: Student Islamic Organization of India (SIO) and Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). On a range of issues such as children's education, cooperation with the state, religious pluralism, participation in democracy, and jihad, the SIO has adopted positions that have moved noticeably away from Mawdudi's vision of the Jama‘at. Rather than pursuing the goal of establishing an Islamic state, the SIO has instead embraced, and at times even defended, secularism and democracy. In other words, the SIO has accepted and championed a political order that for Mawdudi was nothing short of anathema.

This shift or “transformation,” Ahmad argues, signifies the “moderation” of the Jama‘at. In contrast to SIO, SIMI has maintained a more “radical” stance on contentious moral and political questions and has become increasingly radicalized in the recent past. The radicalization of SIMI, according to Ahmad, can be attributed to the recent rise of Hindu nationalism and the marginalization of Muslims, including members of SIMI, from the secular democratic processes of India. The underlying argument of his book, then, is that while access to and participation in secular democracy catalyzes the “moderation” of Islamist movements, marginalization from the values and norms of secularism and democracy furthers their radicalization.

Overall, Islamism and Democracy in India is a highly informative work brimming with historical and ethnographic insights about the interaction of Islam, democracy, and politics. A pioneering study of the Jama‘at-i Islami in India, the book represents an important contribution to the study of South Asian Islam and modern Muslim movements more broadly. However, the conceptual framework of the book is indebted to a liberal, secular logic of critique that cannot account for the irresolvable contradictions of secularism and democracy. While Ahmad admirably seeks to de-essentialize Islamism by carefully navigating and documenting its internal differences and dynamics, his analysis is arrested by such liberal, secular binaries as religion/politics, moderate/radical, and religious/secular. In the following discussion, I am not interested in the empirical question of whether the Jama‘at-i Islami in India did or did not become “moderate.” Nor am I interested in the normative question of whether moderation is a desirable objective. Rather, I wish to interrogate and question the kinds of political and conceptual assumptions that authorize the very categories of “moderation” and “moderate Islam.” What does it mean for life to be moderated? In what sort of a politics does the demand for moderation participate? Is moderation ever possible? These are among the questions I wish to address.

RELIGIOUS MODERATION AND SECULAR CRITIQUE

In thinking further about these questions, let me turn to the work of scholar of religion and Buddhism Ananda Abeysekara, among the most perceptive thinkers today invested in interrogating the irresolvable contradictions of secularism and democracy. In a provocative recent article, “The Im-possibility of Critique: The Future of Religion's Memory,” Abeysekara shows that the desire for “moderating” religion is intimately tied to the promise of secular critique.Footnote ¹ Abeysekara argues that the exercise of secular critique is always animated by the aporetic impossibility of seeking to substitute religion for itself, of wanting to have religion without religion. As he puts it,

According to Abeysekara, the “virtue” of critique, which often presents itself as a necessity, is central to the logic of secular democratic sovereignty. More than anything else, the moment of critique strives to reform, rehabilitate, and purify religion such that it may be rendered more palatable to liberal secular sensibilities. However, as Abeysekara points out, this desire to critique religion remains entangled in the irresolvable contradiction of separating religion from itself, of retaining the name of religion while also making that name differ from itself. A name cannot retain itself while also differing from itself; that is impossible. The promise of inheriting religion castrated of its “extreme,” “superstitious,” or “fanatical” elements through the surgery of secular critique remains deferred to the future. Critique that seeks to subject religion to the “light” of secular reason so as to chain religion within the limits of that reason remains threatened by religion transgressing those limits. In other words, the secular promise of “moderating” religion remains unfulfilled and always deferred to an unspecified future.Footnote ³

The demand for moderation, a demand that in today's world is most often made on Islam and Muslims, is intimately connected to a larger secular politics of critique that seeks to domesticate and purify religion so as to make it more appetizing for liberal secular consumption. It is useful to note here that the word “moderate” is derived from the Latin moderare, meaning to “tame,” “control,” “reduce,” and “restrain.” Moderation is a discursive strategy to tame and regulate religion such that it is rendered amenable to liberal secular reason. In other words, moderation seeks to humanize and neutralize religion so that it may be worthy of liberal secular acceptance. For religion to be acceptable, it must first be baptized by the moderating force of secular critique. But no attempt to neutralize, humanize, regulate, and moderate religion can resolve the irresolvable contradiction of seeking to retain the name of religion while also differing from that name, of having religion without religion. As Abeysekara has brilliantly summarized the matter, “[A]t the end of the day, [critique] can only have religion without religion, religion emptied of the fanatical, the superstitious, the not so religious. Emptied of its substance, still named religion, this ‘religion’ remains itself by not being itself. The name religion is substituted for its own (same) name!”Footnote ⁴

This is precisely the aporia of the idea of moderation that Ahmad has not considered in his celebratory account of the Jama‘at's supposed moderation over time. The question here is not the empirical one of whether the Jama‘at has or has not become moderate—it may well be moderate. Rather, at issue here are the conceptual questions: Who gets to decide what counts as “moderate”? Through what standards should one establish the boundaries separating the moderate and the radical? In Ahmad's account, moderation appears as a synonym for assimilation to liberal secular notions of what authentic religion ought to look like. The defining characteristic of a moderate religion is that its followers jettison any ideological desires or programs that might undermine a modern, secular politics of democratic accountability. Democracy and moderation are intertwined in a tautological relationship: Democracy moderates religion, and for religion to be counted as moderate, it must embrace and champion democracy. Such tautological reasoning is neither conceptually sound nor able to open any new horizon of the political.

Moreover, a moderated religious subject must also order her everyday life in a manner that does not threaten liberal secular norms of sociality, lest she be declared a radical. So what does a “moderate” Muslim look like? What habits, virtues, and affective sensibilities must one cultivate to be eligible for a certificate of adequate moderation? From Ahmad's analysis, it seems that a moderated subject should embody virtues such as the valorization of “rational” over “traditional” modes of argument, the exercise of individual autonomy and freedom, and the embrace of creativity and artistic expression.

For instance, in one of the more illustrative moments in this book, Ahmad sketches a portrait of two Muslims: Jamal, a “moderate,” and Jalal, a not-yet-moderate (perhaps radical?) Muslim (128–36). While both were members of the same organization, the SIO, the similarity between their names betrayed a radical difference in their dispositions. Jalal, a twenty-nine-year-old native of Bihar, showed little to no sign of being moderate. Enamored of Mawdudi, Jalal was a puritan par excellence. He sported an untrimmed beard and was firmly opposed to the intermingling of boys and girls. As president of the SIO, he had prohibited its members from meeting girls in seclusion. Moreover, though he had a master's degree in Urdu literature, Jalal had no tolerance for literature that transgressed the boundaries of Shari‘a by, for instance, depicting romantic love. Similarly, he regarded listening to songs or watching Bollywood films as obscene and therefore repugnant activities. What is more, Jalal “rarely joked, and when he did, his jokes were always decent. He also did not laugh freely; at most he only smiled” (130). As a result of his puritan habits, Jalal had few friends. Lonely and secretive, he mixed only with like-minded Muslims.

Jamal, a properly “moderate” Muslim, was the antithesis of Jalal. Rather than following traditions unquestioningly, he sought out “rational” and “convincing” answers to religious problems and questions. For instance, in a class on hadith, he challenged his teacher's position that pajamas should be worn above the ankle (a contested prophetic practice), “ask[ing] why God would be displeased just because pajamas were below the ankle” (132). His affinity for rational thinking went hand in hand with his championing of secular democracy as a normative ideal that, in his view, was quintessentially Islamic. Moreover, Jamal refused to grow a beard, arguing that it represented a too-literal imitation of the Prophet. He also enjoyed watching Bollywood movies, finding them entertaining as well as educational. And unlike Jalal, Jamal was open and tolerant towards people who did not share his habits or worldview.

In the picture that emerges from this comparison, moderation equals the capacity to question and overcome any barrier to the cultivation of a rational, autonomous, and liberally creative subject. To put it more bluntly, a moderate Muslim is someone who rejects modes of life that might be unacceptable to a liberal secular teleology of how life should be organized. Therefore, a Muslim who reveres secular democracy, relishes watching films and listening to songs, privileges rational inquiry over subservience to established authority, and displays openness towards “others” is legitimately moderate while someone who does not meet these criteria remains outside the fold of moderation. For a moderate Muslim to be sufficiently moderated, she must attune her political imaginary and her affective sensibilities to the demands and requirements of secular modernity and the modern, secular state.

There is no reason to elevate the radical over the moderate or, for that matter, the moderate over the radical. Rather, the very labor of approaching a discursive tradition such as Islam through the binary lens of moderate/radical must be questioned. In this binary framework, a framework that dominates Ahmad's analysis, Islam represents a drama staged according to a predetermined script and performed by actors who readily fit into fixed roles and categories of life. The drama of Islam revolves around the epic battle between the moderate and the radical, each positioned on opposite ends of a fully transparent and perfectly translatable ideological spectrum.

The polarization between moderation and radicalization codifies the radical as uncritical, irrational, and intolerant and the moderate as enlightened, creative, and democratic. While the radical remains incapable of critically engaging tradition or securing distance between the self and the past, the moderate demonstrates a capacity for rational thought by cultivating and embodying the virtue of critique. By framing Islamic religiosity as a problem to be explained, resolved, and moderated, the moderate/radical binary naturalizes liberal secular imaginaries of selfhood, affect, and politics as universally normative.Footnote ⁵ But ultimately, this arbitrary binary of moderate/radical is itself a product of the secular promise to moderate, control, regulate, and tame religion—in other words, to have religion without religion—an impossibility. Moreover, bifurcated representations of Islam that partake in the moderate/radical binary are in complete harmony with the recent neocolonial discourse of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim,” whereby goodness corresponds to a Muslim's conformity to liberalism. Such a representation is at once politically problematic and conceptually impoverished.

APORIAS OF SECULARISM

One of the central conceptual limitations of Ahmad's book is the way it theorizes the question of the secular. While drawing a causative relationship between secular democracy and religious moderation, Ahmad has not thought through certain irresolvable contradictions within the normative ideal of the secular and the political ideology of secularism. According to Ahmad, when secular democracies are inclusive towards their religious minorities—as is the case, in his view, in India—those minority communities shun radicalism and become “moderate.” However, what this neat causal narrative does not consider is that no matter how inclusive a liberal state might be, the generosity it accords to a minority community further marks that community as a “minority,” as the “other.”

The irresolvable contradiction of this arrangement is that the liberal state is always threatened by the very pluralism and inclusivism that it seeks to foster among its citizens. The destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu nationalists in 1992, the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, and the attacks on Muslims or “Muslim-looking South Asians” in the United States in the days following 9/11, were all moments when the stability of the “relation that the secular state strives to maintain between the nation, citizenship, and freedom”Footnote ⁶ was fractured. As a result, the state was compelled to intervene and remind its citizens of the virtues of tolerance and inclusivism through which the promise of democratic pluralism is to be attained. But no number of appeals to the liberal virtue of tolerance can resolve the irresolvable contradiction of pluralism threatening freedom. No number of reminders by the state to tolerate minority others can overcome the threat of citizens misunderstanding those others. This is the underlying aporia of secular modernity.Footnote ⁷

The thrust of this aporetic condition is best captured by Ananda Abeysekara in an instructive set of comments:

No matter how generous the liberal state may be towards its minority communities, the terms of that generosity will always be subservient to the imperative of maintaining public order, an imperative that in turn will always privilege the religious and cultural sensibilities of the majority community. As Saba Mahmood has aptly put it, “A fundamental contradiction haunts liberal democratic legal traditions . . . on the one hand everyone is equal before the law, and, on the other, the aim of the law is to create and maintain public order—an aim that necessarily turns upon the concerns and attitudes of its majority population.”Footnote ⁹

The point here is not to advocate intolerance or the abandonment of secularism and democracy. Rather, by thinking carefully about the aporias of secularism, we might unpack some of the political and conceptual assumptions that undergird the messianic promise of moderating religion through the salvific virtue of secular democracy. A narrative of correspondence between secularism and religious moderation is itself thoroughly secular, animated by the desire to manage, tame, and moderate the limits of religion. More than anything else, the discourse of religious moderation strives to authorize the normative inevitability of the secular as an epistemic and political ideal. However, the virtue of moderation, much like the virtue of critique, remains always deferred, always detained by the impossibility of separating religion from itself, of having religion without religion.

“ANOTHER GENEALOGY OF SECULARISM”?

One may take issue with the above discussion by arguing that it wrongly presumes a radical separation between secular democracy and Islam. What about those Muslims and those articulations of Islam that are thoroughly secular and see no contradiction between Islam and secular modernity? Why should we confine the idea of the secular to the West? Are there not alternative non-Western/non-Christian genealogies and traditions of secularism? This is precisely the line of objection that Ahmad advances in distinguishing his theoretical apparatus from certain recent scholarship on the question of the secular, especially that inspired by the pioneering work of anthropologist Talal Asad.

According to Ahmad, critics of secularism such as Asad have wrongly assumed that secularism is foreign or alien to Islam and that it is a Western construct. As Ahmad writes,

In Ahmad's view, Asad's understanding of secular modernity as a Western phenomenon cannot account for the fact that “most Indians no longer regard democracy and secularism as ‘foreign’ or ‘Western’” (15). He further informs us that contrary to the notion that secularism is foreign to Islam, prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian Muslim scholars, such as those attached to the Jami‘at al-‘Ulama-i Hind, “called secularism a ‘golden principle,’ a ‘pious objective’ and resolved to keep the ‘candle of secularism alight’” (13). Secularization, which Ahmad (following José Casanova) defines as the “differentiation of religion from the state,” was essential to their survival as a minority community (14). It is this native, Indian Muslim, non-European defense of secularism that Ahmad calls “another genealogy of secularism.” For Ahmad, this “another genealogy of secularism” shows that secularism is not a Western construct imposed on Islam and Muslims. Instead, secularism is integral to Islam, at least in India.

Concomitantly, Ahmad faults Asad for presuming that modern ruptures in the discursive tradition of Islam, such as shifts in Islamic law in nineteenth-century Egypt (the focus of a chapter in Asad's book Formations of the Secular Footnote ¹¹), represent an outcome of Islam's encounter with an imported Western modernity. Echoing the recently popularized “alternative modernities” argument in the humanities and social sciences, Ahmad protests: “My discomfort with . . . [Asad's argument of] ‘importation’ comes from the ways Asad juxtaposes modernity and Islam. This argument, like Madan's and Nandy's, assumes, to cite [Peter] Van der Veer, that ‘an already finished modular modernity has already been shipped from Europe to the rest of the world’” (16).

These comments are problematic for a few reasons. First, it should be observed that the very objection to the notion that a “finished modernity” was shipped from Europe presumes that there are such things as “finished” and “unfinished” modernities. As Hussein Agrama has recently argued, the business of distinguishing finished and unfinished modernities is fraught with conceptual and political problems.Footnote ¹² If a finished modernity has not been shipped from Europe, is the implication then that the modernities in non-European contexts are unfinished? Who gets to decide what counts as a finished or an unfinished modernity? Ahmad does not address these questions or the ambiguities they raise.

Even more puzzling is Ahmad's understanding of secularization as the “differentiation of religion from the state” (14). As several scholars have shown, the notion that secularization represents the separation of religion and politics or that the secular signifies the inverse of religion is itself a secular fantasy that is central to the authorizing logic of colonial modernity.Footnote ¹³ Rather, religion and the secular are better understood as mutually dependent and mutually constitutive. While striving to differentiate religion from politics, the secular constantly defines, manages, and moderates the boundaries of what does and does not count as religion. The moment of differentiating religion from politics is also the moment of defining the limits of religion as a category of life. Further, much like any religion, secularism normalizes itself by valorizing certain virtues, rituals, and forms of embodiment that seek to cultivate particular kinds of subjects and affective possibilities.

But the most problematic aspect of Ahmad's analysis is his very search for “another genealogy of secularism” (12–19). Indeed, the underlying conceptual problems of this book lie precisely in its attempted retrieval of an “alternative secularism” and “alternative modernity.” The alternative modernities argument is obviously very attractive. In questioning the Eurocentric equation of modernity with the West, the book endows the native with the agency to fashion an alternative narrative of what it means to be modern or secular. By replacing a story of submission or assimilation to the hegemony of modern colonial power with one of agentive creation and resistance, this argument strives to interrupt a developmental teleology that situates the West as the driver of global history. While the desire to excavate the humanity of the colonized subaltern is certainly laudable, the alternative modernities argument nonetheless operates according to the unsound assumption that colonial power is necessarily negative, repressive, and destructive, and that it should therefore be overcome through acts of native agency.

Though it does not undermine the violence of modern colonial power, Talal Asad's project urges us to think about power as productive and generative of particular rationalities, sensibilities, anxieties, and objects of desire. Colonial modernity is not just a negative force that circumvents native capacity for moral argument. More importantly, modern power has fundamentally transformed the very conceptual and political terrain in which arguments are imagined, constructed, and contested. Modernity introduces new discourses and subjectivities, and, moreover, it alters the very conditions in which discourses and subjectivities are constituted. In framing modernity as an “unfinished project” that cries out to be subverted by alternative versions and articulations, the alternative modernities argument fails to take into account this intimacy between conditions and discourse.

Perhaps no other thinker has registered a doubt about the idea of alternative modernities more clearly and forcefully than the anthropologist David Scott. In his book Conscripts of Modernity, Scott memorably wrote,

In Scott's view, then, rather than approaching modern power as a force that blocks the expression of native agency, it is more helpful to understand modernity as a form of power that “altered not merely the balance of forces in the struggle between colonizer and colonized, but the terrain itself on which that struggle was engaged; that altered not merely the rules of the game of social, political, and cultural life among the colonized, but the game as such in which social, political, and cultural life was organized.”Footnote ¹⁵

Thinking with Scott, one can clearly see the conceptual shortcoming in Ahmad's quest for “another genealogy of secularism” in South Asian Islam. For instance, when certain modern Indian Muslim thinkers championed secularism as a “pious objective” and a “golden principle,” it is not as if they woke up as preconstituted subjects in the middle of a world with which they were dissatisfied and chose secularism as their “golden principle.” This choice, if one may call it that, was itself constituted and conditioned by colonial secular power. Some readers may object that when Muslims establish the normative validity of secularism, they do so by mobilizing arguments and evidence from within traditional Islamic sources. Is this not, then, an alternative genealogy of secularism? Regardless of how one authorizes the compatibility of Islam and secular democracy, what must occupy our attention are the very conditions that generate the desire and expectation to establish such compatibility in the first place.

The choice to valorize the piety of secularism is a choice that is, in part, constructed through the conceptual and ideological apparatuses of secular modernity. This is not to say that a Muslim argument for the normative validity of secularism is inauthentic or that secularism is impious and un-Islamic. Rather, what I want to call into question is the very labor of determining whether secularism is or is not an integral part of Islam in South Asia or elsewhere. A more productive and conceptually sound exercise would be to interrogate the conditions, structures, and forms of power that shape the normative expectation for Islam to be secular, moderate, or democratic.

Seen this way, one may also recognize that the “transformation of Jama‘at-i Islami” that forms the central argument of Ahmad's book is not particularly transformative. Mawdudi rejected secular democracy in arguing for an Islamic state, and some of his followers in India have embraced the ideal of a secular state. However, at the heart of the conceptual register through which these supposedly antagonistic arguments are made is the ineluctability of the state in modern political life. For all their differences, these arguments were conditioned by and in response to categories of life brought into view by modern forces.

One may take the sovereign decision of calling Mawdudi's position “radical” as opposed to “moderate.” However, his normative imaginary was as moderated by forces of secular modernity as that of his later, Indian followers. Rather than categorize moral arguments about Islam and politics according to such binaries as moderate/radical or religious/secular, one might approach them more effectively as competing rationalities of tradition that come into view at particular conjunctures of discursive, institutional, and political conditions. Binaries such as moderate/radical say more about the limits of secular conceptuality than they do about Islam or Muslims. A discursive tradition like Islam, a tradition whose limits are always available for debate and contestation, is never available to be canonized into such disciplinary binaries. For Muslims in South Asia and elsewhere, rather than striving to moderate themselves, it might be a more conceptually and politically productive task to mourn and disinherit a modern secular politics of accountability that categorizes life into such binaries as moderate/radical, religious/secular, democratic/despotic, and so on.

AMBIGUITIES OF THE SHARI‘A IN PAKISTAN

Matthew Nelson's In the Shadow of the Shari‘a is a study of the relationship between laws on property rights and logics of electoral accountability in Pakistan that focuses on colonial and postcolonial Punjab. The central theme of the book is animated by a conundrum related to women's inheritance laws in Punjab. The conundrum is this: on the question of women's inheritance of land, Islamic law, or the Shari‘a, is much more charitable and empowering than the tribal customary laws in Punjab are. However, despite repeated measures to shift inheritance laws from custom (rawaj) to Shari‘a, inheritance practices remain attached to tribal customs of agnatic (all male) inheritance. Nelson's book is an attempt to understand and explain this apparent dissonance between official laws of inheritance, which are couched in the discourse of the Shari‘a and the promise of female inheritance, and the reality on the ground, which reveals an unyielding attachment to tribal customs and the practice of female disinheritance.

Nelson argues that this fissure between theory and practice, between inheritance laws and local practices of inheritance, represents an outcome of the logic of democratic accountability that has come to dominate the political landscape of Punjab since the mid-nineteenth century. Over time, rather than seeking the enforcement or betterment of laws, politics has focused on the circumvention of laws that are opposed to tribal norms and customs. The political welfare of elected officials has depended on their ability to make sure that any law inconsistent with local customs is not put into practice, even as they acknowledge and ostensibly affirm the substance of those laws. The public, in turn, has elected officials on the basis of their ability to circumvent laws rather than on their capacity to legislate effectively. In effect, the logic of electoral accountability has become increasingly fractured and incompatible with the state function of constantly improving and implementing inheritance laws. Therefore, Nelson argues, it is not a lack of democracy or a paucity of good laws that explains the continued disinheritance of women in Punjab, but a “pattern of legal and political estrangement . . . between the ‘law’ on the one hand, and the parameters of political practice on the other” (116; emphasis in original).

Nelson assembles his argument by first discussing the colonial legacy of postcolonial attitudes towards law and electoral accountability in Punjab. He shows that the question of property rights generated considerable disagreement among the British. On one side was a group of colonial officers who championed a system of individualized cultivation and argued against the preservation of ancestral property rights. Inspired by utilitarian theories of individual peasant proprietorship and the promise of free market exchange, colonial administrators such as Sir Richard Temple valorized the possession of property by individuals within specific village groups over its distribution according to the ancestral shares of local agricultural tribes. The sentiment behind this school of thought was captured in the declaration “possession whenever possible; ancestry if absolutely necessary” (60). According to this line of argument, the pursuit of self-interest and the shunning of tribal norms represented an essential marker of “progress” in modernity.

But a competing school of colonial thought was more cautious about disrupting local patterns of ancestral inheritance and the structures of tribal kinship on which those patterns were based. Colonial administrators such as E. A. Prinsep sought to push back against the idea of individual property rights and argued that the implementation of such a system among the local population was untenable and too costly for the colonial state. Fearing that the disintegration of agricultural tribes in Punjab would upset the political stability of the state, Prinsep and like-minded colonial bureaucrats advanced the case for the preservation of tribal customs of inheritance. Eventually, the latter school of thought on property rights won the day, and the intra-colonial quarrel over land ownership was settled in 1900 with the passage of the Punjab Alienation of Land Act, a landmark piece of legislation. The Act subordinated individual forms of land ownership to collective tribal ownership and kinship-based affinities by prohibiting the permanent alienation of land from agriculturalists to moneylenders.

Among Nelson's most instructive conceptual arguments is that colonial attitudes towards property rights in Punjab (and elsewhere in India) cannot be essentialized or read uniformly across time. Rather, throughout the nineteenth century, competing rationalities of colonialism came into view at different moments and junctures. More specifically, prior to 1865, colonial administrators stressed the rights of individual cultivators and the value of free market exchange. But after 1865, with the realization that the security of the state itself depended on preventing the disintegration of ancestral landholdings, the focus shifted to preserving the integrity of larger agricultural tribes. In other words, in Punjab, the liberal promise of securing individual autonomy and erasing the influence of tribal distinctions in the distribution and ownership of property was left unfulfilled. And as a result, the tribal practice of female disinheritance continued unabated.

The picture of colonial power that emerges from Nelson's analysis is a far cry from that of a stable, predictable, and unwavering force fully in control of governance and politics. To the contrary, we find in it a pattern of anxiety, confusion, and intense disagreement within colonial ranks over crucial questions such as the definition of custom, the codification of customary laws, and the ownership of property. However, despite the vicissitudes and vicariousness of colonialism, the transformations brought about during colonial rule in the legal topography of Punjab had far-reaching ramifications for how the relationship among law, land, and politics was henceforth imagined. The legislation most symptomatic of such transformations was the Shariat Application Act of 1937. Designed to resolve longstanding disputes over the relative merits of custom and the Shari‘a between Indian Muslims, this law sought to establish the priority of the Shari‘a over custom in the domain of law.

The valorization of the Shari‘a was intimately connected to a larger discourse of all-India Muslim unity fashioned to ameliorate the divisions and fractures within the Muslim community. However, while fervor for a unified religious identity characterized the Indian Muslim political elite and especially leaders of the All-India Muslim League, a sharp disconnect between rhetoric and local politics persisted. As David Gilmartin has argued in his work, among the fundamental contradictions of the Pakistan movement was the irresolvable dissonance between an ideology that promised to transcend differences of tribe and kinship and the dynamics of electoral politics on the ground that appealed to those very differences in order to mobilize voters.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, despite a dramatic rhetorical shift in favor of the Shari‘a over custom in the first few decades of the twentieth century, customary norms continued to determine local practices of inheritance.

Among the most remarkable examples of this disconnect between rhetoric and practice is one found in the text of the 1937 Shariat Application Act. Even as this bill established the supremacy of the Shari‘a over custom in the domain of personal law, agricultural land was specifically exempted in the final text of the law, which read thus: “Notwithstanding any custom or usage to the contrary, in all questions, save questions relating to agricultural land . . . the rule of decision in cases where the parties are Muslims shall be the Muslim personal law” (100; emphasis in original).

The colonial reconfiguration of the relationship among law, property, and political accountability would haunt the postcolonial period. The 1937 Shariat Application Act exemplified a trend that envelops the political landscape of Pakistan even today, that of symbolically appealing to the Shari‘a while maintaining the juggernaut of tribal customs in the distribution of land on the ground. Nelson's central argument in the second half of his book is that, in the decades following the creation of Pakistan in 1947, “local notions of political accountability began to turn away from any special focus on the task of politically accountable ‘legislation’ to finding ways of access to state power in order to circumvent the enforcement of laws unpalatable to tribal norms” (133). Therefore, even as the rhetoric of Islamizing the state dominated Pakistani politics, such rhetoric was primarily mobilized for the “increased centralization of the state and then, having done so, locating ‘that state’ (as a whole) within a pattern of enduring provincial control” (133; emphasis in original).

The crux of Nelson's argument is that over time, this trend of the state using the Shari‘a in merely symbolic terms, while furthering the consolidation of tribal customs in practice, led to the perpetuation of a particular logic of electoral accountability. Rather than being expected to construct new laws or improve existing laws, elected officials were instead judged on their ability to circumvent the enforcement of laws that contravened local tribal norms. Moreover, as the state abdicated its prerogative to “improve” laws, the task of distributing land ownership rights was left to local officials like the patwaris (village-level revenue administrators), who were uncompromisingly attached to local customs. As a result, law and politics became increasingly estranged, leading to a failure of democracy and the continued disinheritance of women.

THINKING THE QUESTION OF THE POLITICAL: APORIAS OF DEMOCRATIC SOVEREIGNTY

In the Shadow of the Shari‘a is a meticulously researched and multilayered work that provides fresh and thought provoking insights on the interaction of law, politics, and property rights in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western Punjab. Theoretically at stake in and at the heart of this book is a much larger and tremendously significant conceptual question: What constitutes the political? Nelson's answer to this central question is the most problematic and least convincing aspect of the book, and the liberal secular assumptions underpinning his conceptual framework, and the limitations of those assumptions, are here most revealing.

According to Nelson, the lack of correspondence between electoral accountability and the rule of law represents the fundamental reason for the disinheritance of women's property rights in Punjab. Because of this disjunction between law and democracy, rather than enforcing or improving property laws, elected officials and their constituents were more interested in finding ways to circumvent those laws. In effect, politics became divorced from the institution of the state and from the rule of law. For Nelson, this situation reflects a failure of democracy because—and this is his main point—politics or democracy can never be “extra-legal” or non-state driven. As he puts it rather bluntly, “There is, I argue, no such thing as a working democracy set apart from ‘state-based rules of the law’” (262; emphasis in original). This is a remarkable claim to which I shall return momentarily.

But to provide a bit more context for Nelson's argument: his primary object of critique is the work of prominent historian of South Asia and postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee. Nelson takes issue with Chatterjee's proposition that extrajudicial and non-state forms of political mobilization, negotiation, and activity can contribute to an alternative, “richer” form of democracy. In rejecting Chatterjee's proposition, Nelson proposes his own sovereign definition of democracy: “As I understand it,” he declares, “democracy is not concerned with arbitrary and revocable settlements set apart from the rule of ‘law’ . . . What Chatterjee describes is not a democracy but a particular form of locally embedded despotism” (229–30). So in Nelson's view, in order for politics to be democratic, it must center on the institution of the state and be driven by the imperative of improving existing laws. The rule of law, in other words, serves as the sovereign decider of the limits separating democracy and despotism, politics and real life.

In what follows, I am not interested in the question of where democracy lies (within or outside the state) or of how one should define democracy. Rather, I want to call into question the very logic of “improvement” that undergirds Nelson's argument for a process of electoral accountability invested in the constant improvement and amendment of existing laws. This logic of improvement participates in a tradition of humanism that has not thought through the irresolvable contradictions of law and democracy.

In his provocative recent book, The Politics of Post-secular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara has shown the conceptual poverty of appealing to law and justice as a way of “improving” democracy. Drawing on the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Abeysekara contends that democracy is a promise that is always deferred to an unspecified future: “[T]o live in a democracy, to be a citizen, to believe in democratic principles—freedom of choice, freedom of the press, human rights, justice, law, among others—is to live in a state of deferral.”Footnote ¹⁷ What, then, does it mean to inherit, retain, or improve a promise that is deferred to the future? Is such inheritance possible? For Abeysekara, there is an irresolvable contradiction, an aporia, involved in retaining the name of democracy while also improving that name.

That aporia is this: one cannot both remake or improve a name (democracy) and also return to it at the same time. A name cannot differ from itself and also return to itself. The logic of improvement advocated by Nelson is mired in this irresolvable contradiction. The labor of improving democracy is anchored in the promise of retaining democracy but with a difference. Can a name both retain itself and also differ from itself? It is this logic of difference that Derrida called the “ipseity” (“the power that gives itself its own law”) or the “auto-immunity” of democracy, meaning the self-sovereign law with which democracy always turns and returns to itself.Footnote ¹⁸ As Abeysekara brilliantly puts it, “a democracy that turns or returns to its own power, ‘the autos of autonomy,’ its own self, is not something that one can change or improve, in the hope of inheriting a better, a different version of it. In other words, democracy is not something that can really differ from itself.”Footnote ¹⁹

Abeysekara's and Derrida's argument should not be mistaken for a call to abandon democracy, nor as a contention that new or better laws are impossible. That is not the point. Certainly, new and better laws may well be made and enacted. However, no amount of “improvement” in the law can resolve the aporia of law/justice and democracy. While individual laws can be debated, contested, and improved, “justice itself cannot be deconstructed.”Footnote ²⁰ Why? Because justice, like democracy, represents a promise that is always deferred to the future, a promise that is always “to come.” The notion of a promise is inscribed in the very ideas of justice and democracy. A promise cannot be realized through more promising. Derrida distinguished individual laws from justice, for which those laws are legislated and improved, through a helpful set of comments: “On the one hand,” he wrote, “you have the law which is deconstructible; that is, the set of legislations, the set of positive laws which are in constant transformation. They are deconstructible because we change them, we improve them, we want to improve them, we can improve them . . . On the other hand, justice, in the name of which one deconstructs the law, is not deconstructible.”Footnote ²¹

Therefore, the call to improve justice by improving laws participates in a messianic belief in something that remains deferred to an unspecified future. Or, as Derrida puts it, “the law is transcendent and theological, and so always to come, and always promised, because it is immanent, finite, and thus already past.”Footnote ²² To believe in improving democracy by improving laws is to believe in something inaccessible and transcendent. There is no guarantee that it will work; it is a promise always deferred to the future. What does it mean to be living by a promise? It is this aporia of law, justice, and democracy that Nelson did not consider in his secular messianic push for a state-centered logic of democratic sovereignty.

Suppose democracy was indeed circumscribed by state-based “rule of law”: What assurance or guarantee is there that it would deliver justice for Muslim women in Punjab? Would new and better laws legislated by the state do anything to resolve the politics of accountability that empowers such dichotomies as “men/women,” “majority/minority,” and “identity/difference”? Let me put the matter as clearly as possible: Nelson's argument for a system of electoral accountability, driven by the imperative of improving laws, opens no new horizon for the political. No number of new or improved laws can resolve the irresolvable contradiction of retaining a name (justice/democracy) while also differing from it. The name cannot be improved.

So, when Nelson passes the sovereign judgment that “[a]s I understand it ‘democracy’ is not concerned with arbitrary and revocable settlements set apart from the rule of ‘law,’” what he does not consider is that the rule of law itself is quite arbitrary and unsettled. A deferred promise, a promise that is always to come, can only be arbitrary and revocable. By its nature, a promise can never be guaranteed, settled, or irrevocable. This is leaving aside the problematic assumption in Nelson's statement that there exists a universal definition of what democracy is and is not. According to this universal definition, it is solidarity to the “rule of law” invested in the state that will ultimately decide whether one is considered to be democratic or despotic, political or savage. In other words, it is Nelson who, by virtue of his sovereign declaration on democracy, decides what does and does not qualify as democratic or political. But if the definition of democracy is indeed as universal as Nelson suggests, then why does it need to be constantly explained, elaborated, and defended? Put differently, if the universal is indeed so universal, why does it need to be defended?

If anything, Nelson's valorization of the state as the caretaker of democracy and “democratic laws” perpetuates a liberal secular narrative whereby the state arrogates to itself the task of constantly regulating and managing the boundaries of religion and politics in the public sphere. As scholars such as Talal Asad have ably shown, this liberal narrative most often serves as a pretext for the modern state to validate and authorize its own political sovereignty over its citizens. Moreover, the primary discursive arena through which the state seeks to manage and affect the moral, political, and aesthetic sensibilities of its citizens is the law. The law is at once the normative validator of state sovereignty and the underlying affective power through which the state shapes the lives of the people.

Herein we find the fundamental contradiction in the liberal secular logic of democratic sovereignty: even as the modern subject is empowered by the promise of individual autonomy, that autonomy is itself conditioned by and contingent on the subject's complete submission to the state as the ultimate political sovereign. This contradiction is lost on Nelson. That is why he sees no problem in advocating an “Islamic democracy” based on subservience and loyalty to the rule of law as managed by the most modern and human of all institutions: the state. As Talal Asad has so eloquently put it, “since Qur'anic doctrine insists that everything in the universe is subject to God's authority, it is not clear to me how the state, a human construction, gets its special right to demand absolute loyalty from subjects.”Footnote ²³ So, while Nelson's project seemingly seeks to rehabilitate the Shari‘a as a way of delivering justice to women in Punjab, its heart is the liberal secular promise of holding life accountable and answerable to the sovereign rule of the modern state. This promise is never fulfilled; it remains deferred to an unspecified future.

TRADITIONALISM, MODERNISM, AND THE CONCEPTUAL POVERTY OF SECULAR BINARIES

Finally, let me conclude with a brief comment on another deeply problematic aspect of this book and one that is inextricable from its underlying modern secular conceptual apparatus: Nelson's description of intra-Muslim debates over the Shari‘a and custom. Even though custom is a crucial topic in Nelson's book, one finds in the text no discussion of the genealogy of Muslim intellectual discourses on custom (‘urf in Islamic law). For instance, in the canon of the Hanafi school of Islamic law (the dominant school in South Asia), one finds a rich tradition of discourses on the limits and application of ‘urf. Here, the work of the famous Syrian Hanafi jurist Muhammad ibn ‘Abidin (d. 1836), Nashr al-‘Urf, immediately comes to mind. But even when Nelson does discuss intra-Muslim contestations on Shari‘a and custom in Pakistan, he does so through the conceptually wanting binary of tradition/modernity. According to Nelson, the debate over the dynamicity of the Shari‘a in Pakistan was carried out by two opposing groups of Muslim scholars-cum-activists: the traditionalists and the modernists.

While the modernists believed in the principle of ijtihad, a concept that Nelson defines as “interpretive reason grounded in the terms of individual or collective opinion,” the traditionalists adhered to the idea of taqlid, defined by Nelson as “‘following’ grounded in the terms of an ostensibly unthinking attachment to the work of established (Sunni) imams” (160). Moreover, Nelson argues, as the traditionalist position came to dominate the legal and political topography of Pakistan, the Shari‘a increasingly came to be regarded as beyond debate and change, leading to catastrophic results. This narrative should give us some pause. To begin with, Nelson's framing of the ijtihad/taqlid binary says more about his “unthinking attachment” to a liberal secular understanding of religion than it does about Islamic law or about Muslim scholars. According to Nelson, while ijtihad corresponds to such modern qualities as “reason,” “public opinion,” and “interpretation,” taqlid represents merely an “unthinking” attachment to established authority. This reading is at once anachronistic and conceptually wanting.

As several scholars have shown, ijtihad (intellectual exertion) and taqlid (conforming to a legal canon) are hardly binary constructs; rather, the two are inseparable. In both premodern and contemporary periods, the ulama (traditionally trained Muslim scholars) in South Asia and elsewhere have shown remarkable dexterity in engaging the canon of tradition in creative and dynamic ways.Footnote ²⁴ Conforming to the authority of the past does not indicate a lack or absence of reason but rather suggests a different kind of reason, one that is animated by love and loyalty for a palimpsest of scholars, texts, interpretive dispositions, and normative sensibilities that make up the memory bank of a tradition.

Instead of thinking carefully and critically about the traditional/modern binary, Nelson makes the bizarre statement that “[w]hereas one side [modernists] appealed to the language of the public at large (and the value of a certain ‘flexibility’ [in the Shari‘a]), the other insisted on closer ties to the conservative views articulated by cloistered ‘scholar’ imams” (167). One wonders, from what exactly are these “cloistered scholar imams” cloistered? Liberalism? Freedom? Democracy? One does not get a sense of the heuristic work implied by the term “cloistered.” Is one to assume that anyone who does not adhere to the liberal project of inheriting and improving the name of democracy is cloistered or, worse, despotic?

Rather than the recalcitrance of traditionalist Muslim scholars, perhaps it is the modern secular anxiety to canonize law and other domains of life for state consumption that best explains the supposed immutability of the Shari‘a. Might there be an elective affinity between the modern secular promise of a fully predictable, canonizable, and irrevocable state-based “rule of law” and the reification of tradition and religion? Is it possible that the desire to mummify religion is a thoroughly modern desire, intimately connected to the homogenizing powers and apparatuses of the modern state? Put differently, might there be a conceptual and historical convergence of the emergence of democracy as a political imperative, the alleged inevitability of the secular as a normative good, and the ideological reification of religion as a distinct category of life? Even attending to these questions requires that we disinherit and mourn the modern secular promise that we may improve democracy by improving and amending laws. This logic of improvement, which is the underlying logic of modern democratic sovereignty, seeks to retain the name of democracy while also differing from it. This is an impossible task.