Introduction
As he worked on the last revisions of The Law of Peoples, John Rawls repeatedly worried to colleagues that this—his final original work—was “loony.” In late February 1998, he informed Dennis F. Thompson that Charles Beitz had encouraged him to publish the text as a short monograph, “even though the Law of Peoples is—so it seems to me—a bit crazy. Do I want to end my writing career publishing something really loony? Well, why not?”Footnote 1 A few days later, Beitz reassured Rawls, “Dennis Thompson mentioned that you'd described LP as a little ‘loony.’ Perhaps; but so was Perpetual Peace!”Footnote 2 Still, on 24 April, Rawls confided in Jon Mandle, “At the moment I putter along slowly writing Law of Peoples, which I hope to have done by the end of May. It has turned out to be a rather loony short monograph. Perhaps it is time to stop writing these things.”Footnote 3
That same day, Rawls wrote again to Thompson. The Law of Peoples had become “loonier and loonier”:
I don't think I've told you that after I told you that the Law of Peoples I'm doing is a bit loony, Chuck Beitz indicated that you said I had so remarked. He added a PS in his letter to me saying, “A bit loony perhaps, but so was ‘Perpetual Peace’.” I can live with that. But the difficulty is that it gets loonier and loonier. I just completed Pt II, which among other things, contains a description of a decent theocratic Muslim society. I never would have thought I would end up saying such a thing. The dangers of old age. It's time to stop this game? Probably, yet I plow on.Footnote 4
Rawls's anxiety that the text went from eccentric to insane coincided with his invention of a hypothetical example of a decent society. He invented a fictional Muslim state; it is a place he created, not one he discovered or unearthed, and the hypothetical's invention and design are internal to the method of Anglo-American liberal philosophy. He calls this society “Kazanistan.” Its dominant religion is Islam. It treats its minorities and women almost as equals, and it has a consultation hierarchy that allows its members’ concerns to be heard. Unlike most Muslim states, he writes, Kazanistan's theologians interpret jihād in a spiritual and moral manner, rather than in a military and expansionist one. Although this fictional society is not liberal, Rawls submits, it is worthy of toleration.Footnote 5
It is commonly acknowledged that Kazanistan serves a number of functions in The Law of Peoples. Across its iterations, the text argues that there are principles that both liberal peoples and non-liberal but decent peoples may uphold. They do so for different reasons, but, in so doing, the decent non-liberals are worthy of toleration. Rawls sought to explain how such a decent, non-liberal people might look: the structure of such a society, the form of its non-liberalism, and the kinds of commitment and inequality that are tolerable. In principle, Kazanistan did not need to be Muslim, but Rawls chose to make it so. This decision was a factor in Rawls's confession—and self-deprecating humor—about having written “a description of a decent theocratic Muslim society”: “I never would have thought I would end up saying such a thing.”
Less commonly recognized is the remarkable fact that Rawls introduced Kazanistan into The Law of Peoples very late in the writing process.Footnote 6 Rawls had been working on this text since late 1991, having only addressed the subject once before in spring 1975 with a graduate student.Footnote 7 It was delivered as a 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lecture and then published with the year's six other lectures as On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993;Footnote 8 an abridged version appeared in Critical Inquiry.Footnote 9 Islam and Muslims (never mind Kazanistan) were entirely absent from the 1992–3 iterations of The Law of Peoples. Rawls repeatedly confessed in his letters that he felt this essay was rushed, of inferior quality, and that he did it because it was for a charitable cause; throughout the 1990s, he reminded interlocutors that he probably agreed with their criticisms.Footnote 10
In 1993, Rawls presented a draft at a workshop at NYU. In 1995, he offered a three-part seminar at Princeton University and undertook another major round of revisions. He continued to work on the text regularly, and was finally satisfied with Part I in summer 1997.Footnote 11 Finally, from fall 1997 through the summer of 1998, he made another major set of revisions, including inventing Kazanistan in Part II, before the text would be published in 1999.
Based on the multiple drafts, correspondences, and annotated articles preserved in the Rawls Papers, this article tells the archival story of how Kazanistan was introduced only in March 1998. Scholarship in the present historicist turn of “Rawls studies” has focused primarily on the early- and mid-career Rawls—an important turn, but one in which his book-length attempt at thinking globally has remained un-historicized, un-provincialized, and unexamined in light of his papers. By focusing on John Rawls, perhaps the analytic political philosopher of the century, my aim is to treat Rawls as a case study and thereby shed light on the politics of philosophy.
The story has three layers. By outlining Rawls's conversations and networks, this article reconstructs the disciplinary and other pressures that compelled Rawls to think internationally in the first place. His journey wound through the crisscrossing paths of American discourses about “Islam” in global politics and the liberal framing of multiculturalism, human rights, and women's rights in “non-Western” contexts more broadly.
Second, by mapping Rawls's journey, this article recovers his actual method in researching “Islam” and developing a hypothetical Muslim people. If Rawls's engagement with Islam was haphazard, circuitous, contingent, and messy, this messiness is a counterpoint to the aesthetics of rigor, sharpness, universalism, and simplicity in ideal theory's analytic methods—with which Rawls presents Kazanistan and liberal societies.
Third, by stressing the array of scholarly sources about Islam that Rawls assembled and studied, this story sheds light on how interdisciplinarity can elide the politics of knowledge production in other disciplines. In particular, it shows the kind of interdisciplinarity by which ideal theory—as seen in its exemplary practitioner—relates to other disciplines to construct other peoples. On the one hand, Rawls's sources and readings represent a variety of disciplines; comparing them to Kazanistan shows how a philosopher translates the empirical material and historical arguments of area studies into a philosophical discourse. The translation, we will see, is extractive: it presents its terms for constructing other peoples as uncontroversial data, divorcing these terms from the scholarly and political debates, American foreign-policy interests, and ideological frames to which they belong. On the other hand, Rawls's sources and readings are far from exhaustive. The silences and absences in his list of contemporaneous sources and texts are, indeed, just as important. This is not because citing them would have made Kazanistan more “accurate” or “representative” of the field or better grounded in reality or history. On the contrary, the debates about the politics of knowledge production raging on in Islamic studies, Middle East studies, history, anthropology, comparative literature, and religious studies would have challenged the very poseability of the question and the terms on which Rawls and other philosophers since sought to answer it. These debates would have brought other, more critical questions about empire, history, discourse, and positionality into view. The array of sources and silences foregrounds the relationships of the discipline of political philosophy to area studies, other disciplines, and the politics of knowledge production about Islam.
This article thus reconstructs Rawls's journey through his correspondence and sources. By reframing an American philosophical exercise about cultural difference in a historicist and ethnographic key, it treats the archive in terms of the philosophers’ own customs and culture; it approaches their modes of thinking, knowing, and reading as a window into the wider disciplinary culture of philosophy, or its process and production of disciplinary knowledge: what is read and how it is engaged, how arguments are legitimated and what they are situated in relation to. Charles Mills observes that “the abstractions of ideal theory are not innocent. Nor, as is sometimes pretended, have they simply descended from a celestial Platonic conceptual realm.”Footnote 12 Indeed, in the case of Kazanistan, the idealized abstraction of Islam emerges from Rawls's own history, from an ideologically limited set of texts, conversations, and political debates about Islam. The next two sections reconstruct Rawls's gradual engagement with Islam through correspondence about women's rights, multiculturalism, modernization, universalism, and consultation, including his initial engagement with the idea of shūrā or consultation in Islamic history. I then detail his exposure to this idea through articles preserved in the archive. The following two sections trace his conversations about consultation and toleration. The conversations were with a historian and a political philosopher—Roy Mottahedeh and Charles Beitz respectively; based on the extant correspondence and drafts in the archive, they were Rawls's main interlocutors on the topic, and it was through conversations with them that Rawls consolidated his discussions of Islam, invented Kazanistan, and reworked its details.Footnote 13 I conclude with a series of observations about Rawls's actual method in his incursion into comparative philosophy.
“Fully international”: women, Islam, liberalism
There is no Islam in the Amnesty Lecture, but Rawls's earliest mention based on the papers devoted to The Law of Peoples is in a casual reference in his introductory memo to participants at the 1993 NYU seminar. Here, he singled out Islam as problematic for women:
Among the things I need to do are: First, a fuller account of the requirements of a just consultation hierarchy in §§4–5 so as to include at least a note on how the rights and interests of women are consulted and given weight. This is especially important for Muslim and other countries. The denial of women's rights is, as the text says, one of the greatest evils and destructive of human welfare everywhere.Footnote 14
Neither Islam nor “Muslim countries” appears in this draft itself. In fact, Rawls put it differently and more generally: “the subjection of women [is] abetted by unreasonable religion.”Footnote 15 The discourse on women and Islam also figured in responses to Rawls, as with Bruce Ackermann's 1994 criticisms (quoted in an article in Rawls's archives):
The fact is that none of Rawls's “well-ordered” hierarchies will be free of natives who are themselves inspired by liberal ideas of liberty and equality. There is no Islamic nation without a woman who insists on equal rights … Sometimes these liberals will be in a minority in their native lands; but given the way Rawls defines a “well-ordered” hierarchy, it is even possible that native liberals might be a majority.Footnote 16
In 1995, Rawls only made two references to Islam, both in footnotes.Footnote 17 One is a reference to Leila Ahmed's 1992 book Women and Gender in Islam.Footnote 18 The footnote explains that many Muslims argue that the Islamic oppression of women is historical and not essential to Islam itself.
In 1993 and 1995, Islam thus appears primarily as a problem for women. It also appears as a challenge to a shared ethical language. At the 1995 Princeton seminar, Larry Temkin voiced his sympathy for Rawls's overall position but worried that
for Islamics [sic] and others, it may be claimed that you do “smuggle” in a “western” approach in the way you define and understand such notions as “decent and well-ordered”, or “reasonably endorse” or “fair equality” or “appropriate criteria of legitimacy.” With all these notions nonwestern views of them may differ significantly from western ones, in ways that undermine your claims to neutrality.Footnote 19
Muslims thus figure as oppressors of women or as instigating a crisis for American philosophy. Against both, Rawls presents a different Islam. Perhaps his attempt to show that his understandings of decency, well-orderedness, and reasonableness, and his criteria for their assessment, are generalizable and not provincial is part of what led him to Kazanistan. If Kazanistan stands in for “non-Western views” that accord with a “Western” view, then its culturalized and religious differences are not a threat. Importantly, the worry about provincialism is expressed in the idiom of values and views, or that American philosophy's definitions might betray neutrality and smuggle something in, rather than in how, across disciplines, such assumptions, grammars, and ideals can sanitize global hierarchies and facilitate dispossession.Footnote 20
Following the 1995 Princeton seminar, John Mikhail wrote to Rawls with detailed comments, including the reminder that Islam is not alone in oppressing women:
p. 77, note 41: There are many religious traditions which denigrate the status of women and, in effect, sanction their legal inequality. Given the sentence in the main text to which this note belongs, the fact that you mention only Islam in this note implies that Muslim societies alone are dispositive of the issue of the subjection of women in religious societies. This is unfortunate. I think avoiding this unintended implication by explicitly citing Islam only as an example of the point you are trying to make may be advisable.Footnote 21
Rawls would revise the note by adding that the status of women is “often” founded on religion or bears a close relation to religious views.Footnote 22 Across the next drafts, he clarified the main text to say that “consultation hierarchies” include women, and their procedures work to prevent the violation of women's human rights. The footnote to Leila Ahmed would remain in the published book.Footnote 23
When Rawls first sketched Kazanistan, in the first draft of March 1998, there is no reference to women.Footnote 24 In the penultimate draft of May, he imagines that “sometimes” dissent in Kazanistan led Kazani women to enjoy significant reforms, but they still do not have full equality:
More[o]ver, reasoned dissent has sometimes led to significant changes, most recently to the reforms in the rights and role of women in Kazanistan. The judiciary agreed with the dissenters that existing norms could not be squared with society's common good idea of justice. The position of women with respect to men is not yet equal, yet it is much more so than it was, and movement for change goes on.Footnote 25
The final version is more direct: “dissent has led to important reforms in the rights and role of women, with the judiciary agreeing that existing norms could not be squared with society's common good idea of justice.”Footnote 26 No longer is this “sometimes” the case, and no longer does he say that women are not yet equal. He also explains this as an example of how dissent can instigate change.
With these revisions, Rawls went from worrying about Islam and women, to affirming on Leila Ahmed's authority that an oppositional relationship between them is not essential, and finally to highlighting the possibility and yet peculiarity of an “idealized Islamic people” in which women are represented and almost equal.
These changes are compatible with Rawls's conversation with Martha Nussbaum in 1997 on the role of women's dissent abroad and liberalism's universal ambitions. Nussbaum reflected on her trip to India, where she met women living in poverty, “What I came away with was a very firm conviction that the ideas of the liberal tradition are fully international, and arise whenever people attempt to rise up against long-time caste or gender oppression. The ideas of autonomy, integrity, personhood, and self-definition were everywhere, no matter what the terminology used.”Footnote 27 Rawls assents,
I've never discussed the topic [of women internationally] except for §5 of the essay for Chicago, although the Law of Peoples mentions it now and then. I'm sure you are right that the ideas of the liberal tradition are fully international and, as you say, arise whenever people attempt to rise up against long-time gender or caste oppression. The experiences you tell of are immensely moving.Footnote 28
These comments, from Ackerman, Temkin, Mikhail, and Nussbaum, pushed Rawls to think about gender internationally, or in “cross-cultural context.” Although they pushed in different directions, Rawls attempted to navigate liberal feminist critiques of philosophy, Islam, and the global South. Perhaps these challenges—and offhand remarks—illuminate some of the pressures that pushed him to clarify the status of women in Islam, or rather Islam as a problem for women.
“This idea needs spelling out”: consultation hierarchies
Another of the earliest references to Islam is in an undated letter, probably from 1994, to Fernando R. Tesón about the Amnesty lecture.Footnote 29 Rawls writes that philosophers should not be dogmatic about human nature; pluralism requires that one not insist on or missionize Kantian, Millian, Islamic, or Christian perspectives:
I want to deny that a liberal society is founded on Kantian views of human nature; and I would say the same about the views of J. S. Mill, as well as of Christian and Islamic theologians, to mention only a few. We need to stop thinking that we can persu[a]de others to endorse our view. We cannot. One feature of modern democratic societies is the fact of reasonable pluralism: the fact under free institutions many diverse and conflicting comprehensive doctrines will exist.Footnote 30
He explained that he disagreed with Tesón's views that “the goal of humankind is a society of peoples all of whom are liberal, even in a Kantian way,” and that no other kind of society can be recognized “as a decent member of a reasonable society of peoples, with all the rights and immunities of other societ[ies].” But Rawls confessed that the 1993 essay's weakness is its vagueness about a decent hierarchical society and just consultation hierarchy: “I believe that one of the most serious faults of my essay is that I have not given an account of a just consultation hierarchy, and of the other essential aspects of what I call hierarchical societies, for example, more must be said about a common good conception of justice.”Footnote 31 Working out this possibility would be, for Rawls, the essay's contribution.
In the 1992 draft of the essay, Rawls only noted that such a society has a “good faith consultation hierarchy,” along with the marginal note “this idea needs spelling out.” At this point, he used “traditional societies” instead of “decent hierarchical” peoples.Footnote 32 Michael Doyle wrote to Rawls, objecting to his use of the adjective “traditional.” He recommended the category “civilized,” following John Stuart Mill.Footnote 33 Ever since Daniel Lerner and Clifford Geertz, Doyle explains, there is consensus that there are no “traditional” societies and that “tradition” itself is a modern invention. Doyle challenged Rawls with examples drawn from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia: “As I read your reference, I thought: Does he really want to refer to Morocco, Sikkim [in northeast India], Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Nepal?”Footnote 34 Perhaps Doyle's reference to states in which Islam is the dominant religion also prodded Rawls's interest in Islam.
For his part, Rawls agreed with Doyle:
About traditional society (the term): I have searched in vain for a good term & agree that this term has severe problems. Perhaps your “civilized autocracies” is better yet I don't feel comfortable with that either since they have—as described—a consultation hierarchy, they aren't really autocracies. But I will continue to think about this & may end up using your term. I suspect there is no good solution. However, I don't worry about there not being actually trad[itional] societies. There aren't actually any democracies either, as I describe them. We are talking about certain kinds of idealized societies in both cases.Footnote 35
On Doyle's letter, Rawls added a note to read a book by Fouad Ajami: “Add to Bib[liography]: Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament Cambridge UP 1992 (updated ed).” In contrast to scholarship that explored settler colonialism, the legacies of colonialism, and American interests in the Arab world for understanding its present, Ajami's accessible book argued that “the wounds that mattered were self-inflicted wounds.”Footnote 36 Rawls's handwritten note does not indicate any qualifications about the ideological backdrop of Ajami's interventions.
Ultimately, Rawls did not use Doyle's term, preferring a “neutral institutional label” instead. He wrote to Doyle in 1993,
I have adjusted to your criticisms in your letter of Oct 21 as follows. First, I dropped the label “traditional societies” and decided to use “hierarchical societies” instead. It seemed to me that your suggestion of civilized might have its own problems and that perhaps the neutral institutional label of “hierarchical” might be better. I should remark, however, that I wasn't bothered by your saying that after Lerner's work, no one thinks that traditional societies any longer exist; from my standpoint, the matter of existence is not itself crucial, as we are talking about idealized exemplars of societies. After all I doubt that there are any liberal democracies either by the criteria I use.Footnote 37
At this early stage of The Law of Peoples, Rawls gave no examples of a hierarchical and well-ordered society. In fact, he cites Hegel's discussions of counsel or consultation (Beratung) and the decision-making process (Beschließung), not the Muslim institution of shūrā, as the source for his “just consultation hierarchy.”Footnote 38
Here begins Rawls's experiment in comparativism. He expressed surprise to Tesón that “consultation” is a traditional Islamic institution: “Incidentally, I take the idea of such a hierarchy, as you can tell, from Hegel. I am told by a German friend [almost certainly the philosopher Wilfried Hinsch] that the term is also used by present day democratic movements in Islamic societies. An interesting (to me) coincidence, if true.”Footnote 39 This coincidence would further spur Rawls's interest in Islam. In fact, his pursuit of this idea would frame his hypothetical example of a decent hierarchical people.
In another letter from this period, Rawls noted that there are two ways forward: to present the liberal and hierarchical conceptions of justice as equally just relative to the person who holds either in his specific culture, or to say that the liberal conception is just and the hierarchical conception is sufficiently or minimally just to be recognized as reasonable or to preclude coercive intervention. The second possibility is “the easiest to defend,” Rawls wrote, and the one he would follow. He wondered, “I don't yet see how a just consultation hierarchy might go. I worry that we are too likely to think that our view must be right and so there must be another equally sound alternative[.] Why shouldn't there be more than one kind of just society? Is it a lack of our imagination?”Footnote 40
The idea of shūrā, it seems, offered this possibility.
Consultation 1: when liberal philosophy met liberal Islam
With these reflections, “Islam” migrated from absence (1993) to appearing in two footnotes (1995), and then to a handful of scattered discussions (1997–8) that would be largely consolidated in the text's primary hypothetical (1998). Rawls's “German friend,” Wilfried Hinsch, facilitated this transition.
Importantly, as we will see, the story is about multiple chance encounters. The idea of shūrā had been framed as Islam's democratic element by various reformers and was commonly translated as “consultation.” A German graduate student used this idea in a brief letter to the editor of a German newspaper; against the idea of Islamist totalitarianism, he pointed to Islamist democracy. Hinsch read the letter, and the article to which it responded, and gathered some scholarly articles around the topic. He happened to mention this to Rawls, who found the apparent overlap with Hegel on “consultation” interesting. Rawls read some articles and asked an Islam specialist who happened to also be at Harvard University for help.
Furthermore, Rawls, it seems, was largely unaware of the political backdrop to work on “Islam and democracy” and the popularization of its terms. On the one hand, the search for democracy in Islam, and the common trope that shūrā was democratic consultation, served as a defensive rejoinder to the orientalist and anti-Muslim idea that Islam tilts toward despotism or totalitarianism and that Muslims are inexperienced with self-rule or autonomy. On the other hand, this search also dovetailed with American foreign-policy interests in the Middle East, particularly in relation to the “promotion” of democracy, moderation, human rights, civil society, and American economic enterprise. Area studies and other research on “Islam” and “the Middle East” was thus siphoned through the broader projects of American hegemony, namely universalizing liberalism and globalizing social science.Footnote 41 The same is true of the discourse on “tolerance in Islam,” in its translation of any constellation of difference into a frame with early modern European history, as well as the subsequent polarization of Islam as intolerant, as needing to reform and become tolerant, or as having been the most tolerant.
On 9 September 1994, Hinsch alerted Rawls to the institution of shūrā:
Enclosed you'll find a couple of copies from my file “Islam and Democracy”. Isn't it amazing how close the notion of “shuria” [sic] seems to be to your idea of “hierarchies of consultation”. The newspaper article by Tibi and the responding letter by Wenzel-Teuber made me first aware of the idea of consultation in Islamic religious thinking. Tibi, as far as I can tell from his books, is not really a serious scholar. He is serious and he is a scholar, but certainly he is not a serious scholar. He is writing a lot about these issues, though. The other papers certainly deserve more attention. It should be fairly easy for you to get a more complete picture of what “shuria” [sic] is about, if you follow up the references.Footnote 42
The articles on shūrā (not to be confused with sharīʿa) that Hinsch copied for Rawls are among those archived in Box 15, Folder 6, “Islam and consultation hierarchy [1991–4 and undated].”Footnote 43 The folder contains a newspaper double-page-spread article by Bassam Tibi, a German international-relations public intellectual, whose work constructs an opposition between the sovereignty of God for Islamic fundamentalists, and European democracy and rule of law.Footnote 44 A response by Wendelin Wenzel-Teuber, published one week later, observes that some Muslim intellectuals treat consultation (Beratung) as a compulsory Islamic duty.Footnote 45 (Wenzel-Teuber was a graduate student at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, writing a dissertation on Islamic ethics and modern society in Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī's Islamism.) The article and response have Hinsch's markups, but not Rawls's. On scrap paper, Rawls also recorded four references on “Islam & Consultation Hierarchy”: the first is Roy Mottahedeh's chapter on consultation, discussed below, then recommendations from Noor Dhanani: “John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path; Hassan Turabi, Islamic State; Prof Frank Vogel, Law School does Islamic Law.”
The folder's academic articles are disciplinarily eclectic, but each discusses, and in some cases embraces, the interpretation of shūrā as the democratic reservoir internal to Islam, through which Islamic reformation is possible. Although all of these authors might not identify as “liberal,” the grammar of this argument belongs to liberalism and reflects scholarly and popular debates about the status of Islam.Footnote 46 The texts reflect the popularization of “tolerant Islam,” “Islamic reform,” “moderation in Islam,” and Islam's “compatibility” with democracy as idioms in early 1990s social-science and area-studies discourse.
On the one hand, Rawls's reliance on these articles as neutral descriptions elides the politics of their arguments. These arguments emerged, sometimes only obliquely, as reactions against contemporaneous orientalist ideas about antidemocratic, fundamentalist, and fanatic Islam. Their conceptual grammars accepted the centrality of Islam and moderation, consultation, and democratization for the analysis of Muslim-majority countries and prescriptions for institutional or religious reform. When Rawls mentions shūrā, he lifts it without comment from this discursive context, but in the same mold of centering Islam's relevance and insufficiency.
And on the other hand, the articles’ own uses of this vocabulary forget its earlier genealogy. As Mohammed Abed al-Jabri observes, the formula “democracy = shūrā” has its genealogy in the projects of nineteenth-century, colonized Muslim reformers. Some sought to tame the political force of “democracy” by calling it shūrā and others to lionize a politics of authenticity by insisting on the superiority of shūrā: the search for “parallels or approximations for [European liberal concepts] in ‘old’ Arab–Islamic thought” was either to “build bridges between the two cultures” and dilute democratic rule to mere consultation, or to avow “absolute loyalty to the ‘authentic’ Arab–Islamic words” and cut off the idea from its European development.Footnote 47 Further, as Joseph Massad argues, the discourse of “tolerant Islam” and of “tolerance in Islam” took hold in European liberal and colonial discourse as a means of controlling colonies, weakening the Ottoman Empire, and producing a pacified Islamic theology consistent with European interests.Footnote 48
These earlier contexts are erased in the articles—and the articles’ own disciplinary politics are erased in Rawls's use of their ideas.
The articles preserved in this folder come from multiple disciplinary perspectives. They are by John Esposito and James Piscatori from religious studies and politics, Akeel Bilgrami from philosophy, Khaled Abou El Fadl from law, Gernot Rotter from Islamic studies,Footnote 49 and Roy Mottahedeh from history. Esposito and Piscatori offer a broad overview of the “compatibility” of Islam and democracy, or “divine sovereignty” versus “popular sovereignty,” through a survey of modern reinterpretations of shūrā. Most Muslims, they aver, would agree that “consultative government is central to the Islamic state,” and the West, they caution, should avoid “radicalizing” Muslim movements either by supporting local government efforts to thwart Muslims’ participation or by dividing them into “good Muslims” aligned with Western interests and “bad Muslims” to be excluded.Footnote 50 Rawls underlined these points in his copy.
The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami describes the difference between “Islamic absolutists (or ‘fundamentalists’)” and Muslim “moderates.” He notes that Muslims need to “distinguish between different aspects of their faith in a way that allows for its doctrinal reform.” He calls for an “Islamic reformation” that would “reopen the gates of ijtihad” (legal reasoning) by particularizing (in effect, abrogating) the later Medinan verses of the Quran and following the earlier Meccan verses—common arguments in the context of calls for a “Muslim reformation” and “liberal Islam.”Footnote 51 Rawls highlighted Bilgrami's call for the “doctrinal reform” of “moderate Islam” so that it can better stand against “Islamic absolutism.”Footnote 52
Rawls also recorded that Bilgrami recommended Abdullahi an-Naim's Toward an Islamic Reformation; he read the book in 1997.Footnote 53 Rawls would go on to cite it in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” to illustrate how a religion can endorse a “reasonable constitutional democracy,” in that an-Naim argues that Muslims should treat the Meccan period of Muḥammad as fundamental and normative, in which “Shari'a supports constitutional democracy,” in favor of the later Medina teachings as merely “realistic and practical.”Footnote 54
In a third article, Rawls underlined the scholar of Islamic law Khaled Abou El Fadl's discussion of “orthodoxy in Islam” as the product of a “process of consensus building in Islamic society,” and that in liberal democracies, Muslim minorities who subscribe to a “Sharia-based comprehensive view” should exercise “self-restraint” in order to reconcile this view with liberal democracy's commitment to accessibility and reciprocity. According to Abou El Fadl's interpretation, the Quran requires Muslims to engage in “mutual consultation (shura)” about enjoining good and forbidding wrong, which are held individually and collectively. This dynamic process produces a consensus that then becomes orthodoxy, and because consultation is ongoing, this can instigate a new consensus.Footnote 55
The authors neither specify a particular disciplinary or political context against which they write, nor reflect on the broader political terrain in which their arguments are implicated. Nonetheless, such arguments about the moderating effect of inclusion, the need for reformation, and the doctrinally sanctioned place of individual consultation did not emerge out of a vacuum in the early 1990s. On the one hand, they all implicitly argue against the view of a zero-sum struggle between Islam and liberal democracy. From Bernard Lewis's 1990 “The Roots of Muslim Rage” and Samuel Huntington's 1993 “A Clash of Civilizations?” to scholarship that narrates Islam as a history of religiously inspired violence, the idea was that Islam is essentially and violently incompatible with modern democracy. This idea forms the implicit, ideological backdrop to (counter)arguments that this is not the case because Islam can be reformed.
Indeed, on the other hand, each article suggests the transformability of Islam through shūrā, whether as an ongoing Muslim debate, a Muslim need, or a Muslim practice. From surveying a range of social movements that mobilize Islam as a superior form of democracy, to a call for Muslim moderates who follow an apolitical Islam, to the idea that Islam always and already is predicated on participation and consultation, the articles present the possibility of “good Islam.” Each broadly participates in the 1990s discourse about Islam and democracy, which framed the question of Islam in relation to its compatibility with, or vernacularization of, ideas already considered universal and desirable, and which had become fundamental to American foreign-policy interests.
Consultation 2: “different paths lead to toleration”
These points about the politics of knowledge production about Islam become clearer with the folder's three articles by Roy Mottahedeh, Rawls's colleague in the History Department at Harvard. Rawls's shifting descriptions of Islam relied heavily on these pieces. The first is a 1993 chapter, “Consultation and the Political Process in the Islamic Middle East of the 9th, 10th, and 11th Centuries.” (The handwritten bibliographic annotation on the xerox suggests that this piece, unlike the other two by Mottahedeh, was sent by Hinsch.) Mottahedeh surveys ideas of consultation and assembly in classical Islamic texts to describe “the powerlessness of consultation” in the premodern context, or the structures of power through which the ruler disarms consultation and configures consensus.Footnote 56 This chapter likely informs Rawls's footnote about shūrā as a caliphal institution for the powerful and the inefficacy of consultation “in Islamic political institutions”: “The procedure of consultation is often mentioned in discussions of Islamic political institutions; yet it is clear that the purpose of consultation is often so that the Caliph can obtain a commitment of loyalty from his subjects, or sometimes so that he can discern the strength of the opposition.”Footnote 57 This footnote appeared as early as 1995 and remained (with minor copyedits) in the final edition.Footnote 58
The second Mottahedeh chapter, also from 1993, is “Toward an Islamic Theology of Toleration.”Footnote 59 Mottahedeh argues that an-Naim did not go far enough: not only did pre-modern Muslim thinkers support limited toleration, as an-Naim argues, but also principles that support “full toleration” and “full equality before the law … can find strong theological roots in the pre-modern Islamic tradition.” Mottahedeh's argument prefigures what, particularly after 9/11, became routine in liberal narratives about a good, “tolerant Islam,”Footnote 60 including the defensive posture that premodern Muslims were “more tolerant” than their Christian counterparts—a point that Rawls underlined in both copies. He also underlined the “principles” that Mottahedeh adduces from his interpretation of selections from the Quran and a mix of Quranic commentaries, Sufi Persian texts, and prophetic Ḥadīth collections. Mottahedeh thus locates the liberal conception of difference (“toleration”) as having always been inside this specially curated collection of Arabic and Persian texts (“Islamic tradition”): “The author, on the contrary, hopes that the essay provides Muslims, and admirers of Islam, whether they espouse full toleration or not, [with the resources?] to say: ‘The option of full toleration has long existed in the Islamic tradition.’”Footnote 61
Mottahedeh also shared with Rawls the draft proposal for a project that would extend these arguments about toleration. Mottahedeh sought “an Islamic theory of pluralism and toleration” grounded in “new ways of interpreting that tradition, in which nothing need be fully and finally tagged to be discarded or kept, and through which each individual is free to seek his or her own interpretation.” His project would locate the roots of this inside Islam; that is, not in liberalism, Protestantism, Europe, or colonialism, but in “the classical Islamic tradition,” thereby dissolving “an artificial confrontation between a defensive traditionalism and a Europeanizing liberalism.”Footnote 62 The “rediscovery” of this other Islam would anachronistically retrofit “Islamic” sources into a liberal grammar of toleration and conflict.
Rawls first cites Mottahedeh's toleration essay in the 1997 draft. In this pre-Kazanistan iteration, Rawls concluded the text by turning to Islamic toleration under the heading “Reconciliation to Realistic Utopia.”Footnote 63 Rawls describes what it means to be “reconciled” with the world, or to acknowledge pluralism “both between and within liberal and decent peoples”: “Many different paths can lead to toleration. One way found in Islam some centuries ago affirms the worthiness of all decent religions and provides the essentials of what reconciliation to realistic utopia requires,” and he then lists Mottahedeh's principles.Footnote 64 In the previous footnote, he notes that Catholicism since the 1960s and “some forms of Protestantism, Judaism and Islam” acknowledge and affirm pluralism.Footnote 65 (On the back of a scrap page numbered “45” from a draft perhaps as early as 1996, Rawls describes a theology that is “tolerant” with an incomplete citation of Mottahedeh; the principles are listed, but without any mention of Islam.)Footnote 66 Rawls, we will see, redirected this discussion into the core of “Kazanistan.”
These texts, then, represent the constellation of ideas to which Rawls was most exposed in his theorization of Islam. With the gradual infiltration of Islam into the drafts, the brief asides and footnotes would soon become an entire hypothetical apparatus. If Kazanistan, as an abstract philosophical device, masks the debates and ideological backdrop of these articles, ideal theory, in this iteration, is both indebted to and quietly structured by the politics of scholarship about Islam and area studies. Scholars of Islam and the Middle East were compelled to discuss “Islam” in terms of the ideas of consultation, moderation, and toleration, especially in public-facing work. The terms of discourse were already set by the orientalist construction of Islam and were always interventions in American foreign policy. As Rawls read scholarship that engaged these ideas on Islam and democracy, he seemed unaware of the political pressures that shaped the terms of these disciplinary discussions.
Philosophy's “consultation hierarchy”
Throughout the development of The Law of Peoples, Rawls consulted colleagues, primarily in philosophy. Charles Beitz was among those who offered extensive comments. Beitz felt that the above-mentioned passage on Islamic toleration, at the end of the 1997 draft, was out of place. He comments,
(2) what does the passage on Islamic toleration (from Mottahedeh) contribute to the discussion at this stage? … why place the illustration here? It might have come, instead, in the discussion of the extension to decent hierarchical societies in Part II, perhaps in the section on a decent consultation hierarchy. It might illustrate the “wider basis of human rights” spoken about there …Footnote 67
Rawls gave Beitz's suggestion a twist. He wrote along the margins of Beitz's comment,
DONE
in Kazanistan
The apparent coincidence between Hegel's consultation hierarchy and shūrā, the search for toleration in Islam, and the concern about Muslim women became a winding path that led Rawls to Kazanistan. In his 8 March reply to Beitz, Rawls enthusiastically agreed: “Already I can see that you are right about my discussing an Islamic view of toleration. It doesn't belong where I put it, but rather in a brief description of a decent society, named ‘Kazanistan’, which is said to be Muslim. To be decent needs to tolerate other faiths. Mott[a]hedeh's example belongs there.”Footnote 68
The next day, 9 March, Rawls wrote to Roy Mottahedeh, as an Islam expert. The letter mentions that Mottahedeh had previously helped Rawls, and that now an example of a decent people is necessary for a “longish essay on what I call the Law of Peoples”: “I am having trouble meeting their request and feel my project collapses if I cannot” offer one:
So my question is whether a somewhat imaginary account of an Islamic society would fit the bill. In brief, are there any Islamic countries that either now, or in history, might be illustrated by Kazanistan, as I call it? (See the enclosures.) Might the rulers of Kazanistan recognize my description as an idealized form of what they tried to do in their best moments? I am quite sure that Islamic government of the kind I describe would be allowed by Islamic law, but have there been any actual examples?
If this query about Kazanistan does not interest you or is too much, throw all this stuff away. You have [been] very kind in helping me in the past and I understand if I may ask too much. I am grateful for your sending me a xerox of your book, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, and that by Muhammed S. El-Awa.[Footnote 69] Eventually perhaps I'll get it right.Footnote 70
Rawls enclosed a two-page document titled “4. Example of a Decent Hierarchical People.” It outlines Kazanistan. He also sent Mottahedeh the full draft of The Law of Peoples. In the two-page draft (March 1998), the discussion of “Islamic toleration” that had previously ended the book was now moved to a footnote on Kazanistan, where it would remain. (Mottahedeh's response is not in the archives. Rawls recorded a phone number; and in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” his acknowledgement to Mottahedeh suggests verbal communication.)
In July, Rawls outlined to Beitz the revisions he had made: “Perhaps the Pt. most changed is Pt. II with its example of a decent Muslim people of Kazanistan which I hope doesn't seem too outrageous. I think we have [to] speak to these people.”Footnote 71 One month later, Beitz responded, “the improvements and changes in this version make your position both clearer and more persuasive. (I like Kazanistan. Perhaps, as you say, it will strike some readers as outrageous, but it's hardly objectionably so, and it serves your purposes well.)”Footnote 72 Rawls replied a week later, “You found Kazanistan not objectionably outrageous, good and I am happy to think it serves its purpose well.”Footnote 73
In the May 1998 draft, Rawls added more details to Kazanistan, including a footnote to Bernard Lewis's The Middle East, to justify Kazanistan's interpretation of jihād as a spiritual obligation rather than a military one.Footnote 74 (I have not found Lewis's books in Rawls's personal library.Footnote 75 It is, of course, possible that he used the Harvard Library or someone else's copy.) Whereas Lewis skeptically locates the spiritual reading of jihād as a predominantly modern and marginal revisionism, Rawls mistakenly attributes to Lewis the view that this is an old and common Islamic doctrine.Footnote 76
Nonetheless, the reference to Lewis is noteworthy for two related reasons. It accepts Lewis as the authority on “Islam,” and it sheds light on the politics of knowledge production between disciplines. Given Lewis's reputation and the accessibility of his work to nonspecialists, a reference to him is not surprising, though the lateness of adding Lewis (and jihād) in the revision process is striking. Perhaps it indicates how long a shadow Lewis cast on other disciplines in the late twentieth century, so that liberalism's philosopher had to appeal to orientalism's historian for permission to discuss Islam, or perhaps Rawls was unaware of these politics. Indeed, much of the work on Islamic reformation, consultation hierarchy, and toleration in the 1990s American discourses about Islam was written in reaction to orientalist narratives and scholarship epitomized by Bernard Lewis's books and popular writings. The highly stylized structure of Lewis's narratives suggests an Islam that needs to but cannot reform into modernity; this other scholarship pursues that reformation, oftentimes in a publicly accessible and politically relevant key. Rawls himself does not make explicit the connection between Lewis and the democratization discourse; probably inadvertently, he folds orientalist and reformist literatures into the same hypothetical, as if to say (albeit incorrectly), that even Lewis acknowledges that Islam has been or can be otherwise. Lewis, Mottahedeh, an-Naim, and Hegel erect his hypothetical's pillars.
Conclusion: idealization, comparison, knowledge production
Rawls's prefatory comment about Muslim women and his interest in shūrā expanded, footnote by footnote, through Rawls's own consultation procedure. An interpretation of Islamic history, informed by a handful of scholars from American Islamic studies, provides the raw material through which this ideal theoretical picture of Islam is legitimated. The Ottoman Empire is thus marshaled, starting in the 15 May 1998 manuscript, as an example of how Islam has been or can be “tolerant,”Footnote 77 rather than for broader reflections about toleration, its mechanisms or contexts or institutional arrangements, or its discursive relations to religion, difference, empire, or history.
It is helpful here to take a step back and make three broader observations (and, as may be the case, provocations). These are about the accidents in Rawls's journey to Islam, the politics of his sources about Islam, and the politics of philosophy in translating these sources.
First, Rawls's papers do not clearly answer why he turned to Islam. They indicate a historical story of chance suggestions, personal networks, and contingency. Kazanistan is the by-product of accidents. Rawls first wrote the name down in March 1998, though he had been reworking the essay since 1992. The literatures on “global justice” and “international relations” pushed Rawls to identify tolerable non-liberals; he then found himself trying to learn about Islamic theology and history. Perhaps contemporaneous challenges to the norms of analytic political philosophy by multiculturalist and liberal feminist critics provided another impetus. Although Rawls does not cite them, Bernard Lewis's “The Roots of Muslim Rage” and “A Clash of Civilizations?” by Samuel Huntington—Rawls's colleague in Harvard's Department of Government—molded the terms of public- and foreign-policy discourse in the 1990s; perhaps, in response, Kazanistan offers a vision of “good” Muslims with almost liberal values (though it is striking that Rawls's tolerable Muslims are either ancient or fictional).Footnote 78
The Rawls Papers indicate a philosopher being pushed in various directions—toward liberal universalism by Kantian absolutists, toleration by liberal pluralists, a global hierarchy of democracies and autocracies by democratic peace experts, a narrative of Islamic expansionism and moral decline by orientalists, the corollary call for Islamic reformation by liberal Muslims, and the problem of Islam for women by feminist internationalists. In stark contrast to the clean rhetorical lines that demarcate Kazanistan's features in the final draft, the discussions and footnotes on consultation hierarchy and toleration circuitously wandered across various parts of the text before they were constituted as belonging together.
Second, from the perspective of disciplinary “rigor,” Rawls was diligent. He read articles and books about Islam, primarily those recommended by colleagues, adding to his personal bibliography, and he consulted an expert. Perhaps this archival genealogy of Kazanistan suggests Islam's place in American philosophical and public discourse, for the selection is skewed. With the exception of Leila Ahmed's book—important for its time—it neglects agenda-setting work across multiple disciplines that troubled orientalist assumptions, beyond the discourses on Muslim women, Islamic expansionism, or Islamic reformation.
A handful of exemplary texts across disciplines illuminate the challenges and alternative frameworks for conceptualizing Islam as well as the self-awareness about the ideological functions of the academic study of Islam.
Consider the following works: Marshall Hodgson's posthumously published three-volume The Venture of Islam (1974) would have disrupted the orientalist grammar of understanding Islam simply in terms of toleration and violence, never mind the idea of an “idealized Islamic people” in a vacuum. Hodgson was an Islamicist and historian at the University of Chicago who put Islamic history in a world-historical frame. Moving beyond ideas of competing civilizations, Islam's essence, and presumptions about progress and modernity, he examined the dynamism of social institutions, structures, and practices that included Muslims and non-Muslims. His hundred-page introduction is rich with methodological warnings about scholarly precommitments, the political history of Western scholarship on Islam, and Eurocentric periodization and concepts. All this would have also offered an alternative mode of apprehending Islamic history and society and the relationship of Muslims and non-Muslims.
Albert Hourani's intellectual history, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (1962), would require accounting for Kazanistan's relation to European hegemony and colonialism. Hourani, the preeminent Middle East historian at the University of Oxford, historicized the rise of Muslim liberal thought among colonized thinkers and its strands, contexts, and opponents. (Hourani was also among those who engaged with Hodgson's three volumes as a watershed publication.Footnote 79)
Against the narrative of Muslim stagnation—implied in Rawls's understanding of Muslim history and Kazanistan's exceptionalism—Wael Hallaq's 1984 “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” showed that novel independent legal reasoning did not disappear in the tenth century. He overturned the dominant wisdom that Islamic law had “ossified,” showing instead that jurists remained hermeneutically dynamic. Likewise, as Zachary Lockman notes, Albert Hourani's germinal work in social history from the 1950s and 1960s upended the narrative of late Ottoman decline and a Muslim “dark age,” according to which Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 ushered in modernity; Hourani drew attention to important transformations in the century prior.Footnote 80
Against both totalizing and nominalist constructions of Islam, Talal Asad's “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” (1986) called Islam a “discursive tradition.” What becomes understood as orthodox or heterodox, he pointed out, must always be analyzed within structures and relations of power. He also suggested that anthropologists of Islam should begin where (real, not imaginary) Muslims do—from the idea of Islam as a discursive tradition. His Genealogies of Religion (1993), meanwhile, would challenge how Rawls presents gender, violence, and toleration in Kazanistan as naturally about religion. It showed the historical contingency behind what gets coded as religious practice and belief.
There were, then, a set of crucial interventions about “Islam” across disciplines: Islamic studies, world history, social history, intellectual history, Islamic law, anthropology, and religious studies. This is to say nothing of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), or comparative literature and postcolonial studies, the impact of which on analytic philosophy and ideal theory remains minimal to this day. Said's books would have alerted Rawls to a long history of white Europeans and Americans representing Islam to negotiate their own identities and to the role of Muslims as useful enemies and foils for ideological ends both domestically and internationally—a history in which Rawls was, perhaps unknowingly, participating. Rather than a discourse about non-liberal Muslims who are tolerable because they tolerate their minorities, Rawls would have addressed the history of this image of Muslims as oppressors of minorities and its location in American interests. Furthermore, Said's 1980 popular essay “Islam through Western Eyes” argued that American discourses about Islam were ideological; the Orient had geopolitical and material significance for the United States, Britain, and France. Their discourses were split between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” both of which reductively posited a correct view of Islam and operated with the same errors as orientalism. Kazanistan fits directly into this story and its discursive structures.
The absence of these sources—their arguments, what these arguments represent—speaks to the politics of disciplines. These are not only the politics of whom the philosopher cites as an authority in the study of Islam, though that is certainly a part. As Edward Said writes, “Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors.”Footnote 81 These are also the politics of ignoring—or being ignorant of—critiques in each of the other disciplines of their involvement with empire, orientalism, and American foreign-policy interests, especially in scholarship about Islam. Rawls was concerned that not paying attention to peoples and traditions outside “the West” was parochial and unimaginative, but attention to these other texts would have indicated that the terms of his engagement and of posing the question were themselves parochial and ideologically derivative. Whether in provincializing Euro-American categories and periodization in the study of Islam, anatomizing the politics surrounding representations of Islam, or offering narratives and histories that exceed the hoary thematization of “Islam and liberal democracy,” each text reflects on the politics of American knowledge production about Islam. Taking these sources seriously—their theoretical, methodological, and historical challenges—would not have made Kazanistan more accurate; that is not the example's aim. Perhaps any Kazanistan would have been impossible. At the very least, Kazanistan's motivating question, what kind of non-liberals should liberals tolerate, would have been less straightforward, and the ideological partisanship of asking whether Islam can endorse public reason would have been more apparent.
Precisely as the founder of Kazanistan, Rawls was also a subject of orientalism.
Nonetheless, Rawls found his way to a different body of work: scholarship on Islamic consultation hierarchy, jihād, and toleration. Such work spoke to the political moment's concern with Islam's overlap with liberalism or compatibility with democracy. The broader debates they reflect and the ideological work they perform might not have been legible to an outsider. The terms of these bodies of work traveled, apparently with little friction, into an analytic philosophical hypothetical that simplifies those terms and treats them as if they are neutral.
Kazanistan is thus the outcome of one sort of interdisciplinarity, but the result is a redisciplining within the limits of philosophy. Kazanistan is abstracted as an “idealized Islamic people”; the archival trace indicates that it is abstracted out of a small set of sources and a discursive context in which some scholars from multiple disciplines tried to read shūrā as democracy and jihād as pacific. Charles Mills observes that ideal theory's assumptions are “unavoidably an abstraction from the European and Euro-American experience of modernity”;Footnote 82 Kazanistan is an ideal theoretic attempt to abstract from a Muslim context. Rather than an ideal theory that simply “abstracts away from social oppression,”Footnote 83 Kazanistan assumes a default condition of social oppression and violent expansionism in Islam, and then offers a reformed Islam without social oppression and violence. This ideal theoretic attempt treats its starting assumption about Islam and social oppression as a neutral position, abstracting away from Euro-American discourses about Islam and from their politics.
Third, we see that Rawls had his own “consultation” process and it has its own “hierarchy.” The deference to expertise is naive about the politics of knowledge production. He was concerned that Kazanistan is too unreal; he consulted an Islamic studies historian. He was concerned that Kazanistan might be outrageous; a fellow non-Muslim analytic philosopher thought it inoffensive. This consultation hierarchy erases the politics of knowledge production, not only of Islamic studies, its backdrop, and the arguments or examples it recognizes, but also of Rawls's consultation hierarchy itself. It does not reflect on or account for the politics of its knowledge production.
The Rawls–Mottahedeh exchange shows that Kazanistan translates Mottahedeh's historical–political project—locating an Islamic variant of liberal toleration in Islamic history—into an abstract hypothetical. Rather than Mottahedeh's assertion that Islam had an indigenous doctrine of toleration (and thus might recover it as its own), Rawls's tolerant Muslim people are a “what-if” exercise. Mottahedeh tries to use an account of history to reform Islam; Rawls takes that Islam and imagines it as exceptional, but without any social or historical context. The exchange indicates the philosophical exercise's inability to transcend the politics of disciplines and knowledge production. This limit is set by a method that erases the politics of its source material. The translation of expertise into philosophy neglects the ideological underpinning that grounds the political projects of the experts in the first place, as well as their own implication in the discourse about reforming Islam.
Likewise, Rawls confessed to Beitz that he thinks “we” have to speak to “these people.” Whether “these people” are all Muslims, liberal Muslims, Islamists, or scholars of Islam (such as Mottahedeh), it is difficult to conclude that Kazanistan either does or can. The hypothetical represents fictional Muslims to whom Rawls perhaps paradoxically also wished to speak. Rather than “cross-cultural dialogue”—itself a fraught rhetorical device and an entire political machinery—Kazanistan suggests that ideal theory on religious others offers a monologue. It informs other analytic philosophers what Muslims would have to be in order to be tolerable. The discourse might include a Muslim historian or philosopher in the footnotes, but its terms and audience are already set by ideal theory.
If this history offers any lessons, it is that political theorists and philosophers interested in Islam must, I think, attend to the politics of comparison through which they turn their gaze to the rest of the world.Footnote 84 This means that they should not neglect the politics of knowledge production and its layers: the politics underlying the sources they study, those structuring the secondary sources they consult, and those structuring their own thought and situatedness. This genealogical sketch of Kazanistan through the archives, then, highlights the importance of a genealogical sensibility for political theorists and intellectual historians interested in Islam. Their interest is never outside the Muslim question.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the staff at the Harvard University Archives for their help during my multiple visits. I visited the archive to research Kazanistan and Rawls on Islam in fall 2014. I presented my archival discoveries to the University of Virginia Political Theory Colloquium in spring 2015. I returned to the archives in spring 2015 and again in spring 2018. Versions of my papers on Kazanistan and my archival findings have been presented numerous times and have been in circulation for a few years, most recently at APT (2018), CSPT–Toronto (2018), Critical Conversations @ IAS (2018), IAS Social Science Seminar (2019), APSA (2019), APT (2019), and the University of Michigan (2019). This research was supported by a fellowship from the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University (2014–15), the Violence/Non-violence Mellon Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University (2014–15), funding from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia (2015, 2018), and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018–19) funded by the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study. For conversations about my findings, I am grateful to Banu Bargu, Ronald Beiner, Hiba Bou Akar, Robin Celikates, Daniel Cohen, Rodrigo Cordero, Will Deringer, Beshara Doumani, Stefan Eich, Mohammad Fadel, Didier Fassin, Alex Fattal, Jason Frank, Adom Getachew, Nick Harris, Axel Honneth, Ulas Ince, James Ingram, Humeira Iqtidar, Rahel Jaeggi, Leigh K. Jenco, Deme Kasimis, Munirah Khayyat, Hagar Kotef, Theresa Krueggeler, Andrew March, Inder Marwah, Jeanne Morefield, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Jennifer Rubenstein, Elias G. Saba, Noah Salomon, Joan Scott, Chris Taylor, Megan C. Thomas, Max Tomba, Ali Wick, Melissa Williams, Jessica Winegar, and Rebecca Woods; the editors of this forum, Teresa Bejan, Sophie Smith, and Annette Zimmermann; and the editors of this journal.
