The Languages of Political Islam.

• Author: Yavari, Neguin
• Position: Book review

The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800. By MUZAFFAR ALAM. Chicago: UNIVERSITY of CHICAGO PRESS, 2004. Pp. 244. $55 (cloth); $25 (paper).

A modern history of Islamic political thought remains to be written. Medieval Islamic texts are not read as "windows unto worldviews," in Quentin Skinner's words, nor do we have, for a better understanding of the modern or medieval period, detailed studies of the way political concepts have changed over time. This is in stark contrast with the way such studies have dominated European intellectual history in the past three centuries, contributing along the way to the popularization of liberalism itself and the propagation of enlightenment values. In his 2005 study Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example, Paul Strohm describes the evolution of the imagery of the "wheel of fortune" to demonstrate the gradual ascendancy of the king over the wheel, especially clearly exhibited in the drawings that accompany the texts, and, on that basis, argues for the incremental rationalization of political discourse almost a century before Machiavelli. On this side of the border, the wheel of fortune, also a much-used metaphor, is dismissed, if at all mentioned, as a mere literary embellishment, a static metaphor incapable of offering differing nuances in different contexts.

Given this bleak background, Muzaffar Alam's study on Islamic thought in India from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century is a courageous venture. It would be unfair to expect it to define the parameters of inquiry, identify thought-provoking questions, and answer them all at the same time. We know it is an important book, however, when even its shortcomings mirror the deeper political problems confronting the present-day study of Islam.

The questions that open the book probe the past in order to prescribe for the future: Can one find consensual precepts and frameworks in Islamic intellectual traditions to encourage liberal, tolerant, and cosmopolitan Islam: would they be robust enough to bear the foundation of modern Islamic political thought, endowing it with its own distinct vocabulary and conceptual framework; and would they be attractive enough to meet the expectations of the political public?

These preoccupations reverberate throughout the book which consists of four loosely connected chapters, an introduction, and a short conclusion. A major topic is advice literature, from Nizam al-Mulk's eleventh-century Siyar al-muluk, to political treatises of the latter half of Mughal rule (1526-1828). There is a sharp thematic division into two literary groups, those on akhlaq that favor religious tolerance, and the citlab group, which in the author's view promotes Islamic orthodoxy and the eradication of all heresy. In the latter corpus "the term sharfa is used in its narrow and legalistic sense. In this tradition of writings, too, there are certainly unmistakable borrowings from the non-Islamic world. ... Yet, crucially, they fail to question the basis of juridical sharfa or provide anew definition of it. For this reason it seems to me unjustified to club the two sets of writings together within the same category" (p. 12). Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's (d. 672/1274) Nasirean Ethics and the akhlaq texts in general, "represented in...