What Is Islam? On Shahab Ahmed’s The Importance of Being Islamic — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/01/what-is-islam-on-shahab-ahmeds-the-importance-of-being-islamic/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as comments on r/AcademicQuran, in the thread “What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic by Shahab Ahmed”, copied here as written.
Comment 1
I think there is value in distinguishing between the intellectual scholarly tradition of Sunnism, i.e. Sunni Islam, and this much wider sociological, civilizational, anthropological approach (the Islamicate). Something can be Islamic (part of the Islamicate) without being in accordance to the prescriptions or descriptions of traditional scholarship (Islam).
I would hesitate to call the practice of Ottoman prostitutes wearing niqab to hide their faces an “Islamic” phenomenon because that risks attributing it to the prescriptions of Din, but it is certainly a phenomenon of the Islamicate in that it could only arise in a Muslim society that cares about certain Islamic values.
There definitely is a reductionist approach both to Sunni Islam & to Islamicate so thanks for sharing this excerpt.
Posted January 27, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 2
If we believe that there is objectivity to doctrine & practice then we would distinguish between normativity & heterodoxy. Do we think that the earliest Muslims & their broad strokes understanding of the Quran has authority? Or is “Islam” a much more fluid concept.
I would argue that we never conflate Christianity with Christendom. We wouldn’t call capitalism “Christian” simply because it is difficult to imagine modern capitalism arising out of anything other than Calvanism & Protestantism (see Talal Assad). We would call capitalism a model that has Christian “features” in the same way that prominent atheist Richard Dawkins says he is “culturally Christian.”
Do the Diwan of Hafez represent Islam or are they a product of Islamicate? Can we say that when Hafez says he uses God’s hair as braids for his swing, this coheres with Islamic monotheism? Or would we say that Hafez is a poet with Islamic features?
Posted January 27, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 3
I think it’s ahistorical to claim definitively that Muslims did not make these distinctions. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be so much scholarly literature lambasting poets, metaphyiscians, and mystics! Muslim traditional scholarship made a huge deal around determining “authentic” expressions of Islam – in other domains than theological & legal.
Even if we concede that most Muslims throughout most of history do not make this distinction.
There is a large body of literature analyzing the works of ibn Arabi, Rumi, Farabi, ibn Sina, Kindi, Abu Bakr al-Razi, and others to attempt to parse what is “Islamic” and what is not. While the poets, philosophers, and mystics themselves may not have cared – it was certainly a concern. In some places & times more than others for sure. But there was not a universal laissez faire attitude as you seem to be alluding to.
Some of the seminal works of Islam/Islamicate are borne out of a response to perceived un-Islamic influences. Look at Ghazali’s Tuhfat al-Falasifa or ibn Taymiyyah’s Critique of Greek Logic or Abu Hatim al-Razi’s refutation of Abu Bakr al-Razi.
There was a constant dialectic around authenticity. For sure, what is and is not “authentic” changed and there was/is a very wide degree of subjectivity. But it was definitely something Muslims concerned themselves with.
It could even be argued that whenever the line between Islam & Islamicate blurred too much, there was almost always a revivalist movement that attempted to parse the two. Whether Abu Hasan al-Ashari, al-Ghazali, ibn Taymiyyah, Uthman Dan Fodio, Shah WaliAllah al-Dihlawi, Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Rashid Rida, etc.
The puritanical impulse of Sunnism (& to some degree Shi’ism) constantly, on a historical scale, gives birth to movements attempting to excise syncretic elements.
Posted January 27, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 4
I don’t think scholarship’s past failures to acknowledge products of Islamicate which fall outside of traditional scholarly orthodoxy as being intellectually rigorous or valuable or worthy of study should cause us to totally eliminate useful demarcations & adopt a totally sociological or anthropological lense. There is definitely a constructed orthodoxy that has held dominant intellectual sway and there are definitely a lot of important currents that don’t fit into that fold which should also be analyzed. But if we don’t demarcate what is what and just go based off of frequency it will put any conclusions we come to out of step – since the Muslims in these syncretic or quasi-orthodox strains do still think in thisnway themselves!
Posted January 27, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 5
Yes, if at some point Rumi or Hafez were incorporated widely into traditional madrasah studies. Not in a sense of supplementary material that requires a great deal of work to bring it into the fold of orthodoxy but as a staple part of the curriculum, it would cross over into being a product into something mainstream with a capital “I”.
The closest analogue is probably al-Busayri. While far less prolific than either Rumi or Hafez, his Burda has become a part of the institution of orthodoxy. This is despite extremely vehement debates about whether it crosses the line. But for whatever reason, the Burda is recited, studied, analyzed, and written about extensively in traditional scholarship across languages.
If you go to an Islamic seminary anywhere, except perhaps Farsi speaking Shi’i ones & some Hanafi or Hanafi-sympathetic neotraditonalists, and quote Rumi or Hafez to prove a point – you’ll raise an eyebrow. There’s certainly no Salafi madrasah or community that would accept it, you’d be hard pressed to find Maliki or Shafi’is that did. Even among Hanafis, Deobandis would be hit-or-miss.
Certainly in the past with Rumi & Hafez specifically, they were more widely acclaimed and valued, but still on the periphery of mainstream Sunni intellectual thought. It is extremely common to find Islamic texts in Arabic & Urdu quoting poetry, but rare to ever find them quoting Rumi or Hafez.
Perhaps they were even closer in the past to being enshrined or canonized so to speak. But the Sufi tariqas have fallen out of favor internationally, which would have been a primary way especially for Rumi.
That’s not to say that they didn’t have a huge outsized impact on the scholarly class & laymen, but they were consciously excluded by the scholarly class from “orthodoxy” for the most part. Which means lay people rarely hear their verses on the pulpit or in the mosque.
Ghazali was himself quite contentious after his life, with Hanbalites rejecting him outright & his books being burned in Andalus. But he was ultimately incorporated into the orthodoxy, serving as the basis for Avicennan Asharism, Shafi’i usul with al-Mustasfa, & reformulated Sunni tasawuf.
Posted January 27, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 6
The problem this poses is that you lack a way to effectively communicate anything about Islam.
Simple question: is Islam monotheistic or pantheistic?
Well when we look at al-Hallaj, ibn Arabi, the Falasifa, and some of Hafez/Rumi we would conclude it’s pantheistic. These are interpretations based on the Quran.
But the vast majority of scholarship & Muslim masses would vehemently oppose this characterization.
Does Islam prescribe praying five times a day?
Again, some groups believe that this is abrogated when one reaches “Certainty” or that this is the exoteric of the text while the esoteric reality suggests not (Batiniyyah).
So we will need, at the very least, some rough guidelines as to what constitutes “Islam” versus what constitutes “Sunnism” or “Shi’ism” versus what is a cultural product of Muslims.
I don’t see how a totally postmodern approach helps us understand anything better.
Posted January 27, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 7
I think there’s definitely a mainstream Islam that is consistent throughout scholarly readings & the largest denominations from the beginning until the current day. It is hard to imagine NOW Ghazali being excised from that since he has become a part of the edifice of Sunni orthodoxy specifically. Islam would need to change so drastically for that to occur.
I don’t know of any circumstance where religious Muslims rebelled or protested against their scholarship to the point where the views of the masses were markedly different than the scholarly class. Usually, traditional scholars are just very learned religious Muslims that know more about the same things they already agree about and are stricter against syncretic influences/more iconoclastic.
These scholars write books which are passed on and become reference points for later people trying to understand whaf Islam is.
Again, I’m not speaking from a place of objective correctness but rather dispassionate analysis to try to identify what is and is not Islam versus Islamicate.
Posted January 28, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 8
I think you’re overestimating the prominance of tariqas/zawiyyahs in much of the world and definitely overestimating the penetration of Rumi/Hafez. Rumi & Hafez have had very little discernible impact in Arabic (I say this as a fan of Rumi). Even the great Farid al-Din al-Attar who wrote in Arabic & has perhaps the greatest epic poem of Islamicate civilization has very little impact.
I do concede their outsize influence among Persian & Turkic Hanafi Sufis & Shi’a. That being said, there have always been Hanafis who held serious reservations about them.
When we look at madrasah curriculums currently & historically, we don’t tend to see Rumi or Hafez as staple texts for spiritual instruction or even as supplemental texts. They’re moreso devotional works for aesthetic enjoyment & personal/communal enlightenment – which demonstrates that they were not considered to be scholarly or pieces of what constitutes orthodoxy.
I don’t think it’s useful to define Islam from the popular religious practices of masses.
In the Islamic Maghrib, Sufi tariqas had already decomposed by the time Mohammad Mawlud was writing about Tasawuff. Ahmad Zarruq also has a litany of criticisms for the decaying institution of organized Sufism. I don’t think it’s fair to attribute this to Salafism. There was a deep ossification of these institutions that made the ground ripe for Salafi repudiation.
The Salafi Egyptian repudiation of Egyptian Sufism has little in common with the Peninsular Salafism’s repudiation of Peninsular Sufism. Which has less in common with the Maghribi Salafi repudiation or the Malay Archipelago.
That being said Rumi was controversial even early on and Hafez even moreso. Rumi acknowledges & tries to pre-empt some of the criticisms that will be lodged against some of his verses but I don’t see that in my lay reading of Hafez.
Posted January 28, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 9
The Mu’tazila are a great stress test because they’re really on the cusp between sects. I would argue initially there was much confusion as to whether they were “Islamic” or not because orthodoxy itself and therefore Islam as we conceive of it today was still being constructed. That being said, Islam =/= Sunnism. The Mutazilah held that there is One God, Muhammad is His Prophet, the Quran is God’s inerrant Word, & that we must imitate the Prophet. They believed in the 5 pillars and 6 articles of faith. So, the Mutazilah are Islamic – even if most Sunnis consider them to be heretical (I think there’s a softening happening now).
Islam should be something broad, relatively unchanging, and not extremely particular – but clearly definable. Whereas Islamicate can have much more variety and be less tangible. Islam produces Islamicate.
Ibn Taymiyyah is definitely Islamic as is Ghazali. Whether they represent Sunnism or the most accurate interpretation of Sunnism is irrelevant, because the major broad strokes are there.
But is Farabi “Islam” or are his works a product of Islamicate?
Shi’ism would be a part of Islam but obviously not a part of Sunnism.
I would say any group that has certain doctrines, practices, & spiritual components would automatically fall under the definition of “Islam.” There’s fluidity & development but we can pretty easily decipher the broad strokes.
The Qaramitah are an Islamicate group that no Muslim group would consider Islamic, for example.
Posted January 28, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 10
From a discursive tradition standpoint:
- Masajid are mentioned in the Quran & Sunnah
- Beautification of masajid is discussed in the Quran & Sunnah
- Orthodox scholarship had debates & discussions about masjid architecture & symbolism/icons
What would not be accounted for were certain kinds of things happening in & around masajid. For example, some masajid have basketball courts to attract the youth. Is it a part of “Islam” or is it a part of “Islamicate”? Asad’s system can account for it as a secondary feature that doesn’t define Islam but is a part of Islamicate whereas to Ahmed the basketball court is actual lived Islam & what scholars have to say about it is not as important.
Posted January 28, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
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