The problem of writing about Others – and Othering them in the process – is an old one for anthropologists, and a defining one for contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. Positionality is crucial. It makes a difference, for instance, if the scholar of Islam is (not) a Muslim. But what kind of difference? Answers to that question are many, and they orbit around matters of “authority” and “legitimacy.” The authority to know and represent. The ability to do so in legitimate ways.
In “Religious Authority beyond Domination and Discipline: Epistemic Authority and Its Vernacular Uses in the Shi‘i Diaspora” (CSSH 65-2, 2023), Ali-Reza Bhojani and Morgan Clarke fold problems of representation into their analysis, creating a new framework in which likenesses between liberal/secular and Islamic/religious authority can be seen and compared. Co-authorship, a kind of “reasoning together,” is essential to their approach. So is the fact that they write as a Muslim/non-Muslim pair. How they interpret foundational texts, assess the claims of lay Muslims and clerics, and recombine key elements of Muslim and non-Muslim intellectual traditions – all are shaped by a collaborative process that, we imagine, must have been as fascinating as the essay it produced.
We asked Bhojani and Clarke to tell us more about how they work together. In their response, they make a strong case for collaboration. As a method, it surprised and excited them. It took them beyond their disciplinary comfort zones, kept them in learning mode, and protected them from the overconfidence that so often creeps into studies of moral authority. At the end of the process, it is hard to say that Clarke and Bhojani are writing about Others, even as they create a highly nuanced analysis of difference and distinction. This outcome is itself a lesson. It points toward better forms of anthropology and Islamic studies, and subtler forms of comparativism.
CSSH: Your essay is about religious authority, a seemingly classic case involving Twelver Shi`a, taqlid, Islamic law, and expert opinion. You make several claims about how this authority is constituted, both in Shi`a diaspora communities in Britain and in classical and current literatures on Islamic authority. You’re clear and convincing about your decision to push away from an emphasis on domination and discipline. You look instead at how lay people make use of expert opinion, and the range of usage is wide. Often, popular trends have a pick and choose quality, or they suggest a kind of rational, commonsense approach to expertise that, for lack of a better word, de-exoticizes the subject matter. Our favorite trope is the likening of religious authorities to plumbers. This doesn’t mean that a turbaned jurist and the bloke with the big wrench and plunger are doing the same kind of work. But the reasons one would rely on them, as experts, are similar. They both can solve problems that most of us can’t.
All of this makes the essay compelling and innovative. What we’d love to hear more about, though, is your method. Basically, you work as a dynamic duo. You don’t make a mountain out of it, but you do note that one of you is Muslim and the other is not. You also refer to a kind of “product testing,” where you together presented arguments and claims to the Khoja community in focus groups and lectures. What we see in your essay is two authorities who are creating an enriched form of analytical authority – about religious authority! – through their partnership (across difference) and deliberative interactions with the people they write about. In short, you are developing the authority to make claims about authority, and you are doing it in rather peculiar ways related both to Muslim tradition and the secular academy.
We find this intriguing. The heuristics and logistics of it. How did you divide labor, and share it? What insights came to you principally through collaboration? Did your research subjects see you as authorities in your own right? Did they appeal to you the way they might appeal to other … plumbers?
Bhojani and Clarke: Many thanks for your careful reading of our paper and the prompt to think more explicitly about the nature of our collaboration, both as research method and as mode of argument.
As you say, our collaboration brings together different, and complementary, positionalities: Ali-Reza is a Muslim and insider to the Khoja community we are writing about; Morgan is a non-Muslim and an outsider, to the Khoja community at least, although not to the wider British context in which all this plays out. Our collaboration also unites different disciplinary traditions and approaches to Islamic studies: Morgan is an anthropologist and Ali-Reza is a textualist trained both in the seminary (the hawza) and in the academy. So, we are wrestling with interdisciplinarity as well as interpositionality.
We have found this dialogue of perspectives and expertise hugely exciting. It is also humbling. On that note, we enjoyed the irony of your observation that we are effectively developing a new form of authority in order to write in a new way about religious authority. That is true in a way. But, as you also say, it has really been our partnership and interaction with the people and ideas that we wrote about that has been crucial to this endeavor. Although we each brought our own expertise to the project, the study was conducted with a deep commitment to learn from not just each other, but also from those who so generously gave us their time in interviews and focus groups, and in the discussions around the presentations of our developing research that we gave to the community in various forums. The article is about epistemic authority; the method is one of epistemic humility.
That might sound pious. But neither anthropology nor academic Islamic studies have been immune from arrogance in their approach to their subjects, and humility is warranted. It is also intrinsic to our argument, in that we start not with authority but with those who need and make use of it. That is a move more familiar to anthropologists than Islamicists perhaps, but it is also one with radical possibilities for the normative tradition, itself no stranger to condescension towards those “ignorant” (jahil) of the religious sciences.
You ask how we divided and shared the labor. We didn’t! There was no division of labor; we shared it all. We did all the fieldwork and all the interviews together. And we also read the texts together – both the texts of Ayatollah Sistani in Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) that we refer to (where Morgan could benefit from Ali-Reza’s expertise), but also some fundamental readings in the anthropology of Islam, which we explored through a reading group that also brought in other interested colleagues and students (where Ali-Reza could benefit from Morgan’s and their expertise). We discussed our findings and ideas continuously; we gave all our presentations as (so the joke went) a double act. We both wrote sections of the article, discussed joint drafts, and then Morgan finally brought it together so that it had a more unitary voice.
In a sense, all our insights were dependent on this collaboration, in that neither of us would have been able to do the work we did on our own. In terms of access, Ali-Reza’s connection to the community was of course vital. But the community might not have been so willing to agree to the project if it had just been Ali-Reza. They might have wondered why he needed to do the research at all, given his existing immersion in community life. And religious authority and practice is something of a contentious topic. In local terms, Ali-Reza could hardly escape being positioned somewhere in this field. The joint nature of the project perhaps lent it some greater guarantee of objectivity, as well as clearer purpose. Equally, during our interviews, Ali-Reza’s presence no doubt brought a sense of trust, and Morgan’s provided reason to ask some very basic questions that might have sounded strange coming from Ali-Reza. Our research was aimed ultimately at challenging the negative stereotypes of sharia in the UK, and the community was very supportive of that project.[i]
While the issues of access and its ethics are no doubt obvious, collaborative research also brought shared surprise. We were both very struck by the sheer thoughtfulness of the people we spoke with, as well as the diversity of their ideas and personal practices. Taqlid (the following of expert opinion that we write about) is typically conceptualized in the tradition as the reference of the non-expert to the expert, and indeed we found it an essentially active process, one that springs from the non-expert’s agency and comes with often deep moral deliberation and seriousness. While the material was all new for Morgan, in learning to adopt an ethnographic approach Ali-Reza also found himself knowing and appreciating the community that he lives and teaches within in a new way. Ethnographic fieldwork brings something more than just everyday interaction. And the insights that resulted brought something new to our understandings of the normative discourse of Ayatollah Sistani himself. Ali-Reza could take Morgan deeper into the layers of Sistani’s legal theory. But although Ali-Reza started out on the project with an interest in the place of human moral rationalism within the tradition,[ii] he had not fully appreciated the extent to which “ordinary people’ exercise it, nor in turn how readily a place for that exercise can be found in Sistani’s theoretical position, or so it seems to us. Indeed, given Ali-Reza’s progressive credentials, some in the community have been surprised by how far our work has ended up validating traditional authority. But they were also very surprised when we brought to their attention just how limited Sistani’s formal claims to authority actually are.
Both ethnographically and textually then, we gained things together that we never would have apart. So too in terms of the broader theoretical framing. We end up putting our material on Islamic thought and practice in conversation with analytic philosophy, not least the work of Joseph Raz. That might seem odd. Whatever else, we wanted to dislodge further the stranglehold that Weber still has on the way Islamic studies conceives religious authority. But it also stems from our reading together in the anthropology of Islam. The work of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood has been truly inspiring. But their insistence on opposing a fundamentally non-liberal Islam as Other to the Western liberal tradition doesn’t wholly convince us. We don’t find each other that Other! We have grown up in the same country, and we have similar interests and presumptions. That sense of commonality allowed us to shift emphasis instead to the ways in which Shi‘i Islamic legal theory itself shares presumptions and concerns with liberal legal and political thought, and hopefully convey something of its sophistication in the process.
You ask whether our research subjects saw us as authorities in our own right, to be appealed to. People did sometimes ask for Ali-Reza’s opinion on some of their deeply-felt dilemmas, and he did sometimes find it hard to hold himself back from giving it. When we presented our findings to a group of community leaders at a workshop in Morgan’s college in Oxford – which of course comes with an authority all of its own – they seized on them as showing that a section of the community who have a reputation for putting themselves above others in piety, in practice are doing no different from those they criticize.
Community audiences haven’t always found our research so convincing, however. This is a highly educated community, and some clearly wanted something more robust in terms of statistical analysis, or at least ensuring that our sample was representative. But also, when we gave an early presentation to one local association, a lady in the audience wanted to know why we were asking non-scholars about questions of religious law: they might tell us the wrong thing. Against the grain of such traditional epistemic hierarchies, our whole endeavor is based on the idea that “ordinary people” really do have insights worth knowing and respecting in their own right. More than that, they might also be relevant to conversations among the scholars themselves. Perhaps our approach could enable a new kind of conversation between ordinary experience and learned normative discourse. That is a possibility we are very interested in pursuing.[iii]
[i] Compare Mark Massoud and Kathleen Moore’s Sharia Revoiced project in the US (https://shariarevoiced.org).
[ii] See Ali-Reza Bhojani, Moral Rationalism and Shari‘a: Independent Rationality in Modern Shi‘i Usul al-Fiqh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
[iii] As we suggest at the end of the article, there is something of a precedent here in the Christian tradition of “ethnographic theology” – that is, a theology informed by the insights and concerns of “ordinary” people and everyday life. See e.g. Christian Scharen and Anna Marie Vigen eds., Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). For an initial such venture on our part see Ali-Reza Bhojani and Morgan Clarke, “Free speech as ethical speech in Islam: an essay in ethnographic moral theology,” in Liyakat Takim ed., Free Speech, Scholarly Critique, and the Limits of Expression in Islam (Birmingham: Al-Mahdi Institute, 2022).
Ali-Reza Bhojani is Teaching Fellow in Islamic Ethics and Theology at the University of Birmingham, and honorary Research Fellow at the Al-Mahdi Institute. His research, teaching, and writing focuses on intersections between Islamic legal theory, theology, and ethics. His doctoral study, conducted at Durham University, was published as Moral Rationalism and Shari’a (Routledge, 2015). More recent publications include the co-edited volume Visions of Sharīʿa (Brill, 2020).
Morgan Clarke is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College. He is the author of Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009); and Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia within and without the State (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and a co-editor of Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History (Manchester University Press, 2021).
