Mesa 2011 Making Islamic Authority

Mesa 2011 ended last Sunday. It was a rewarding conference this year in Washington DC. I met several new people, saw some old colleagues back after quite a while and attended several interesting panels. On Sunday morning I participated in a round table discussion with Gudrun Kraemer, Free University Berlin – Mirjam Kuenkler, Princeton University – Thomas Pierret, University of Edinburgh – and Hilary Kalmbach, University of Oxford; the latter also being the convenor and chair of this session. The title of this panel was Mapping Change in Islamic Authority: Shifting Cultures of Knowledge, Learning, and Practice. I’m not going to summarize this panel for you (you had to be there…) but I will share with you my notes which I used for a brief talk.

Social Field
Based upon my research on the Salafi movement I wanted explore the usefulness of Bourdieu’s social field approach with regard to the matter of authority. Now Bourdieu is certainly not unproblematic in this regard. In his work he maintained a very rigid distinction between authority and lay people, or as I put it (certainly not appreciated by everyone in the discussion given its obvious neo-liberal market connotation) between consumers and producers. Nevertheless his explorations of other fields shows that there are possibilities to explore the religious field in a more dynamic way. Following Bourdieu these fields are characterized by opposing forces and power struggles. I will use this idea as to point some ideas and suggestions of what we can look at, in a rather tentative way. In 1999, almost 10 years after the establishment of the first Salafi networks in the Netherlands a blacklist was published that featured several Salafi preachers, denouncing them as people from the Muslim Brotherhood, innovators and lacking piety. The list was issued by a then new network connected: the Madkhali network. A network of scholars and students that claims to shy away from politics and is loyal to Saudi (and other) authorities. They did the same in other countries as well for example in the UK and in the US. It immediately  gave them a place among the others, albeit a contested one.

Establishing and performing authority through genealogy
The competition in the transnational Salafi field results to a large extent from conflicting claims by Salafis over positions of authority over what is, and how to establish, the authentic truth of Islam and what constitutes a trustworthy, genuine and reliable authority.. It has been in particular the Madkhali network that has established itself by identifying a false authority. They also  issued lists of trustworthy scholars in order to authenticate their own religious knowledge in the sense that it is they who adhere to the silsila (or chain) of ‘true’, ‘trustworthy’, and ‘genuine’. By looking at the student-scholar relationship on this list, we can, for example, trace the inherited knowledge of someone like Ibn Baz back to the days of the Salaf. Like in Islamic traditions the isnad or the Chain of Authenticity is crucial instrument for ascertaining the validity of a hadith, this Salafi chain is used to trace the lineage of knowledge of a Salafi Shaykh to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, perhaps somewhat similar (I’m speculating here) as the chain of masters and students, ‘silsila’ among Sufism. What is authentic is not only decided upon people’s mastery of knowledge but also about scholars with a reputation of being pious. It is a way to ascertain that one is on the correct path and to delegitimize those who are not part of the chain. It appears that within the religious field there are differences with regard to values, hierarchies and systems of aesthetic judgement serving to legitimate and authenticate particular practices, styles, and subjects. This is contrary to how Bourdieu treats the religious field but less as to how he treats other fields (such as arts).

The religious field and the media field
The religious field is not always clearly demarcated and isolated from other fields such as the media.  A few of the lay preachers for example have a made an appearance on TV which in different ways contributed to their authority. It appears that their authority in the ‘Islamic’ field also rendered them authoritative in the Dutch media field in which debates about Islam and the nature and interpretation of Islam dominate. In both the religious and the media field their image as uncompromising about ‘what Islam really says’ contributes to this authority, albeit with a different interpretation and evaluation. Often in defending their own position in the public sphere they do not so much use arguments based upon  works of scholars, the Qur’an, hadith, and Sunna, as a  means of authenticating their knowledge. Instead they point to the freedom of speech and freedom of religion thereby demonstrating their adjustment to the rules of the game in the media field. At the same time these different fields interact. These Salafi preachers often get verbally attacked in the media and in particular on the Internet after their TV appearances. For many Muslim youth, a prime example of both how Muslims are treated in public (with double standards) and how one nevertheless should remain steadfast. Furthermore what this case alludes to I think is the issue of professionalization. There is much talk on Salafi activists about the need to become more professional in their outreach and becoming media-savvy is part of that. Muslims more critical about the Salafi preachers actually accuse of them of not being professional and often mock there media appearances. Dutch salafis in turn look to the English networks as example of professional media outreach while some of the English look at the Dutch as to how to respond to a strong anti-Islam party.

Genres of authority?
In Bourdieu’s work different fields are to be distinguished but not always separated. With regard to the making of authority we should not limit ourselves to analyze what kind of or how much people master particular types of religious knowledge but we can look to what kind of values, hierarchies and systems of aesthetic judgement serve to legitimate and authenticate particular practices, styles, and subjects. It is very clear that in a mediatised context not only mastery of religious knowledge counts but also how media savvy people are. Focus should be on how fields are positioned in relation to other fields, on distributions of value and resources, habitus and comparing them by focusing on their discursive resources, the kinds of effects they have when put to use, the strategies producers (speakers) pursue and the ends they achieve. It is clear that only some institutional affiliation is not enough to provide someone with authority. Based upon that we can probably distinguish between different genres of authority as came up in the discussion that ensued from the presentation. Whereby for example Amr Khaled (not a salafi) represents a different genre than for example Bin Baz in the past and both are in turn different from that of Nasr Abou Zayd. These differences are not only the result of differences in content or institution but also in aesthetics. Taken together they might constitute (following Bakhtin and his notion of ‘speech genres’) a set of peformative features combining different repertoires (for example media and religious capital) based upon more or less (but also contested) patterns and expectations. The persuasive power represented or manifested within the words of the preacher then resides outside his text (for example his or hers eloquence, gender, relation to particular institutions, gestures, styles of clothing and so on). Maybe this idea merits further exploration?