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An Anxious Inheritance examines the role of the ever-expandable category of "non-Muslims" in early Islam. It demonstrates how the Qur'an functioned as both a script to understand them and as a map to classify them, and this category's role in shaping (Sunni) orthodoxy. This orthodoxy was considered natural, but in fact it was based on retroactive back-projections. Non-Muslims and the "wrong" kinds of Muslims became integral to understanding what true religion was not and what it should be. These non-Muslims were rarely real individuals or groups; rather, they functioned as textual foils that could be conveniently orchestrated, and ultimately controlled, to facilitate self-definition.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part One: Late Antique Fantasies
- Chapter One - Qur'anic Others
- Chapter Two - Producing Islam through the Production of Religious Others
- Chapter Three - Past Perfect: Opening the Jihiliyya's Complex Present
- Part Two: Subsequent Constructions
- Chapter Four - Good Jew, Bad Jew
- Chapter Five - Making Christians
- Chapter Six - Shia: The Other Within
- Chapter Seven - The Amorphous Zindiq
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
About the author
Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean's Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester.
Summary
An Anxious Inheritance reveals the tensions between the early framers of Islam and the ever-expandable category of non-Muslims. Examining the encounter with these religious others, and showing how the Qur'an functioned as both a script to understand them and a map to classify them, this study traces the key role that these religious others played in what would ultimately emerge as (Sunni) orthodoxy. This orthodoxy would appear to be the natural outgrowth of the Prophet Muhammad's preaching, but it ultimately amounted to little more than a retroactive projection of later ideas onto the earliest period.
Non-Muslims (among them Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians) and the "wrong" kinds of Muslims (e.g., the Shi'a) became integral--by virtue of their perceived stubbornness, infidelity, heresy, or the like--to the understanding of what true religion was not and, just as importantly, what it should be. These non-Muslims were rarely real individuals or groups; rather, they functioned as textual foils that could be conveniently orchestrated, and ultimately controlled, to facilitate Muslim self-definition. Without such religious others proper belief could, quite literally, not be articulated. Shedding new light on the early history of Islam, while also problematizing the binary of orthodoxy/heresy in the study of religion, An Anxious Inheritance makes significant contributions to a number of diverse academic fields.
Additional text
Hughes's thesis that Sunni Islam reduces non-Muslims and "internal others" to literary fictions is compelling and a challenge to Islamic studies' uncritical acceptance of polemical sources
