Since the late sixteenth century, religions have been able to travel across the globe at levels and in ways that are, for all intents and purposes, unprecedented in human history. The movement of religion in the modern era has primarily been fostered by the numerous developments in travel and communication technologies. Modern travel technology, for instance, has allowed for individual human beings to move at distances and rates unheard of in previous eras. In the process, people have transported their own religious beliefs to new lands. Frequently, travelers and the people they have met have been able to pick up and carry with them knowledge—in the forms of physical texts and re-told memories—about the religions they have encountered. This movement of religion has also been assisted by developments in communication technology, which have made it easier for texts to be reproduced, thereby increasing the number of copies of a text, which in turn increases the size of the potential audience of a text. To a great extent, then, religion in the modern period has no longer had to remain largely contained in one
physical territory. It could be said, borrowing a term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, that religion has become “deterritorialized.”67
But when Deleuze and Guattari use the term “deterritorialization,” they are also referring to another phenomenon. This unprecedented access to the world’s information gives humans the ability to interpret data and enact ideas in ways that were previously
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impossible. For example, humans are now able to compare the religious texts of people from all corners of the Earth. And, if they so desire, they can rather easily combine elements from these texts to invent new religions. So, in addition to religions themselves traveling in unprecedented ways, interpretations and practices of religion also no longer have to be limited by traditional boundaries. This notion that symbols can now potentially be arranged in an almost infinite number of ways is the second meaning of
deterritorialization.68
However, as Delueze and Guattari admit, despite our ability to transcend many traditional interpretative and cultural limits, certain boundaries remain. Humans still do not have access to and control over all the existing information; vested interests, cultural dynamics, and power structures—even though they have changed over the centuries to adapt to modern conditions—still play major roles in circumscribing what can be
legitimately thought and enacted. Deleuze and Guattari use the term “reterritorialization” to refer to the cultural boundary-creating process in the modern era.
It is important to know one other thing about de- and re-territorialization: they are not only products of technology; they are also deeply shaped by the larger developments that are, in fact, the very macro-level causes of the improvement of technologies. Indeed, de- and re-territorialization, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are so intimately tied to their physical and cultural environment—their ecology—that they cannot be seen as separate from it.69
68 It is for this reason that Delueze and Guattari refer to the modern world as schizophrenic, a concept that
suggests the constant outpouring of new symbol combinations.
69
Deleuze and Guattari developed the notion that de- and re-territorialization are connected to ecology by building off the work of Michel Foucault. They had originally been interested in Foucault’s discussions (in History of Madness and History of Sexuality: Vol. 1) of the transformations—what Deleuze and Guattari would call
reterritorializations—of “madness” and psychiatry in modern Western Europe.70 Foucault had shown that the process of reterritorializing madness was not simply the act of a single dominant group desiring to discipline certain types of people, but rather part of a much deeper tendency affecting all parts of Western European society. What is more, in most of his major monographs Foucault showed that there were several different types of territorializations, all of which had similar traits, developing simultaneously in Western Europe. The trend included, among other things, an increased interest in and tendency for using technical thought (such as mathematics and taxonomies), an increased interest in “science,” and a growing sense that the individual was important because he or she possessed a soul that needs to be respected and valued (as opposed to the medieval view that human life was almost valueless)—in other words, the individual has dignity.71 And, if one took a macro-level view one would see that these developments reflected clear historical eras.72 These eras, according to Foucault, were the “Renaissance” (c. 1400- 1600), the “Classical Age” (c. 1600-1800), and the “Modern Age” (since c. 1800). The
70 Deleuze and Guattari, passim.
71 See Michel Foucault, History of Madness. J. Khalifa, ed. and trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalifa (Abingdon,
England: Routledge [1961] 2006) and The History of Sexuality: Vol I., trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, [1976] 1978). These themes were also emphasized in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
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causes of the developments of these eras were not limited to trends in intellectual thought, dominant classes, or popular culture; they were deeply shaped by major historical events, such as the decimation of Europe’s population by the bubonic plague, the development of modern sea-faring technology, the spread of book printing, and the increased use of modern forms of capitalism.73 Deleuze and Guattari understood that all these factors were elements that significantly affected de- and re-territorialization.74
While, given the known orientalist biases of these three thinkers,75 some might resist using their ideas for interpreting Islamic history, there have already been a number of fruitful attempts to employ them to understand the relation between Islam and the West. Edward Said famously combined Foucaldian and Gramscian views of power in his Orientalism, which, despite its many limitations, opened the door for critically examining the various dimensions of the West-Islam relationship.76 More recently, Olivier Roy has applied the concept of deterritorialization to contemporary Islam in order to explain modern Islamism and Western Muslims’ identities.77 Neither of these authors, however, nor any others, as far as I am aware, highlights either the importance of ecology or
73 Deleuze and Guattari cite on several occasions Order of Things, which is Foucault’s work that most
directly examines the interconnectivity of the elements of each stage.
74 Deleuze and Guattari, 299.
75 For a discussion, see Ian Almond, New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault
to Baudrillard (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007).
76 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). For a summary of the limitations of
Said’s analysis, see Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents (New York: Overlook Press), 277-304.
77 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press,
Foucault’s historical eras. Because of this, a key connection to a well-known theorist of Islamic history has been missed.
In his posthumously-published Venture of Islam (1974),78 Marshall Hodgson presented a groundbreaking view of Islamic history that fits very well with the theories of Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault. In writing his three-volume history of Islam,
Hodgson, who died in 1968 likely never having read any of the three post-structuralists, attempted to free Western scholarship on Islam from its Western biases. To do this, he made several strong critiques and offered a few key intellectual tools. Besides pointing out the more blatant examples of Western-centered biases (such as distorting the size of Europe on maps to make it seem larger than other regions), Hodgson observes that a major source of academic bias has come from the belief that cultures and civilizations can be clearly demarcated and their core elements identified. This idea leads many to the conclusion that the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations can be attributed to their supposed core elements.79 Along these same lines, he also criticizes, in a rather post- structuralist way, the use of structuralism (or, in its worst form, functionalism) by philosophers and philologists who attempt to reduce cultures to only a few sociological factors, such as social structure or economy.80 While he does not propose eliminating altogether the identification of trends and continuities, he argues that scholars must resist the temptation to reduce history to these elements. Instead, as Hodgson demonstrates throughout his book, scholars should look to a region’s ecology—both social and
78 Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 79
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physical—and how it is impacted by the various forces (also social and physical) in the rest of the world.
Hodgson’s stress on ecology enabled him to masterfully situate Islamic history within broader world history.81 He, for instance, was able to show that the rise of Islam in the first millennium A.D. can largely be attributed to the Muslim attainment of power in a location (which Hodgson calls the “Nile-to-Oxus” region) ideally situated between Europe, Eastern Asia, South Asia, and Africa. As economies, technologies, and
philosophies were developed in each of these separate regions, the Nile-to-Oxus was the one best able to access and capitalize on the others’ developments. Ecology also goes a long way in explaining the decline of Baghdad in the tenth century and the subsequent rise of the “ayan-amir” system that characterized the Nile-to-Oxus region in the first half of the second millennium A.D.82
Hodgson’s use of ecology also led him to what he thought was a unique periodization of the development of Western culture. He proposed that the traditional tendency to identify the beginning of the modern era at around the year 1500 did not account for how much and the rate of development the West had at that point compared to other regions. It was only around 1600, he argued, that the West entered a period he called the “Western Transmutation,” in which it began to surpass the Islamic lands. And it was around the year 1800 that the West entered into a new phase, the “Technical Age,” in which technicalistic thought dominated. Consistent with his critiques of Western
81 On the uniqueness of Hodgson’s ecologically-based world-historical view, see the reviews of Venture by
Albert Hourani, Frederick Denny, Richard Bulliet, and Richard Martin.
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scholarship, Hodgson asserted that the development of these periods was not due to certain essential elements of Western culture. It was, instead, due to ecological (social and physical) changes, such as the increasing contact and sharing between societies, the raising of the levels of control of materials on a worldwide level, and the increasingly destructive capabilities of modern armaments, which forced people into urban areas and to develop capitalistic means to create the kind of wealth necessary to produce more of their own weapons.83 Furthermore, Hodgson says, during each of these periods, the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual tendencies of Western Europe transformed in ways that adapted to the newly developing ecologies, such as by increasingly giving importance to the individual’s psychology and social position (both of which supported the idea of the individual’s dignity), science, technical knowledge, rationality, and capitalism.84
Hodgson adds that while the major modern transformations happened initially and primarily in the West, because they were grounded in deep world-wide historical
tendencies, they were not exclusive to the West. So, as they eventually impacted the other parts of the world, similar cultural transformations began to occur in those places.
Hodgson’s view of major trends in modern history and his periodizations are thus very similar to Foucault’s. And, by recognizing this, it becomes clear how Deleuze and Guattari can be applied to give insights into Islamic history. In short, de- and re-
territorialization are not limited to the West—they are very much part of Islamic history. This is significant because observers of African-American Islam sometimes emphasize a
83
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normative/irregular dichotomy when discussing the relationship between the forms of Islam practiced by Muslims in Muslim-majority lands and those by African Americans. This frequently has contributed to debates over the religious legitimacy of African- American Islam. While it certainly cannot be denied that some forms of Islam are much more dominant than others, by including de- and re-territorialization as significant parts of Islamic history, attention can be turned away from questions of religious authenticity and legitimacy—questions which belong, in my opinion, more to the realm of theology than history—and instead focus on how and why Islam has changed in the modern world.85
As will be shown in this dissertation, the history of Islam in the modern West, and in the AAIR in particular, largely revolves around deterritorialized Islam and its
reterritorialization in the West. Therefore, the use of these concepts helps explain a number of things about the AAIR. First of all, they give us insight into why the forms of Islam promoted during the AAIR varied greatly and frequently bore little resemblance to the dominant forms practiced and believed in by Muslims in Muslim-majority lands. These concepts also shed light on why African-American Islam often blended various forms of Islam—this was an inevitable outcome of the encountering of the diverse manifestations of Islam in the U.S. In fact, there were a number of cases in which
immigrant Muslims were themselves influenced by African-American forms of Islam. In
85 As Richard Bulliet, who has done influential work on early conversions to Islam, has pointed out, one of
the greatest benefits of the study of religious conversion is that it helps us understand social change; see Richard W. Bulliet, “Introduction: Process and Status in Conversion and Continuity,” in Conversion and
Continuity, eds. Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (Ontario: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
the end, then, the concepts of de- and re-territorialization help explain how and why unique forms of Islam have emerged in the U.S.
In addition, as will be demonstrated throughout the course of this dissertation, by combining the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari with Hodgson’s emphasis on ecology and ecological shifts, once can more easily see why the reterritorialization of Islam in the U.S. has neither happened overnight nor taken on a single form. Any single
reterritorialization is the product of multiple, ongoing, and competing minor de- and re- territorializations, with some having more of an impact than others. In the next two sections, I explore major de- and re-territorializations of Islam that played important roles in preparing the way for the AAIR.
2. “Mystical” Islam in the West
One of the most influential reterritorializations of Islam in the West has been the Western creation of a tradition that I call “mystical" Islam. This tradition, still strong today, dates probably to the twelfth century, and was one of the most important
influences for the AAIR. This section’s discussion is twice as long as those of the other three dynamics because, though several scholars have already noted the connection of this tradition to African-American Islam, they have generally failed to appreciate its complexity and how deeply-rooted it is in Western culture. Given the importance of the “mystical” Islam tradition in the AAIR, it is helpful to have a deeper understanding of the topic.
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“Mystical” Islam
I use the term “mystical” in quotation marks because the way Islam has been perceived in this tradition has not always been clearly defined and has been influenced by disparate traditions that, though they might all be identified as “mystical,” are
typologically distinct. There are at least five types of minor traditions that feed into the Western image of “mystical” Islam.86 The tradition that is most often connected with “mystical” Islam today is what is frequently referred to as mysticism. Mysticism, as it is typically understood, is the acquisition of non-discursive knowledge (i.e., knowledge that cannot be taught through words), usually done through learned rituals.87 In Islam, this tradition is frequently called tasawwuf—Sufism. However, despite the popularity of Sufism today, there are almost no known instances of early modern Christian Western Europeans studying under a Sufi sheikh, nor is there evidence that Western Europeans had Islamic texts dealing either explicitly or exclusively with Sufism prior to the nineteenth century.88 Mysticism, then, was just one, and for a long time a rather minor, element in the “mystical” Islam tradition.
Two of the minor traditions in the “mystical” Islam tradition have to do with magic: one is the type of magic that claims to affect changes in the physical world and
86 My distinguishing between types of “mystical” religion has largely been inspired by Szonyi, John Dee’s
Occultism.
87 For a helpful discussion of the technical definition of mysticism, particularly as it relates to both the
acquisition of non-discursive thought and the Islamic tradition, see Peter Adamson, “Non-Discursive Thought in Avicenna’s Commentary on the Theology of Aristotle,” in Interpreting Avicenna: Science and
Philosophy in Medieval Islam, eds. Jon McGinnis with David C. Reisman (Boston: Brill, 2004), esp. 88.
88 See Michel Chodkiewicz, “La reception du soufisme par l’occident: conjectures et certitudes,” in The
Introduction of Arabic Philosophy into Europe, eds. Charles E. Butterworth and Blake Andree Kessel (New
the other is magic that claims to bring one closer to god. The first of these two distinct minor traditions, magic used to affect changes in the world, contains within it two sub- types: “natural magic”—magic that was to some extent accepted by a significant number of medieval and early modern Western thinkers as scientific (astrology, optics, etc.)—and what has been pejoratively labeled “black” magic—the use of talismans, amulets,
incantations, and number symbolism as well as talking to various spirits and/or demons. Both types were written about by Muslims and Arabic-language texts on the subject had a significant influence on the study and practice of them in the West, as I will discuss in the next sub-section. The second magical tradition was that of exaltation—performing rituals or other practices to bring one closer to god. This is perhaps most popularly associated with alchemy (which claims, in its more occult manifestations, that one can purify one’s soul to attain a position closer to the divine), but there were also a number of other practices written about by Arabic authors that claimed to give the user exaltation.
The fourth tradition that feeds into “mystical” Islam is often assumed to be intrinsic to medieval and early modern magic—the “organic” view of the universe. This view, typically associated with Plato and Plotinus, regards the universe as an
interconnected whole in which events that happen on earth can be influenced by both events in the celestial sphere as well as the four elements (air, water, earth, fire). This was in fact the dominant view of the world in the West until around the seventeenth century when many scientists began to break from it, stressing a “mechanical” view of the universe. It needs to be made clear here, however, that a belief in an organic view of the
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humans were part of an organic system and were influenced by celestial bodies and the