A Metamodern Paradigm for Islamic Studies Scholarship: Evaluating and Extending Shahab Ahmed's Theorization of Islam and the Islamic

Abstract

This article explores the theorization of Islam developed by the late Shahab Ahmed in his major work What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, where he develops his thesis of Islam as hermeneutical engagement with the Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text of Revelation to Muḥammad. I show how Ahmed’s approach to Islam displays many features of metamodern scholarship avant la lettre, which is evidenced by his treatment of the human and historical phenomenon of Islam as a process social kind. Further, through putting Ahmed in conversation with the ideas of Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm as developed in Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, Ahmed’s theorization of Islam can be further clarified and extended. Storm’s formulation of the anchoring processes of social kinds and his hylosemiotics are particularly instructive in this regard. Ahmed’s thinking itself may also make some constructive contributions to metamodern theorizing, particularly through his sensitivity to the dynamics of spacialization, which produce coherent contradiction in and as Islam. Through a careful reading of Ahmed’s work, and by developing and clarifying it through recourse to Storm’s ideas, one obtains a helpful example of the contours of metamodern scholarship within a particular field—here, Islamic studies.