Reply to Dr Adis Duderija’s review of ‘Jihad Beyond Islam’ and ‘Understanding

Muslim Identity: Rethinking Fundamentalism’

I wish to thank Dr Duderija for the extend book review of my two books and
hence for providing an occasion to correct some of his misunderstandings of
my approach to identity and ‘fundamentalism’. Although I appreciate Dr
Duderija’s efforts to summarize and engage with my theory of identity, which, I
wish to highlight, finds its basis within neuroscience (something that I admit is
an unusual field for an anthropologist) and in particular Antonio Damasio’s
work (1999; 2004), I find it difficult to understand how Dr Duderija may fully
appreciate and make sense of my overall argument while leaving much of the
discussion ‘aside for those who are more familiar and better qualified than [he
is] to deal with.’ Hence, it does not come as a surprise that many points of
both my theory and overall approach have been not only misunderstood, and
therefore misrepresented, but twisted to serve as background to Dr Duderija’s
own analysis, which, as we shall see, shows exactly those weakness that I
have criticized in detail, particularly in ‘Understanding Muslim Identity:
Rethinking Fundamentalism’.

Dr Duderija, I suppose because of space limitation, tends to collapse some of

my theoretical points, one on top of the other, when in realty they represent
more complex dynamics. This brings him to represent me as saying things
which I never said, as any reader of both books may observe. I provide below,
because of space considerations, only a few examples.

Dr Duderija has for instance stated: ‘In the words of the author “It is what I
feel I am that determines my identity for me” (Marranci 2006, p.10). Marranci
refers to this phenomenon as “Emotional Islam” (2009, 20-24)’. I never
defined ‘Emotional Islam’ as ‘what I feel I am determines my identity for me’.
Indeed, the latter is the natural conclusion of a very complex theoretical
discourse, which defines ‘identity’ and not ‘emotional Islam’. This brings Dr
Duderija to commit the first epistemological mistake as far as my argument is
concerned; a mistake which flaws much of the review provided.

The fundamental issue is that my ‘I feel to be Muslim’, where ‘feel’ refers to the
differentiation that Damasio makes between emotions and feelings, addresses
‘personal’ identity and yet does not at all deny ‘social’ identity. In all my works,
I have never said that ‘culture’ or ‘society’ do not have a role - quite the
contrary, as also my ethnography indeed shows! However, I have claimed that
it is by focusing on that ‘feel to be’ more than on the symbolic ‘Muslim’ that we
can understand how Muslims express, form and develop their identity beyond
the imposed stereotypes. In other words, the discourse here focuses more on
what comes first: identity, influenced by the processes I have described in my
books, and then interpretation of text, or, as Dr Duderija seems to argue,
hermeneutics and then identity.

The debate and differences between our approaches would have been easy to
discuss in these terms. Yet Dr Duderija has decided to provide a lengthy, and
rather unclear, review of more than four-hundred pages. My criticism of
certain culturalist approaches of Muslims in general, and religious
fundamentalism in particular, does not aim to remove ‘society’ or ‘culture’ from
the discourse. Rather my work attempts to correct those approaches, as for
instance the one advocated by Dr Duderija himself, which through the over-
emphasis of social structure has ended in representing the self of individuals as
the direct consequence of the ‘structural logic of that individual’s social
circumstances. If I am a Nuer, then I must think like a Nuer’ (Cohen 1995: 1).
The rejection of essentialism and the illogicality that an ‘Islamic tradition’
exists per-se is deeply different from the social-cultural nihilist position that Dr
Duderjia has adduced to me and which is very distant from my own approach.

Hence, since Dr Duderija misunderstood my position, or better, bent it to the

second part of his review, he has naturally found many ‘contradictions’
between my analysis and fieldwork. I am not surprised that he has found such
‘contradictions’ since in his review he has radicalized, if not actually
transformed into a kind of ‘freak show’ of illogicality, my own analysis. Dr
Duderija has affirmed, with a cunning selection of both some parts of my
theoretical analysis and some parts of my ethnography, expressed throughout
more than four-hundred pages, that I fully deny that Muslims (or non-Muslims,
for that matter) use, refer, quote or try to manipulate texts (included the
Qur’an) to form their arguments, while of course, my respondents indeed use
them. Yet I never stated that they do not do so, but rather I have advocated
the fundamental role of emotions and feelings in the understanding of the
‘scriptures’ and of course, jihad.

Again, the matter concerns what comes first: the ‘hermeneutics‘ and then the
emotions and the consequent cognitive operations; or as I suggest, the
emotions, neurocognitive processes that form self and identity, and then the
interpretations of text and the derived hermeneutics. This is very different to
forcing upon me a social scientific position which, had he represented correctly
my analysis and views, would be not only untenable but also rather stupid.

Quoting from Hadith, or a verse from the Qur’an to make one’s argument, or
even repeating what a scholar may have said, is never a neutral action, aseptic
and self-defined by the text or the ‘charisma’ of the scholar. It is instead
filtered by the specific neuro-cognitive capacity of an individual. There is no
direct passage of information, without the powerful distortion of emotions and
feelings, identity processes as well as cognitive elaboration, between a text
containing ideas and a reading subject’s acting upon them.

There are other weaknesses in Dr Duderija’s review of my work, but for

reasons of space, I shall not review each of them, especially since a majority
derives from the above foundational ones in any case.

I wish instead to concentrate on Dr Duderija’s argument that we can find in the

second part of the review, which at the end appears to be the real reason for
discussing my work. I believe that Dr Duderija’s position suffers from some of
those flawed arguments that indeed I have criticized in my two books, but this
possibility remains unwritten in his review.

Dr Duderija has observed, ‘the interpretational process is constrained by a

number of factors most importantly the nature of the text itself’ and one of the
most important factors of this ‘constraint’ is ‘interpretive communities’, which
limit the freedom of the individual in his/her own understanding of the text by
‘some reading uniformity’ derived from social factors such as shared class and
religion amongst other elements. These ‘interpretive communities’ appear to
go beyond face-to-face sharing and have some kind of inscribed universality
that derives from sharing the same culture.

If we accept Dr Duderija’s viewpoint, we have to find a cognitive tool

somewhere in the human brain that allows for such ‘reading uniformity’ based
mainly on hermeneutics. However, we cannot start from the text and move to
the brain, as Dr Duderija suggests. We are rather forced, by acknowledging
nature instead of cultural determinism, to start from where the information is
created and processed: the brain and its mechanisms. Evidence of the impact
that memory, emotions and feelings (in Damasio’s terms) have on how we
perceive texts, objects and how even simple changes of the environment can
alter one’s understanding of text, so that we do not really read twice the same
text in the same way, is confirmed by recent neuroscientific research. This,
however, does not mean that people do not influence each other of course.
Dr Duderija risks in his approach to embrace a strong form of ‘culturalism’, in
which the culture, as a symbolic object, is supposed to be capable of shaping
and controlling the human mind. This idea suggests that a text may be able to
control the individual and the collective behavior of those whom see it as an
inspirational or holy text. In other words, the text and its rules of
‘interpretation’, enforced by what Dr Duderija refers to as ‘interpretive
communities’ that are represented by charismatic scholars, provide people with
a certain unified ‘mind’ as far as their views of jihad for example, or even
Islam, are concerned.

In doing so, Dr Duderija cannot other than espouse the concept of ‘Muslim
minds’, which then can be, as a species, subdivided according to how the
interpretive communities ‘elucidate the interpretational mechanisms and
assumptions underlying certain interpretations’.

In his case, the subspecies are Neo-Traditional Salafis(NTS) and Progressive

Muslims(PM), both of them, of course, with a unified mind defended by their
scriptural mode. Dr Duderija, provides in his analysis a good example of what
Mamdani, in his renowned book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), calls
‘Culture Talk’. Muslims, in this way, can divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, into NTS
and PM, into normative and exonormative, into everything except the
individual human beings that they actually are and whom we meet in our
everyday lives.

Despite having conducted years of research, I have never spent my time with
NTSs and PMs, for instance, although Dr Duderija would likely label some of
my respondents as such. Instead, I have encountered only single individuals
whom, yes, in some respects may share some aspects of, say, Salafism, but
whom also have peculiarities, convictions and interpretations derived from
their own identities that made them very different from even the members of
their own group of reference. Nobody can meet NTS and PM Muslims since
these are labels (i.e. maps instead of territories). It is clear that for Dr
Duderija, although acknowledging the relevance of emotions and other
cognitive aspects, Muslims’ means of making sense of their religion is based on
maps that have some sort of ontological essence.

If there is strong scientific evidence of the impact of emotions and feelings (in
Damasio’s terms) on the capacity of understanding a text and the impossibility
of sharing ‘feelings’, ideas and conceptualizations directly so as to reproduce
the same result in each individual through hermeneutical exposure, no
evidence is today available of the constraint imposed by ‘interpretive
communities’.

In conclusion, while I never, as Dr Duderija has suggested, played down the

usage of Islamic language, texts and charismatic figures, I do not consider
them to be the main engine of how, at a personal level, Muslims make sense of
their own autobiographical selves.

References

Cohen, A. P. (1995), ‘Introduction’, in P. Cohen, and N. Rapport (eds),

Questions of Consciousness, Florence, KY: Routledge, pp. 1–20.

Damasio, A.R. (2004), Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain,
London: Vintage.

Damasio, A.R. (1999), The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Making of Consciousness, New York: Harcourt Brace.

Mamdani, M. (2004), Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, New York: Pantheon Books.