The fragmented sovereignty of the ummah : A response to Sidaway's manifesto

Abstract

In this commentary, I engage with Sidaway's manifesto by exploring the implications of the spatiality of the ummah for political geography and what this could mean for future research agendas. I argue that feminist geographical contributions offer an important pathway to discuss the spatial implications in Muslim geographies, because they are useful in critically approaching the political dimension of Muslim geographies, particularly the question of sovereignty. Building on my own research on Muslim family law in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, I highlight the centrality of the concept of sovereignty as well as the question of positionality for a decolonial research agenda of Muslim geographies.

In ‘A Manifesto for Critical Muslim Geographies’, Sidaway (2023b) rightly points out that Muslim geographies are related to the spatial dimensions of the Muslim community of the ummah, but he leaves the implications of this statement under-explored, especially the spatiality of power and knowledge. In this commentary, I explore selected implications of this spatiality of the ummah for political geography and what this could mean for future research agendas. I argue that feminist geographical contributions have not only been an important pathway to discuss the spatial implications in Muslim geographies; they are also useful in critically approaching the political dimension of Muslim geographies, particularly the question of sovereignty. I highlight the importance of relevant feminist geographical contributions and then discuss, partly related to my own research on Muslim family law in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the centrality of the concept of sovereignty as well as the question of positionality for a decolonial research agenda of Muslim geographies.

Sidaway lobbies for an informed engagement with Islamic ilm (knowledge and learning) that overcomes the separation between the religious and the secular as two different spheres. He writes: ‘Whilst the term religion may serve as a convenient shorthand, its uncritical adoption as a catch-all label is a categorical fallacy that imposes an analytic which misconstrues Islam’ (Sidaway, 2023b: 388). Llopart i Olivella and Mostowslansky (2023) highlight in their response to Sidaway that the social sciences tend to assume a secularist frame in the production of knowledge. I agree with their intuitions and positions. At the same time, and at the risk of being charged with perpetuating a ‘Western’ approach, I still find Talal Asad's insight important that the secular is deeply implicated in religious thinking and not necessarily a break with it (Asad, 2003). The histories of these implications are important to understand negotiations around Muslim identities and politics in a variety of different contexts and societies.

The complicated relations between religion and state bring up the question of sovereignty and law. Geographers have extensively worked on the concept of sovereignty (for an overview, see Mountz, 2013) as well as on the relation between religion and sovereignty (e.g. Agnew, 2006; Hopkins, 2016; Kong, 2010). Attention has been directed toward the everyday repercussions of religious identities in struggles over political power, including those that take place in Muslim minority contexts (Sidaway, 2023a). This scholarship, most often focusing on challenges with the integration of Muslim immigrant populations in Western societies, points to the everyday practices and tactics to materialize, navigate, challenge, and negotiate religious identities in everyday life.

Work by feminist geographers on Muslim femininities shows that negotiations of religious identities not only involve normative expectations, behavioral rules, pious beliefs or traditional customs, but also a set of skills to navigate these in everyday settings (for an overview, see Schenk, Gökarιksel and Behzadi, 2022). It is important to note that feminist literature on Muslim women in minority contexts not only shows that the everyday navigation or even struggle around expressions of religious identities is gendered, but also points to the challenges that emerge in settings of integration. And these settings are often related to sovereignty as rule of law building on secular state constitutions.

Religion, including Islam, in public space has long been subject to debate. In contexts where Muslims have settled many hundreds of years ago, be it in societies where they are the majority (Mills and Gökarıksel, 2014) or a minority (such as in India or Ethiopia), the role of any religion, including Islam, in public space is different to Western minority contexts. In states where religion(s) is/are part of the constitution, such as in Indonesia (where Islam is the de-facto state religion) and Sri Lanka (where Buddhism is considered the dominant religion), religion manifests in various aspects that shape and inform everyday life. Religion can be turned into a larger political project informing the everyday (e.g. Gökarıksel and Secor, 2023; Gupta et al., 2020). This political turn (Hyndman, 2001) is important in further developing Sidaway's plea to think of the spatializing of the ummah.

In Western scholarly thought, sovereignty is closely linked to the idea of the rule of law and how to approach law. However, Islamic law rests on the holistic intentions to deliberate on a legal judgment based on Islamic texts. In his manifesto, Sidaway highlights various Islamic concepts (e.g. Sharia, ijtihad) that underpin his plea for critical Muslim geographies. All these concepts serve as a basis for judges, governors, public servants, or imams in powerful positions to interpret, justify, and deliberate on purely religious-cultural forms of piety as well as political power and knowledge. However, a variety of teachings and interpretations exist in Islam that provide leeway for different approaches to justify power or interpret Islamic law as they rest on reading and interpreting Islamic texts (Quran, Sunnah, Hadith). Islam recognizes the deliberations of ideas and thoughts (known as ijtihad) as a societal process and not necessarily as a regulatory force in its first instance (Abou El Fadl, 2001). A body of trained jurists in Islamic legal schools is usually appointed to deliberate on matters such as family issues or heritage. The training of these jurists in specific Islamic legal schools defines the basis of their deliberations and the traditions that inform how they deliberate (Hallaq, 2009). This contributes to what Iza Hussin (2016) has called ‘the politics of Islamic law’.

If we consider the spatialization of the ummah as linked to power and knowledge, then power and knowledge are inherent to the politics of Islamic law: Where and how Islamic jurists are trained affects the judiciary and its legal judgments as well as the translation of these judgments into everyday life, often regulated informally. This might imply that a tafsir (exegesis of Quran) needs in turn to be read in line with the political ambitions of the person or institution tasked to read it and issue a ruling. And this politics of Islamic law might have a certain bias.

Sovereignty, as being linked to the ideal of effective rule of law, becomes fragmented when legality becomes political and is contested among different ‘seats of power’, especially in place-based regimes that rely on local authority structures. Schenk and Hasbullah (2022) have shown the politics of these place-based regimes and the ‘informal sovereignty’ of Muslim courts ruling on family issues in Sri Lanka. These courts heavily rely on mosque federations. Judges’ local power differs depending on how much leverage and influence the national Muslim umbrella organization can exert in a particular place. Linking this claim to Sidaway's notion of spatializing the ummah reconfirms that Sharia law, here Muslim family law, remains a flexible law that is subject to the spatiality of the power-knowledge nexus of Muslim organizations.

Geographers have not yet touched upon many specific questions related to Islam, spatiality, power, and knowledge. For example, what role do religious organizations perform in a state? Are they a de facto state power (as in Indonesia), or do they have legal expertise and function as judiciary force? Are Muslim organizations an intermediary that can be approached to address, for example, family problems, if needed (Lemons, 2019)? Are Muslim institutions becoming sub-organs of the state – or should they be co-opted for that purpose? What are the politics of such co-option that is often called legal pluralism? When we ask these questions about the politics of Islamic law, we also likely touch upon Islamic studies, a discipline concerned with the subject and object of Muslim authority.

I therefore propose to consider sovereignty as one key concept to grasp the spatiality of the ummah. This sovereignty can be fragmented and place-based, and studying it comes with methodological intricacies and challenges filled with the pious readings of Islamic texts that might or might not embrace a political dimension. Sovereignty might be tied, but need not be so exclusively, to different approaches to Muslim authority and imaginations, for example, of kinship (including heteronormative ones) or pious lifestyles. Considering Muslim minority and Muslim majority contexts helps focus on differences across different countries, political frameworks, and systems. The ‘fear of small numbers’ (Appadurai, 2006) affects Muslims as minorities specifically, as it implies that those who deviate from the majority in terms of piety, faith, or most accepted norms might face repression and intimidation. In Muslim majority contexts, this repression might be faced by other religious minorities, heretic minority groups within the Muslim community (Hasbullah and Korf, 2013), or by those who consider themselves as atheists (Quack and Schulz, 2023). Geography, as a discipline, is key to understanding these everyday negotiations of the fragmented sovereignty of the ummah.

What are the methodological implications of studying the politics of Islamic law and the spatiality of the ummah? Positionality is essential in carrying out research in general and more particularly in the field of Muslim geographies (Noxolo and Hamis, 2023). In our special issue on ‘Security, Violence, and Mobility: The Embodied and Everyday Politics of Negotiating Muslim Femininities’ (Schenk et al., 2022), we asked all authors to explain their positionality in relation to their research process. What was published in small portions, was a much larger discussion and, at times, also informed the review processes: Can a Muslim man carry out interviews with Muslim women's groups? Do we need a gendered approach? Do research participants consider a white Christian woman more trustworthy because she is not part of the Muslim community and thus believed to keep secrets for herself? To turn this question the other way: What happens to positionality if someone is an insider and might be intimidated as a consequence of critically questioning one's own Muslim community? Is it possible for a non-Muslim to ever understand the forms of violence that Muslims might experience? Can co-production of research be an approach to balance not only positionalities, but to ‘free’ academia from the overwhelming whiteness of its scholarship? These are just some questions to make a decolonial approach more tangible in methodological terms.