Metaphysical Institutions: Islam and the Modern Project investigates scholarly conventions for describing social phenomena and critiques the powers and limits of language for theorizing complex social realities. By thinking through core definitions in religious studies, including the porousness between what can rightfully be characterized as religion, culture, civilization, tradition, or something else, Caner Dagli seeks to delineate a conceptual space within which social theorists can more accurately describe the realities propagated through human efforts to organize and theorize issues of metaphysical concern. The book’s call for linguistic precision concerns Islamic studies most immediately but extends to adjacent humanities disciplines and will interest social theorists and analytic philosophers invested in language’s uses and limits. His project is animated by a quest for definitional precision and a healthy appreciation for the ineffable.
Dagli draws inspiration for his interdisciplinary approach from the sages and polymaths at the acme of Islamic knowledge production, “where historians write about the spiritual life, philosophers write Quran commentaries, jurists write mystic treatises, theologians explore logic, mathematicians write poems, and poets teach law” (3). Chapter 1 identifies conceptual gaps, hurdles, and “generations-long definitional dead ends” (34) in religious and cultural studies that tend to reproduce chronic imprecisions, incoherencies, and ambiguities. He considers a tetrad of concepts, namely, “religion,” “culture,” “civilization,” and “tradition,” concepts that often have ad hoc usages but not adequate, consistent definitions across scholarship. Dagli takes aim at ubiquitous terms in humanities writing, terms such as “structure” and “construct,” that function as metaphors through which scholars attempt to communicate about social phenomena.
Dagli then creates a matrix to help theorize consciousness at the collective level by describing how a given social group conceives of “what is real, what is possible, and what is good,” that is, the metaphysical dimensions of human existence. He theorizes the qualities of metaphysical institutions in a manner that aims to be, in his words: rich/complex, clear/coherent, and targeted/correct in scope. The resulting matrix that Dagli produces offers a historian or social theorist questions to relate to a given human composite group.
In his scrupulous, multifaceted definition of institutions, Dagli initially evokes the terms “community,” “practice,” and “legacy” to describe who an institution is, the activities an institution does, and what an institution has, respectively (39). The elements relationally “imply and presuppose each other” (40) as Dagli explains in depth. This section of the book will be of utmost interest to sociologists and anthropologists as Dagli proceeds to characterize an institution using the additional triad “stability, dynamism, and purpose,” whereby each term of this second triad applies to each of the initial three constituent elements of the institution in a fascinating three-by-three grid (46, Table 2.1). Dagli’s matrix is then completed by one more triad, “accounts,” “heuristics,” and “norms,” umbrella terms that are unpacked in detail. This additional triad results in twenty-seven discrete but interrelated facets that scholars can use to describe a “metaphysical institution.”
Dagil’s proposed framework also offers theorists helpful language to think through stability and dynamism in institutional life, or its “constants” and “variables,” to follow Dagli’s lead in evoking mathematical terms. His variable factors for metaphysical institutions are hierarchy in community constitution, which ranges from egalitarian to elitist; the balance of old and new expressions of practice; and the mediums and modalities through which legacy is bequeathed. To capture these constant and variable factors, Dagli generates another handy social science matrix (62, Table 2.3), making chapter 2 especially valuable. He then describes dynamics between thinking individuals and their collectivities, the subject of the middle chapters of the book.
Employing his rubrics in later chapters, Dagli affirms and even amplifies the creative and emergent dimensions of Muslim doctrinal, jurisprudential, didactic, and literary knowledges, while also demonstrating their continuity and rootedness. He then wades through the theoretical intricacies of four seminal academic works that attempt to describe what can accurately be labeled as “Islamic.” Here, the work pushes provocatively against dominant conceptions that have long defined the field of Islamic studies. Chapter 8, entitled “One Islam, Many Islams, or No Islam?” could be considered essential reading for a theory and methods class in religious studies or anthropology.
Even as Dagli’s project offers heuristics for “defragmentation” and “disambiguation” (260), his project is also pertinent for scholars working in constructivist theological modalities. For instance, by working with Dagli’s matrix to theorize institutional life, I can more precisely articulate the ways that contemporary theologians are rooted in the “community,” “practice,” and “legacy” of the “metaphysical institution” of Islam, which can be characterized by “stability,” “dynamism,” and “purpose.” I can more readily specify which “accounts,” “heuristics,” and “norms” I might be assessing or readdressing with any given article or practice-based intervention.
The precision of his framework also offers me language to describe the intervention that scholars invested in female well-being are making within the apparatus of Islamic knowledge production. I find Dagli’s book helpful in articulating how feminist epistemologies can challenge hierarchies, bring novel insights, and generate new modalities of engagement without subverting, destabilizing, or negating the foundations of the “metaphysical institution” of Islamic epistemology. The variable categories of “hierarchy,” the “balance of old and new expressions of practice,” and the mediums through which to bequeath legacy are especially pertinent, given that women and gender studies aims to reconfigure gender-based hierarchies, emphasize more egalitarian and female-affirming expressions of practice, and ensure that females and other non-dominant groups are represented in bequeathed legacies. Moreover, women’s and gender studies methodologies insist—as does Dagli—that knowledges are situated within larger epistemic frameworks that necessarily constrain any given knower’s perceptions and powers of articulation.
Though Dagli will likely go further in describing the “Modern Project” that looms in the book’s background, Metaphysical Institutions hammers a nail into a coffin of an intellectual paradigm propagating inappropriately reductionist descriptions of Islam and Muslims. A companion book that Dagli is well-positioned to write could assess how aptly Muslim critiques of modernity gage modernity’s philosophical underpinnings and limits.
Celene Ibrahim is a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Groton School.
Celene Ibrahim
Date Of Review:
October 18, 2024
