Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty

Ali Altaf Mian demonstrates how attention to genre and embodiment illuminates the concepts and practices of the Islamic tradition—and how theologians, Sufi mystics, and ordinary Muslims respond to the incapacitating tribulations of creaturely existence in modernity.Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is grounded in the rich textual archive of one of modern South Asia's foremost Muslim theologians and Sufis: Maulānā Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī (1863–1943). Through a close examination of Maulānā Thānavī's vast corpus of writings, Ali Altaf Mian elaborates a profound theorization of tradition as a discursive and affective crucible of ethical formation and spiritual sovereignty.With philological and philosophical rigor, Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty elucidates connections between tradition's forms of life and language. Mian demonstrates how intended and unconscious movements between genres in the life of tradition attend to the felt and perceived needs of the ensouled body at the dual scales of singularity and collectivity. Through a novel attention to genre and affect, Mian models a way to study religious traditions and their tensions as productive sites for understanding ritual law and moral agency in the modern world. Insofar as modernity has been about individualism, the rise of literalism, and the disciplining of desire, religious traditions' capacity to respond to these hardships depend on coming up with new configurations of community, activating textuality and the creativity of genres, and keeping alive the unknowability of desire.