Good evening and welcome to our third Oxford Political Thoughts seminar for this term.
This is coming to you from St Anthony's College, Oxford,
and specifically at the Middle East Centre under the Islamic Contemporary Climate Studies Program.
My name is Osama Azami and I am the co-convenor along with my colleague.
If I select a special that she will be joining in just a short while and it really gives me immense
pleasure to welcome you to a Oxford Political Thought seminar discussion on the notion of friendship.
And we're delighted to be able to welcome two scholars from often situated in different parts of the world.
But right now, Nuha is joining us from London,
where he is associated with the Institute for Society Studies and also spends time at the
American University of Sharjah and from across the Atlantic at Franklin and Marshall College,
we have sheer alliteration. And as I have mentioned, both of them will be addressing the theme of friendship,
specifically know how Charlotte will be talking about friendship in Islamic ethical, political thought, foundations and modern implications.
And I'll start by giving a brief introduction to yourself, and therefore I'll ask you to take things away.
Nuha is an associate professor at the American University of Sharjah and,
as already mentioned, a scholar based at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London as well.
She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge and has taught and engaged in research in a number of institutions,
from Cambridge to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to the International Studies Centre at Queen's University in Canada.
You've also taught has also taught at the Institute for Spanish Studies in London, continues to do so,
and her main interests are in Islamic ethical and political thought and classical Arabic literature,
as well as ethics and the Koran and the reception of the Qur'an in classical literary studies.
I think most notably for this particular talk from your numerous publications and you have quite a collection,
is your 2015 book Ethics in Islam, Friendship and Political Thought A Tahiti and His Contemporaries, published by Routledge.
So with that brief introduction, I'd like to welcome you to give you a presentation.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Osama. And thank you all for inviting me in to present in this series.
Surely it's very nice to meet you and I look forward to connecting with you and engaging with your work.
As we go forward, I'll start my presentation.
I will try to keep the time as well.
In head analysis of friendship and social networks in post-revolution a revolutionary fringe society,
Sarah Horowitz reveals the extent to which politics and the friendship interacted in times of shifting political alliances here.
The study also explains how French society responded to and recovered from the upheaval of the French Revolution,
including that the sense of distrust and the division of society and on
ideological lines friendship is presented as one bond that could restore trust,
connection and cohesion among people. Trust and cohesion where we sit with the Society for the Functioning of the parliamentary life there.
Therefore, many politicians turned to friends for help.
In my talk, I will present a similar story about friendship in this context, but from very modern Islamic perspective.
My aim is to use the 14th century Muslim think that any Aborigine he and his concept of Sadat of friendship into
the broader development of friendship and its importance in the context of politics of his time and beyond.
I want to begin by defining some of the points that shaped my thinking while exploring
the subject of friendship in political thought in the 10th century Islamic context.
My starting point was challenging the receiver and his argument that limits of secular approach on Islamic political thought.
Modern concepts such as humanism and political philosophy as applied to authors like Haiti.
And the texts, in my opinion, were not faithful to the social and intellectual context in which these sort were produced.
These approaches impose certain assumed dichotomies,
including the religious secular divide which overlooked the encyclopaedic system of
knowledge that shaped their source and the interdisciplinary nature of their work.
Where religious, philosophical and literary elements are intertwined, as I will show in my in the course of this book,
another area of concern at the time was the contentious debate in earlier scholarship over whether the introduction of political,
ethical concepts in Islamic thought was the product of the Greek or Arabic renaissance.
As suggested by scholars such as Maus and Jeb and Judy Cramer,
or largely an indigenous product of Muslim thinker in response to the adverse effects of political
and social and social changes and the increasing polarisation of Islamic culture and cultures.
And so this reminds me also of what Matthew Arnold,
the great Victorian social and literary critic who offers a valuable context in which to interpret much, much of premodern Islamic philosophy.
In 19. In 1869, he wrote a hippie ism and Hellenism.
Between these two points, the influence moves our our world.
So it was important to rethink these categories as a way of helping me understand the Islamic past and why certain concepts.
Where proposed and applied in their own social and historical contexts.
Thus, rather than applying the preset categories to.
To these thinkers and their concepts, or assuming that they are reproduction of previous ones.
I analysed the complexity of the system of knowledge that shaped the formation of important concepts and terms,
including friendship that Attache D and his contemporaries employed in their historical context.
And I also tried to identify the moral conceptual changes that thought the
introduced to the concept of friendship and the ways in which they were applied.
And their significance in relation to the unique historical context of Bullitt society.
Furthermore, in order to make sense. Of what also is like a dossier that you were doing.
I looked at these the scores on on friendship in relation or in the intellectual contexts of his contemporaries,
who also proposed similar concepts and vocabulary,
like the brother of ability who spoke about the concept of Brother Good Hua or like you have
an idea who spoke about also about the concept of insanity and humanity and also Moscow.
He Ahmedinejad been the way he also spoke about the idea and the brother and also spoke about the idea of love and the idea of friendship and justice,
etc. So it was a,
it was important to contextualise the whole to study or to understand the whole intellectual minutia of the time and
to appreciate what the 14th century also wanted to say through their introduction of concepts such as friendship,
brotherhood and love, as I just mentioned, or whatever types of knowledge they wanted to communicate.
We should judge them by considering their perspective,
perspectives and the range of issues that they aim to address within the context of their society.
Which was. At the time, burdened by substantial social strife, political struggle and shifting political alliances,
as well as division and heated debate on the nature and form of knowledge that could save society.
Given the encyclopaedic nature, given the encyclopaedic nature of writing in the first ten century anthology, the armour begins to go.
He and the Brethren ability to produce and produce exhibits, produce, exhibits,
expositions of ideas to reflect on the nature of political matters and the morality of their
society and current believe beliefs and practices invented in various places of their works,
rather than in one specific study devoted to the subject.
For example, Doshi discusses a number of intellectual themes and political ideas concerning the tensions between different bullied visitors.
Namely, even then, they've been at bed as well as how best to rule the to rule the community.
These ideas are scattered in his books and especially found in his books.
And in fact, on a set, the book of the light and conviviality was needed.
I am the moral of the two visitors, as well as a study of a study of friendship and dissent,
which is a lengthy emphasis on the theme of the friendship, which, though he did, composed at the request of the boy, a visit of Baghdad.
Then I bet a and then them who seemed to have heard about associated discourse on the friendship from and then the
famous Zaid been the father who is supposed to be a member of the brethren of the group of the brethren of purity.
This epistle was based on the lectures that he though hardly seems to have delivered
on friendship and related matters in the philosophical circles of Baghdad.
At the end of 370 980, which included members of the School of the Christian philosopher Adi and the Muslim philosopher Abu Suleyman, said Gisenyi.
And so in order to to set his epistle within the wider genre of intellectual inquiry and to often,
if inside then guidance that he be drew not a boon previous ideas on friendship.
Be they religious or philosophical, as though he and his contemporaries seem to be more.
When we look at these ideas,
they seem to be more concerned with methods actually related to everyday experience of Boyd's social and political situations,
rather than with a coherent analysis of the theory of friendship or polity.
And it is worth. It is noteworthy that these two scholars shared a consent for collective harmonious living,
which could be it which could explain their interest in an exclusive in an inclusive approach to knowledge.
These scholars thought that people need to be reminded of the of the actions and moral context which enable people to live together.
They propose the questions including why do human need to live in a social framework and what forms of affiliation,
affiliations or sociability should exist in order for people to exist harmoniously and
maintain salvation and the good life to explain humanity's need for social cooperation.
These philosophers obviously brought forward several arguments for the need of the one or cooperation.
One of these arguments is the is that they said that the inability of humans to viewed all their needs alone.
Is what? Mississippi friendship and cooperation.
And they cite Aristotle's concept of man as a social animal incident.
And in some in Elmer Almaden or and Haven Madani, the inability also to reach moral perfection on the earth,
to beautify their soul alone, and therefore concepts like brotherhood,
humanity, friendship were seen as both to achieve the true happiness and thus a better time to cultivate morality, social behaviours and cooperation.
In his Edison and Sadak, a study the friendship and the friends.
At the hip it. From the outset.
He. It introduces friendship as the highest moral value that links religion.
Reason. Morals in theory and practice.
It is also useful to note that in deciding who requested the who requested the
composition of the of the Epistle was faced by external and internal threats,
as well as shifting political alliances at the time.
In this context, the subject of a friendship was a beating.
Especially the unavoidable friendship with an enemy, which was a major theme running through the epistle of it,
though he viewed the friendship with an enemy and instead and in order to help keep the danger under control.
And this theme was a very important theme in the episode itself and in circumstances of conspiracy and shifting political alliances.
The practice of defending an enemy. Build one self built on self interest and was common actually in the period.
I'm going to share with you my my PowerPoint because I would like to read this.
This one of the citation that says this is the definition I would like to look at.
Very this is a beautiful definition of a friendship.
So start the epistle by introducing this very unique friendship between a philosopher and the judge and the religious judge.
And so it's it's he's a he introduces this a friendship between the philosopher Ibn Abbasid Salim that Gisenyi and Ibn Salah.
And he says, you can read it. So we can see from this quotation that though he just seems to offer the example of the true
friendship between assiduous study and who is a master of logic and the Greek philosophy.
And the judge, Ibn say Yahoo! Is a learned man in religious law as a model of effective polity,
since he is actually addressing of a zeal that replaces the baton of competing political military commanders or kinship this person,
the person centred approach to the ruling. We can also see that it is a model that seek it.
Then we can also see that he does attempt to seek patronage and to promote the role of intellectuals in society.
He also seems to be offering a theory and practice of a friendship based on religion and the reason to reform and to reform the political domain.
And these last things highlight the transcendent character.
Though he does this interest. A concept of friendship between the philosopher and the judge or a ruler,
since it exceeds the limitations of a specific categories and combines religion and philosophy in an ideal political framework.
At the at the time of adoption, these two disciplines were seen as separate and as two disciplines that cannot be combined.
And it was a very clever attempt to bring them together through this sort of this through this framework of friendship.
It seems to be establishing here a balance between the role of knowledge.
By introducing the scholars to study and law in reforming and organising society.
It also seems that the friendship between the man of knowledge and the men of religion and
authority remains essential in Haiti's theory of the connection between knowledge and politics.
Thus this the inescapable relationship between Haiti's concept of friendship and politics
can be seen also in the role of human companionship as a necessary means for ruling with.
But by promoting the example of the rule, our friend and the need for a ruler to turn to friends for advice.
He offers insights concerning the bond of political affiliations and addresses the importance of adopting friendship as a political practice,
especially in times of trouble and shifting political alliances.
Which takes us to, in some ways, the work of Sarah House that I started with and his views.
On them can also be related to the wider project to persuade people in an authority of the indispensability of a wise and just ruler.
And just to a certain extent, I can see a reference to the notion of the platonic notion of a philosopher king and that as the best model for ruling.
And at that point that the air that is noteworthy here is if you can look at my and the words that I thought that I highlighted in red,
and you can see that here he is offering in like four key elements to his concept of Sadako, which is so.
Intellect, nature and morals. And these feelings.
These were very important philosophical concepts that were discussed greatly and in the schools of Abu Salim and said,
just Danny, if not the and the brethren of impurity.
So when we look at these four key components of so that we can see he does attempts to introduce
a darker and to make it imply epidemiological conception to secure a person's perfection
and happiness since it consists of the soul that determines a person's moral equality and
control and havoc and and has a control over the body and direct it directs it to goodness.
So we can see also reason and nature and mortars.
The friendship can be seen here then as a framework as both.
The more we in order to address social and political challenges in society and to produce alternative,
moral and intellectual responses to social disintegration and to the decline in morality which were characteristic of society at the time.
I would like you now to look at the other quotation, which is Who can be a friend?
This was another important point. In Italy, this episode is like and the theme of what is a friend?
What should a friend do? Who can be a friend or who cannot be a friend.
So you can see here a very interesting and lengthy quote he says.
And these are questions that they they are both normative and action guiding ethical questions.
And and they define also and they also these questions also define the nature of this virtual friendship,
which is the place of places at the heart of an alternative moral order.
And if you look at the court, you can see that things according to authority cannot difference, cannot enter the realm of friendship.
And he excludes them from friendship because of their oppression, passion,
and because of their and unjust character at times and aggressive character.
So you can see here also an attempt to link the concept of friendship with the concept of justice,
which was also extremely important in Hades and conceptualisation of his framework.
And so we can see here also that there are other people excluded from being able to be friends like the and the lonely in society,
like because of their also lonely characters and lack of ambition, etc.
And I think something that is of interest to us as scholars, when he say also when writers and put them and who they were,
I think they were the academic they were the academic group of the time, he says.
When writers and could them and the people acknowledge have withdrawn themselves from competition, jealousy, hypocrisy and duplicity,
sometimes friendship with them may be maybe becomes sound, and they may show the fidelity, though that is a scarcity.
And this scarcity is due to a scarcity in its origins.
I'm afraid it's a bit of a gloomy image, but again, what he is trying to say is like trying to say that everything that distracts,
everything that distracts social harmony cannot be included in friendship,
cannot be included in what he sees or what he imagines as the framework of friendship.
So so through the framework of who can be included in friendship and who should be excluded at the links,
the virtue of friendship to justice, and in his view, for the friendship to exist.
I wrote, a ruler should maintain justice and should protect people,
while the lack of friendship brings a deteriorating political, economic and social climate.
This defines a modern form of ruling as that which preserves the community and establishes social harmony,
reason and action, and in opposition to passion and religious zing.
How much time do I still have? Unfortunately, if you see this.
Yes, slightly. So if you can knock on the alarm,
I'm just very quickly just mentioned that the also a very important distinction in the he within
the framework of friendship is the distinction between friendship and other forms of emotions.
So for him, friendship is higher than other forms of familial love because it is suited for the purpose of reason.
And also, I would like very briefly to mention that although it may be like there is a
difference between this concept of friendship and that of the Aristotelian philia,
though he doesn't exist, and his as well as his teachers suggest that they both don't accept the friendship that is based on passion and pleasure.
They only accept this interest, the interest of the friendship.
And so we can see that that he does not take over the Aristotelian understanding of philia,
but he actually excludes certain elements that he doesn't agree with, and he brings other elements from other religious sources.
And citing read a bow, it's like a challenge, etc. In order to offer a more harmonious form of friendship that is able to bring it,
to enable people not just to exist, but actually to exist in a harmonious way in society.
I'll stop here and I'm sorry that I exceeded that.
So thank you so much. That was really a wonderful sort of overview and in many respects a compatibility of tahiti's interpretation
or conception of the notion of friendship across sort of his own contextual and his own context,
but also looking at the in some respects,
the philosophical genealogy of his ideas, because it's fascinating to think about a figure who is in that, of course,
in some respects the centre of the world at the time, but at the centre of the Muslim world,
certainly who is grappling with these divergent traditions.
But there's also the anecdote that you mentioned about the jurist and the I guess,
the philosopher and the jurist when they are meeting, when those minds are meeting.
That's two very noteworthy competitors to the intellectual space as well.
And so I'm sure in the course of the discussion and I'd like to welcome Faisal because he was
able to join mid-stream and will be able to inquire into those aspects of your fascinating talk.
So thank you very much. It's really been beneficial to do something, you know, and you've done all the hard work.
Thank you so much. And I also want to remind audience members, if you'd like to put in any questions to any of our panellists,
please feel free to sort of write those in the Q&A and we will take them up in the Q&A portion.
So let me first introduce you.
Sharon Schiraldi is a currently associate professor of Religious Studies and department chair of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College.
He's been there since 2012, and he's he received his Ph.D. in 2012 from Duke University study under Ibrahim Moussa and
researches Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia.
His fantastic and remarkably long book, Defending Mohammed in Modernity,
is published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2020 and received the American Institute for Pakistan
Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist in the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award.
So you're now my understanding is working more squarely in a second book project.
On a second book project. And you have a, I think, a working title, Perilous Intimacies Debate, Debating Hindu, Muslim, Friendship after Empire.
And so very much squarely both of your books ask in your case, Shirley, your second book squarely in the realm of this week's theme.
So I really look forward to your presentation,
which is entitled I'll just read the title words Debating Muslim Hindu Friendship After Empire, and I'll leave it to you.
Thank you. Thank you so much to Professor Linda Summer for this invitation.
It really is an honour to be here. Thank you so much. No help for you. Really wonderful talk.
I learned so much from it.
I really am honoured to be here, so I just prepared some comments to stay within my 20 minutes and my comments to come from my second book,
which I've just finished and is forthcoming next October from Columbia University Press.
As Osama mentioned, it's titled Perilous into the Seas Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire.
The six chapters of this book look at very discursive and political theatres of intra Muslim scholarly contestations,
primarily focusing on the thought of prominent, early, modern and modern South Asian or traditionally cleaned Muslim scholars on the
boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendships from the late 18th to the mid 20th century.
Since the theme of this seminar is Friendship and Politics, this is what I will focus on as well,
which also forms an important element of the conceptual constitution of this book.
And in this regard, I am interested in exploring ways in which friendship, especially interreligious friendship,
emerges as a promise as well as imperative for different stripes of South Asian Ottoman in modern South Asia.
So this idea of friendship as a promise and a peril will be key to my comments today.
But before I give you a couple of examples to elaborate on this point,
we offered a very quick theoretical comparison between discourses on friendship
and politics in Western philosophical and Islamic intellectual thought,
broadly speaking. Contemporary philosopher Alexander Demas,
in a probing survey of the idea of friendship in Western philosophical thought, argued that from Aristotle onwards,
friendship has represented what he called a double face that promises the highest bonds of virtue,
while also threatening to morally corrupt someone blindly, blindingly bound to a harmful friend.
Friendship, in other words, is both a promise as well as a parable on a somewhat similar note friendship as Jacques Derrida
in his classic The Politics of Friendship had elaborated is intimately entwined with enmity.
While describing German theorist and lawyer Carl Schmidt's thought that it offered
a set of brief and brilliant comments that captured the key conceptual order.
What I'm After. Once the enemy had disappeared, Derrida writes, the friend would disappear at once.
The possibility, the meaning and phenomenon of friendship would never appear unless the figure of the enemy had already called upon them.
To call upon them in advance, had indeed put to them the question or the objection of the friend.
A wounding question, a question of rules and of good.
They did a famously continued with this pithily evocative sentence No friend without the possible wound.
Friendship and Derrida's words is only possible alone alongside the wound of enmity.
Friendship requires enmity, and it's doomed as a condition of its possibility.
No friendship without enmity. No friend without the possible good.
In another essay, cryptically but productively titled Hostile Vitality Hospitality,
Derrida showed that the ideas of hospitality and hostility share a troubling common origin between Hostess as host and hostess as enemy.
Hospitality. The lynchpin of friendship is always vulnerable to be parasitised by its opposite hostility,
the undesirable guest which it harbours as the self-contradiction in its own body.
Back to friendship, though. What then, do I mean by the category of friendship?
I want to experiment by approaching friendship, and here I would share screen.
So it's easy for you to follow my my comments.
As attractive as a relationship or encounter of intimacy, collaboration, cooperation or hospitality with the other.
That viable affording particular benefits, opportunities and forms of power and pleasure.
Also renders untenable exclusive claims to the purity and sovereign ownership of the self.
Friendship is an invitation that cannot be embraced without forgoing the claim to sovereign mastery.
Friendship frustrates sovereignty and is a reminder of its impossibility.
Friendship, especially interreligious friendship, while holding the promise of engaging in access into the other,
also invites peril by signalling the inextricable entanglement of the self with the contingencies of the other.
Friendship offers the possibility of enrichment and expansion, but also carries the threat of influence, corruption or even erasure.
It is this underlying tension and friction between friendship and sovereignty that most interests me.
How does the moment of encounter between religious identity and difference present itself as both a promise as well as a threat?
And what sorts of intra religious negotiations in this case,
intra Muslim negotiations and forms and modes of politics, does that encounter foster and ferment?
This is a foundational question that I'm interested in and want to open up for discussion.
Now the Muslim discursive category corresponding to the idea of friendship most frequently invoked by the
South Asian actors I focussed on in my book was not so much that of savarkar that we had talked about,
but is that of mobile, not an Arabic term that carries the dual meaning of relationship, of friendship,
intimacy and loyalty, or that of client and patronage, as in that between the state and its subjects.
It logically carries that excuse me, it etymological shares the roots.
One idea of mystically infused terms like the friend of God Valley,
usually meaning a Sufi master and will air or sainthood now curiously will air and its Siamese twin.
While air can also mean sovereignty, sovereign power and sovereign authority,
reinforcing the conceptual and linguistic intimacy between friendship and sovereignty.
For instance, the 11th century Qur'an executed theologian and author of the famous Dictionary of Koranic
Terms Alma afraid that we thought evil could Undruggable is the honey died 11 to 8 defined
and voila as the authority of command the one legal number while capturing the semantic frame
of the roots one the with the following description and I quoting here Intimacy of space,
lineage, religion, friendship, loyalty and beliefs, end of quote.
Only prudent aliyah carries the meaning of a friend, an intimate as a friend of God or Sufi saint, but also that of a protector,
master or person with power and authority who can lay claim to the guardianship or alliance layer of the community.
For instance, God described himself as the legal guardian of the faithful.
In verse 2 to 57 of the Koran, the party reads, God is the guardian of those who established feet.
Now, the expert of the Arab beat, Michel Djokovic, has succinctly described the etymological duality of this category.
When he writes, and I'm quoting here, the primary meaning of value is proximity or contiguity.
And this, in turn, gives rise to two further meanings. One of these is to be a friend, and the other is to direct, to govern, to take in charge.
Thus, the wealthy, properly speaking, is the friend who is close.
But as the famous 13th century lexicographer Ibn Manzo put died in 11,
emphasises in the lesson of the speech of Arabs, the holy is also the Nossiter who assists and the he who disposes.
So the point is this. In this formulation, friendship is fraught with power.
If cultivated in a salutary fashion, friendship promises the gift of sovereign power and authority.
Pastoral or territorial, extended by the most absolute of all sovereigns.
The Divine sovereign.
But friendship with an undesirable, the other that portends perilous and harmful consequences eviscerates the integrity of the self, and by extension,
that of the community, unleashing spiritual and political ruin friendship, as does the prize promise, as well as a potentially dire peril.
Moreover,
and this is the crucial point the idea of friendship or Moala and connected categories like and voila rely and rely on in Muslim intellectual
thought include but go much beyond the commonplace notion of congeniality or good relations that one associates with the English word friendship.
Today, rather, mobile art encompasses and brings together theological, political and everyday intimacies.
It is a category that connects to political theology, eager to guard a muslim sovereign power with the desired choreography of the everyday
anxiously invested in preserving Muslim distinction over its various others.
How is this normative mandate an architecture of interreligious friendship negotiated
and debated in the context marked by the aftermath of Muslim political assault?
In other words, how is the promise and peril of interreligious friendship and intimacy, especially in India?
Muslim friendship and intimacy debated after Muslim imperial sovereignty in contexts like modern South Asia,
defined by the absence of Muslim political sovereignty.
These questions are at the heart of my interest. Let me give two interconnected examples for purposes of illustration.
One of the main arguments I make in my book is that from the late 18th century onwards, the increasingly colonised minority,
the interpretive galleries that informed South Muslim scholarly engagements with the question of Islam
indifference were often deeply anchored in a pre-modern context of Muslim imperial sovereignty.
This did not mean, of course, that television Muslim scholars were somehow stuck in the pre-modern word to the exact contrary.
The persistence of an imperial Muslim political theology was intimately bound to the conditions,
expectations and pressures of colonial modernity for a deracinated, colonised minority.
This moment was saturated with these anxieties of recovering the distant,
yet urgently attractive fantasy of sovereign problem and with the impossibility of its own sovereignty.
And this is a crucial point for me with the impossibility of political sovereignty.
This desire for sovereign power was increasingly exercised in the realm of everyday ritual,
like through the drive to preserve and maintain markers of Muslim distinction,
what are called Shia Islam or Shia order Islam, the singular meaning,
ritual practices and affective visions of everyday life that distinguish religious identity and difference in the public sphere.
How is this sort of just rubric examples? One of the most fascinating moments.
Of intra Muslim contest on the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim relations concern the context of the philosopher movement in the early 20th century.
That, of course, Professor David Yu has written extensively and brilliantly about introverts.
But I have benefited tremendously from.
So one of the classic movement's most famous protagonists, the renowned Muslim scholar Abu Mazen, died in 1958, was among Gandhi's major allies.
And later, a key intellectual architect of the Indian constitution had called on Indian Muslims to
actively collaborate with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress non-cooperation movement.
But severing all civic ties with the colonial state in a detailed text peppered with Arabic
references pointedly titled The Arabian Peninsula scheduled an Arab composed in 1920,
Azhar drew on two intensely contested verses in the Koran,
verses eight and nine of Chapter 60 album of relevant parts of which read as follows God does not
submit you from showing kindness to those unbelievers who do not fight you on account of good faith,
and neither drive you forward from your homes. God only forbids you to stand in friendship towards those unbeliever,
to go fight against you because of your faith and drive you forth from your homes or eat others in driving the fort.
And of course, now, in the context of colonial India that argued Hindus represented the first category of non-Muslims mentioned in these verses since
they had never attacked Muslim countries for them in religion or been the cause of the expulsion of Muslims from their lands.
In stark contrast, the British with the designs to colonise Arabia and destroy the Ottoman Caliphate,
exemplified non-Muslims of the second ability those who fought Muslims into religion and expelled them from their
homes as arts program of marrying inter-religious hospitality with anti-colonial activism met stiff resistance.
However, for instance, the towering late 19th and early 20th century traditionalist scholar Ahmad Reza Horn, founder of the school in South Asia,
was furious with Assad and his with movement colleagues and their push for Hindu-Muslim friendship and collaboration.
He counter argued that to begin,
the Ottoman state cannot be understood as a legitimate caliphate since it lacked prophetic lineage or more specifically,
the lineage of the Prophet's tribe, the Kurdish.
But most critically, most relevant to the argument I've been trying to develop here.
Can't disagree with what you called and saw as the encouragement of Hindu-Muslim intimacy and friendship in the public sphere.
Not only was that wrong in characterising Hindus as a community that had never attacked
Muslims for the certainly had done so during multiple episodes of communal violence,
but most significantly, legitimating Hindu-Muslim friendship left vulnerable to erasure.
Public markers of Muslim distinction in Islam era.
Islam in Urdu. Persian. Kohn was especially limited, for instance,
when leaders of the climate movement once invited Gandhi to a mosque on a certain Friday to address the congregants handing over to a Hindu leader.
The elevated and coveted site of the summit exemplified an attitude of disregard
for markers of Muslim distinction that in the absence of political sovereignty,
indexed sovereign power and the promise of preserving religious identity against the threat of competing ideas.
So in contrast to Azad,
who had connected interreligious friendship with a political horizon that exceeded the nation state in the figure of the caliphate,
Khan located Muslim sovereign power squarely in the realm of ritual practice and the choreography of the everyday.
For the latter, it was not the resurrection of any notion of a muslim state, colourful or otherwise,
but the cultivation of embodied markers of Muslim distinction in the public sphere
that enshrined the imperial fantasy of sovereignty in the ruins of Empire.
So the point being this for both deep thinkers, friendship,
its promise in the case of Azhar or its better in the case of Khan was saturated with power.
But how to imagine the interaction between friendship, power and politics was diametrically opposed.
Example two And then I will close another issue of contention that best crystallised this point was that of Gul sacrifice,
arguably the most vexatious subject of dispute among the Indian Muslim scholarly elite in the early 20th century, exactly one century ago.
For that matter, recently,
Hindu nationalists discourses in majority Indian violence directed against minorities like Muslims and Dalits as part of the protection movement,
have attracted tremendous scholarly and journalistic attention as well as alarm.
But investing, affective and political attachment in the body of the cult as an index and
marker of religious purity and superiority is not a solely Hindu phenomenon.
The couple has represented a site of tremendous anxiety and opportunity for competing groups of prominent South Asian Muslim scholars as well.
For at least a century, for instance,
the leaders of the Khilafat movement surged extension from cow sacrifice as a gesture of inter-religious hospitality towards the Hindu community.
This gesture of obedience, they argued, was crucial for forging a robust political alliance with the Hindus against the British,
though their argument was based not on some abstract appeal to pluralism, but on a specific reading of the Islamic legal tradition.
Drawing on the observation that real sacrifice is not an obligatory rajib, but only if permissible mobile practice in Islamic law.
Hence refraining from exposed nor normative pitfalls,
Indian Muslims can easily substitute cows with goats and sheep for adequate sacrifice in both everyday life and on devotional occasions like eat.
This proposal, however, left opposing scholars like Mohammad Reza aghast again.
Of particular interest is the reasoning that went into his protest abstaining from power sacrifice a ritual known to be a distinguishing
marker of Muslim identity in colonial India under the coercion or pressure of Hindus amounted to the shame and humiliation of Muslims,
an outcome that was and people due to the underlying motif of the Sharia establishing Muslim dominance over non-Muslims.
Yet I must avert a potential misreading while articulating and presuming an imperial Muslim political theology.
It is not as if Reza Khan was some unhinged, exclusivist, oblivious to the reality of British colonial power either.
Exactly. To the contrary, he was not only keenly aware of British colonial power,
but all too closely attuned to the opportunities and benefits afforded by that power.
So, for instance, when arguing for the preservation of Muslim markers of distinction Shahida Islam,
Khan frequently invoked the colonial promise of tolerance and policy of tolerance towards individual
religious communities and of the commitment of the colonial state to ensuring the freedom of religion.
Pressuring Indian Muslims to abstain from cow sacrifice, he often proclaimed,
and I'm quoting him, represented an abomination that the colonial authorities should never allow.
Similarly, on the other hand, it is not as if scholars attached to the synoptic movement who argued for Hindu-Muslim
collaboration and friendship were some open ended plural lives unavailable
for uninterested or uninterested in the normative potency of traditionalist
hermeneutical logics anchored in the assumption and context of Muslim empire.
Take, for instance, the position of arguably the most intellectually formidable protagonist.
Maulvi Abdul Bodhi died in 1926 who was associated with the famous Ferengi School of Muslim Traditionalism in South Asia,
known for its emphasis on rationalist disciplines like logic and philosophy.
Even by urging abstinence from cow sacrifice,
Abdul body was at pains to emphasise that such abstention should not issue forth under the pressure or coercion of any non-Muslim community.
Why? Because suppressing a public marker of Muslim distinction involuntarily under any pressure or coercion
contravened the imperial political theology in forming the normative ethos and parameters of Sharia,
but no normative landmines included. If, for purposes of sacrifice, one replaced cows with other animals like sheep and goats of one's own volition.
The most interesting thing here was that Bodhi anchored his whole case for refraining from cow
sacrifice on the very category of public markers of Muslim distinction that the opponents of this view,
like Ahmed Rajan, had mobilised to argue for the necessity of sacrifice, including India.
How? By claiming that the caliphate represented a far more critical and monumental marker of Muslim distinction than cow sacrifice.
As he bitterly and cunningly put it and I quoting here.
What is the cow when put next to the cattle?
Both these examples I have briefly described highlight a vexing conundrum on which I will end.
That conundrum is this How should one imagine and engage the legacy of dominant, pre-modern,
normative attitudes on Muslim non-Muslim relations and friendship in a world in which the very
political context of Muslim imperial sovereignty that informed those attitudes is no longer available.
But paradoxically, what I've tried to show today is that despite or perhaps because of the absence of Muslim political
sovereignty at stake and work in these interpretive contestations over Hindu-Muslim friendship,
what precisely the logic and promise of an imperial Muslim political commission?
And indeed, thank you for your patience. But thank you so much, Shirley.
And, you know, like, this has really been a sort of vista into a series of debates on the theme of today's seminar that I mean,
it really is a fascinating insight of goings on in the Indian subcontinent in the last 150 years or so in ways that really illuminate,
I think, the the as you put it, the promise and the perils of friendship, as it were.
And I want to open up the floor for any questions.
I just want to remind the audience members, if you have any queries, please feel free to ask.
But Fazal, with yourself sort of here,
I may actually start off by asking if you have any comments that you want to put to either or sharada on their wonderful presentations.
Well, thanks very much and thank you both generally.
I'm sorry I missed a bit of nuance talk because I was detained in London by a panel that started late and ended late,
but I made it for the substance of it and a really wonderful quality.
I've got both presentations on reading.
Well, no, I just let me start with you and I'll move to you.
I love this idea of Siddartha as defining friendship because, of course.
In its form. It's a gift. It's voluntary. It's discretionary.
And yet it's also necessary at the same time.
And I want to ask you about the relationship between what is discretionary and voluntarily and voluntarily given on the one hand,
and the necessity that it implies on the other, because friendship, as you laid out, involves a necessity for society.
And this seems to be mirrored in what you're saying about the figure of the king.
So the king. Cannot be a friend, and yet he must exist in order for friendship to exist.
And the King guarantees the possibility of friendship, but is removed from it in some ways at the same time.
And I wanted to ask you whether this removal is also.
One of the things it does is just to towards the king sovereignty, you know, something that Johnny was talking about in a different time and place.
And the king really needs to be an external force as a sovereign figure.
So he is inside and out at the same time.
But doesn't the king also perhaps not have Bobby or need friends?
Because as far as I can tell, in the kind of medieval tradition of political theory saying the mayors of princes literature,
it's not something I know anything about in my research.
I'm just parroting what I read. The figure of the boon companion, the king's friend.
His friends are very, very important.
And I'm just wondering whether these friends are also and were friends of a different variety than the kind of friendship you were talking about.
Your friendship with the king is premised upon something other first.
Of course, it's a problem in its own right. How can you be a friend of the King's if you're unequal and it's a problem for the King because of
the king's possible loss of his own sovereignty by depending on the love of or for his friends.
But it just made me think of that when you think about it as your writing about the king and friendship,
whether that kind of friendship that he's talking about is necessarily outside the normative conception of virtue,
that you describe the totality of that, because after all, it requires.
War, wine, drinking, women, all of the things which are not part of the two categories of friendship here.
What's. And you may have talked about it before I arrived.
Could you just say some more about it and then I'll come to John? Sure.
And thank you so much for this fantastic question.
And this is exactly what I was on with, though.
He did try to distinguish between what he what he calls as real friendship or just interest in interesting friendship and companionship.
And then so or a being a acquaintance.
So what he was trying to do is like obviously there was an explicit criticism to the institution of kinship.
That that became a new institution during the pre and the brief period that we saw a change in the concept of polity,
a change of the structure of polity in the period the Abbasid caliphate became weakened and the boyhood which and who were and Shia minority,
they came from the Salem area and Iran and they ruled the Islamic caliphate.
But these boys are the rulers. They couldn't claim their kinship on the basis of prophetic succession.
And they were actually also not very welcomed by the Sunni majority of society.
So they were seen in somewhat as outsiders to the rest of the population or to the rest of the society in Baghdad.
In addition to that, they were not interested themselves.
The kinship, the king or the institute, the institution of kinship in itself.
Kings were not interested in making the friendship with the rest of society.
They wanted to be always.
That outsider is the institution that can control and manipulate all the other groups and all the other competing groups in society.
So what was that, though he did? Trying to say is like these things we're only interested in their own self-interest
in the in the in well in combining wealth in their own desires in them.
It like aggression, a power it says.
So for that they are not suitable to be friends.
No one can be friends with them because the one important element in his understanding of friendship,
in addition to social intellect, nature and morals, is the trust.
You cannot trust them. You can't have a relationship of intimacy because it's you should be able to reveal your inner self with your friend.
And this is missing from this friendship with these and with these things.
Obviously, they can have companions, they can have acquaintances, but they can't.
They are they are they cannot be qualified or morally elevated to be to reach the rank of friendship that he was talking about.
But he actually and was also promoting his own his own intellectual works, meaning he was trying to argue for the place of intellectuals in society.
So what he was trying to say that if these things like the vizier had been said,
then where to become interested in knowledge and where to embrace the people of
knowledge and ask for their advice and welcome them and and select the right companion.
They will be able to purify themselves through knowledge and they will get the right advice.
And then they become a ruler of friends. Also there is a possibility there is a road down.
That's why yes, there is a possibility. But the responsibility is somewhat confined or conditioned and on their willingness to control their
passion and to control their self interest and to to yet to control their self interest and passion.
Thanks very much. So turning now to security again, the discussion of sovereignty in that very rich paper.
I was wondering what you were saying.
I mean, you're describing the socialisation of celebrity in the absence of empire.
But do you think something else is happening there as well, in addition to being socialised?
It is, as it were, islamised in a certain way.
So it might have been part of the language of siesta earlier, and now it is made to fit in the language of Judea.
I'm not drawing an absolute distinction between those two categories, but I think it's important nevertheless,
because of the authorities who are making this pronouncements, their authority is not based on anything that a principal thought it would be based on.
So I wonder if that is also happening and if that is the case, then, you know, you have a new imperium of the faith who created so.
If you could elaborate on that. On the issue of the conflict.
I just found it fascinating that the standard Urdu translation of non-cooperation is stuck in Malala, as you know,
and yet it's used completely differently from the English non-cooperation or any other Indian term, because cooperation is certainly not friendship.
And when Gandhi talks about non-cooperation,
he thinks that to not cooperate with the British actually involves the greatest amount of friendship for the British,
that in refusing cooperation with them, you are performing a sacrifice for yourself.
I mean, you lose, you lose out. And in doing so, you offer the hand of friendship to your opponent.
So you give them the opportunity to to claim friendship, but the friendship that you're offering.
So in a way, the refusal to cooperate and friendship go together.
For Gandhi. And I suppose you can read that as another way in which sovereignty gets to be linked and be linked with friendship.
And yet, as I am still close to going.
Use this knuckleball wallop in your and your telling of it in a completely different way in which this issue of refusal to cooperate,
leading to friendship does not seem to be that available.
And I wonder why why that might be the case.
On on the caliph in Macao, of course, there's that Gandhi, too, as that wonderful saying where he says that the caliph is the most.
So the caliph is the Muslim cow. So he actually makes a comparison between the holy cow.
They sound sort of like the same kind of sound in English anyway.
And he's not suggesting that the same thing or the equivalents that could be exchanged, the commodity exchanges,
but precisely because they are unlike each other and an equal,
they can enter into a relationship and that one can be literally exchange for the other.
So again, what strikes me is that I'm a Christian and others of your being fighting.
I refuse to look at that kind of reasoning or it seems not to have any weight on them so that they are reading the kind of,
say, Gandhi was the most prominent advocate for this kind of thing.
They are reading him in terms of their own categories, but.
In such a way as not to read him at all. And it's that refusal that I.
Is it? I'm standing on both sides. FARZAD Who should have known better and did know better.
And for Assad's own opponents, there's a kind of unwillingness or an inability or a refusal to actually accept.
The terms of the argument, even though they are constantly arguing with each other in the most sophisticated and nuanced rate,
as you describe them both very, very fast.
Thank you so much for that sense. You know, in the first point, you know,
one of the things that I've been interested in is precisely this question of these seemingly illiberal actors like Amadeus Han
and other sort of scholars contemporaneous to him who might be in opposing camps like the pioneers of the Deoband movement,
who are so invested in these questions of the everyday. Why does everyday life become so charged by the late 19th century?
And these questions of the celebration of the Prophet's birthday or the question of, you know, distributing food on the third day of the deceased,
and these questions of intimacies between different religions in the public sphere and this whole question of preserving the markers of Muslim
distinction in everyday life to not see this kind of preoccupation as apolitical or to retreat to the private sphere or to retreat from politics,
but rather as deeply political, but rather exactly as you put it,
compensating for that lost political sovereignty precisely in a different domain of politics.
That is, in some ways, Islamism sovereignty. The nice way of putting it in that precisely the everyday becomes a sphere saturated
with the promise of sovereign power in the absence of political sovereignty.
And as you have pointed out in your book on the climate movement, that for many of the political protagonists,
you know, this was not a movement to live under the Ottoman caliphate.
I think that's a very interesting point, that this was not a movement that we want to live under the Ottoman caliphate,
but rather it represented a form of politics that exceeds the nation state and that also exceeds the actual Ottoman caliphate itself.
So these are horizons of politics that that emerged in the in after political sovereignty and the competing articulations of sovereignty,
but nonetheless, both grappling with the aftermath of sovereign power on the question.
The second question that you that you raised is very interesting on on a lot and
how it is collapsed with friendship and the thought of some other than others.
The interesting thing here is that on this particular point, someone like Gandhi and some others are contractually exploiting the agreement.
And that someone it is also precisely the problem that he has is with this point of collapsing more a lot with friendship with the British,
to the point that he makes is that we ought to make a distinction between friendship or substantive friendship.
And mere transactional relations. And you ought to continue mere transactional relations with the British,
taking funding for our schools and all those kinds of things that ought to through which we
ought to maintain our everyday life and our existence as a functioning community of Muslims.
But we don't need to engage in substantive friendship with them.
So when you collapse while out with substantive friendship and start giving away a lot what you're basically is doing,
what basically you're doing is you're inviting catastrophe and socioeconomic hardship on your own self,
which will eventually benefit the, quote unquote Hindu community and Gandhi.
So this basically, he argues, is a catastrophic ruse that has been planted by Gandhi in the minds of people like us, all that others.
So he makes an interesting point that we should, in fact engage in a practice of masked French, a masked friendship with the British,
and that you're not actually showing substantive friendship and militarily mere transactional relations,
but mask a certain kind of friendship that is not apparent, but is but you keep it masked in some ways.
It's close to the idea of a certain kind of a Sunni Turkey of friendship with the British.
So but this is precisely the kind of collapse of this category with substantive friendship that is also bothering someone like Ahmed.
And this kind of slipperiness of these categories is precisely what makes them ambiguous and productive, but also threatening to the different actors.
But I just the last point I want to make is that even within the climate movement, I think, you know, as you have explored,
there is this interesting shades of nuance between a figure like Assad and a figure like Abdul Mahdi,
in the opinion of the body, is much more attentive to addressing the kind of normative sensibilities of a Hanafi traditionalist.
And to make sure that those sensibilities are not traded on and are addressed in a more deliberate fashion,
but are somewhat like other reports of Azhar Ali and all those kinds of pre-modern figures.
He can take certain leaps in certain kinds of licenses.
For example, on the whole question of does the Caliph need to be of, then you're very open by saying,
no, he doesn't need to be, because this started as a kind of choice.
Many of the killings have not had that lineage, and that is something that does not have historical precedents.
That is something the body would not argue. So within the movement, that is interesting temperaments that we find those sort of beautiful nuances,
but also need to be kept in mind as I just just an ending comment that which is icons
argument in many ways gets to be the most to me argument in the Pakistan movement,
which views this movement as precisely a ruse to impoverish Muslims.
You know, they quit the assembly. They quit colleges and schools.
They quit their law practices, and they moved down in the world.
And then they become slaves of the looks of it.
But the Muslim League, it's not about the [INAUDIBLE] out of Islam or whatever, but it's about a conspiracy.
Exactly. In which they lose, they lose power.
And I think it's. Should I take the opportunity to ask?
So I had my own set of questions. Now we have about 15 minutes left.
So unfortunately we can't address all of our curiosity, but I'm sure these conversations will keep on going through well beyond this evening.
I wanted to start with a question for her, which I you know,
I found an amusing sort of moment in your lecture where you were talking about friendship with enemies.
And it made me go back to a line in The Godfather, which is attributed to I think this is typically a segment of Don Corleone or something like this.
You know, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
And I was kind of wondering, like, what does friendship with enemies mean in this sort of a context in particular?
Because I assume it's in the context you were speaking about to do with recognising that you need to have relations with people,
with you need to maintain some diplomatic relations, perhaps with people who are potential threats to you ultimately.
But it also kind of hearken back in my mind, obviously, to Haiti is earlier than a figure like Machiavelli,
but to the kind of, I guess the Renaissance post renaissance never for princes literature,
because I think I kind of associate with the sort of person who is hanging out with the court
and in a sense providing as well as entertaining discourse advice of a sort for the court.
So that was one dimension of the question.
And the other dimension is, is there any conception into Haiti that there can be friendship with members of the opposite sex?
And whether there could be friendship with it is one's relation with one spouse too hierarchical in that context,
with one's wife going to be a relationship of friendship.
So in a sense, three questions, but thank you. Thank you for these very interesting questions.
I'm going to start with the last question, actually, which I also find them.
Yeah, very, very creative. And I think he doesn't address the friendship between a man and a woman in the sense that you're talking about,
that he actually talks about a relationship.
He talks about romantic love. And he says that.
And he talks about it in a in a quote that I don't remember exactly, but I remember the context.
He talks about the Bedouin and a Bedouin love for a woman and that for his wife and this love for his wife should.
And if there is if there is a if if you are faced with a choice between between a choosing romantic love, your love for the wife and your French,
your friend, you have to choose your friend because your relationship with your wife is based on passion.
And while the relationship with with the friend is actually based on reason and based on choice.
So you have made the choice and you have duties towards your friends.
And you have to maintain a friendship. Therefore, you have to choose your friend over your life.
Very counter to what exactly.
And that is actually it is a very interesting view because it reminds me of a story in Khalilah within the Bible,
a thought if you know the story, the monkey and the turtle.
Okay. So it's a very interesting story that there is a monkey that who used to live in an isolated land and like in an oasis and a turtle,
he swam and the monkey every time he would shake the tree and some kind of fruit will fall down and and the turtle will take the food and would eat.
So the turtle assumed that actually the monkey is doing that on purpose to feed him.
So he felt like that the monkey was trying to to have a friendship with the bears.
And then the turtle developed a very strong friendship with the monkey.
And to the extent this distracted distracted the monkey from his wife and the wife became very jealous because of the absence,
the absence of the husband who started to spend a lot of time with the monkey.
And then she should have had anxiety about this relationship between the character and the monkey.
And then the neighbour advised the wife to bring the turtle wife to pretend that she is sick and she will only be cured if she eats a monkeys heart.
And then the turtle was in dilemma.
I mean, what how what does he what would he do?
He's going to lose a good wife. And is he going to deceive his friends?
So what is the right thing to do?
But then after a period of contemplation, the turtle goes back to the monkey, and then he tries to deceive the monkey.
And to tell him that, okay, I want to take you to visit my house.
And then the the monkey jumped on the turtle's back, and then the turtle was going back home with the monkey.
And the idea was to kill the monkey and to make the wife in the hut.
But then in the middle of the journey, like the turtle became a bit said, how would he kill his friend?
So he started like in a way to in order to bend and to ask the monkey for forgiveness.
He told the story to the monkey that what is going to happen. Then the monkey was extremely clever.
And he said, you know, we monkey is when we need our hand, we don't take our heart with us.
We actually needed that. So so the turtle took the monkey back and this is the button.
The soda is like it's it's a dilemma.
Like what? What would you choose? But then someone like a lady would choose a friend over.
Over a romantic love. Back to your second question.
It's just like if you can just remind me again, I was just thinking in terms of like, you know, the notion of keeping one's enemies close.
What does that mean? And it sort of struck me as maybe somewhat Machiavellian as it were.
Yes. It was actually a very this notion was extremely important in the constant in the context of boys, because boys society was bullied.
The governance was divided across courts in different areas, like in very Shiraz like that.
So they were different. Boy, it was years in these course and they were competing relationship and there was a particular was
the visit of the son had been I bet he was in in constant competition with have been saddened
and have been sad then always wanted to know about what's going on at the court not that so and
apparently though he knew the court even saw them inside out and therefore had been stopped.
That had been studied through the he wanted to know about the court of about bed and wanted to send the correspondence.
He was always sending correspondence to the court of about a bed in an attempt to keep.
A kind of diplomatic relationship and friendship with him in order to understand what is the next move by Ibn Abed, etc.
So this kind of type of friendship were necessary at the time?
Absolutely. And I think, yeah, that would that would make a lot of sense to contemporary sensibilities as well, I think.
Just very briefly, surely, and this idea of, you know,
Muslims cannot be humiliated into adopting the abandonment of cow sacrifice is really
fascinating because on what basis of Muslims effectively abandoned slavery in our times?
And I wonder if people like, you know, there was a Han, if they were alive today would be saying that.
But actually we need to re-establish slavery.
And so, yeah, I kind of wonder. And that's more or less my question to yourself, like, how do you think there's an analogy?
Or Am I missing something here in the way that they would have seen this? What's a slave you can actually do?
So, you know, in the sense that, you know, if we're saying, okay, slave account sacrifice is not a word yet.
It's more back in the Shariah. So you can abandon that.
So that is a very common argument against slavery. It's a common against, for example, multiple marriage for men.
And so there are a whole host of areas where you can say, well, this isn't an obligation technically.
So we can abandon it because it's better for us in this context. Right.
So, so so the argument there is that in this particular context,
it's a marker of Muslim distinction that God sacrifice distinguishes Muslims from non-Muslims.
So if you were to abandon it under the coercion or the pressure of a non-Muslim community,
that would be to eliminate that would mean undermining our own position in relation to the other.
So interestingly, even someone like Abdel Bari of the Flashpoint movement, he in fact argued that if Hindus insist that Muslims abandon God,
sacrifice at that point, in fact, it will become obligatory for Muslims to engage in sacrifice.
So, in fact, he tells his compatriots and the Indian National Congress also that don't insist on this point,
because the more you insist, the more I will also become legally obligated to tell my community that you must undertake this practice,
because in terms of a classical legal sort of deem dropping, the insistence will allow me then to tell them that,
okay, at least on everyday matters at this, at least on Eve, you can at least drop down sacrifice.
And I will not engage in sacrifice either on either that at least.
So in order for this to happen. Both sides have to temper their insistence on this matter.
But even someone like Abdel Bari is very insistent that that that the that this should not come from the
pressure or the insistence of the non-Muslim community or else a marker of Muslim distinction will be erased.
So that is the kind of what I'm interested in, how the kind of power relations and assumptions of power dynamics coming from the
pre-modern Muslim imperial framework of law is informing both groups of scholars,
and hence this intra Muslim debate is not really about for or against pluralism or forward against inclusiveness of an exclusive,
but rather it's really a negotiation of a pre-modern framework of law in a radically
new set of conditions and how that negotiation leads to new forms of politics.
And that's all connecting friendship politics.
Just to add a tag on to this, I mean, what's interesting is that some of the Ottoman opponents to European pressure to emancipate slaves.
Right. This was their argument as well, that interesting Western powers are insisting and in some respects undermining our sovereignty,
that that makes it all the more important for us to maintain this practice.
So I guess it's not it's not a salient issue in South Asia, right?
Slavery in particular, but in other parts of the world, it may well be.
That's interesting.
Thank you so much to both of you to thank you for giving so much of your time and really sharing your the latest you've been engaged in.
And it's really been eye opening in so many levels. I wish I always feel this way.
I wish we had so much more time to engage in these conversations.
But I hope that this encourages our listeners and future sort of viewers of the podcast to,
you know, get their hands on your books at least and, you know, benefit from from that experience.
Before we conclude, I just wanted to mention that we do have an A session,
which is our final session for this month, for this term of the Oxford Political Thought Seminar.
And this session will be on secularity.
So on Wednesday, the 30th of November, and we'll be joined by Amanda Salvatore and Winfred Winifred Fuller's Sullivan,
both dealing with the theme of secularity.
So we'd really welcome you to join at that point. But until then, we look forward to seeing you.
I want to thank again Shirley. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. It's a true pleasure.
Thank you so much. Great. Nice meeting you, Shirley. Wonderful meeting you as much, Robert Patterson.
Take care. Goodbye. Thank you very much. Good evening to everyone.