When Books Become Teachers: Understanding the Modern Crisis of Islam through the Bureaucratization of Traditionally Embodied Knowledge

Abstract:

This thesis proposes a new way of understanding the modern crisis of Islam: as a pedagogical and epistemological conflict, rather than a political or religious one. I first explore the premodern approach to Islamic pedagogy—one of the most consistent and well-developed fields in the Islamic intellectual tradition—through medieval texts on knowledge transmission and a brief anthropological look at a traditional learning community in Mauritania. Next I approach the historical modernization and bureaucratization of this system all over the Muslim world through secondary sources and the case study of French-occupied Tunisia, relying on archival research and interviews to show the development of modern state-controlled Islamic education. Finally, I make the argument that these two approaches to the transmission of religious knowledge are based in divergent understandings of what Islam is and how it can be known and lived. I also suggest that this fundamental difference may explain many modern approaches to living Islam, most notably violent antitraditionalism. This thesis uses a variety of methods to make an historical and theoretical argument that the intervention of modernizers, colonizers, and state actors into the premodern Islamic educational system has produced a new form of Muslim subjectivity which is disembodied, bureaucratized, and functionalized, rather than organic, personal, and living.