Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia with Ali Altaf Mian (U Notre Dame Press, 2026)

Yes.

Well, that figure is Maulana Ashraf Ali Tanmi, who was a Sufi theologian and also a Quran scholar, an exegete of the Quran, a Muslim reformer, a jurist of the Hanafi law school who lived in colonial India from 1863 to 1943.

He wrote in many genres, and of course this is not unique to him, but one of the reasons I have spent the last 20 years studying him is is because he wrote in all sorts of genres.

And at first, I used to think that maybe I could divide the genres of his production, of his oeuvre, of his archive, of his corpus of writings, into the scholastic genres, which would be Quran exegesis, commentaries on hadith, the fatwa genre or the legal response literature that he authored, theological treatises on one side, and what I at that time called ordinary life genres, which stemmed out of the ritual practices of his Sufi lodge in North India.

And so the majalis, the council sessions would be the crucible for the malfuzat genre.

So the council literature, the moral councils, these were transcribed by disciples and they were edited before they were published and made available to a broader readership.

Another genre that stems out of the practice of the Sufi tradition within the context of the Sufi lodge is the correspondence between disciples and masters, the maktubat genre.

And as a Muslim reformer, he also traveled widely across colonial India to deliver sermons.

His collected sermons are about 32 volumes.

They're very extensive.

They build on often a single Quranic paracope or a verse or a hadith or a saying of the Prophet Muhammad.

Peace be upon him.

And then the final ordinary life genre is the Tazkirah genre.

These are hagiographies, but they're also about the lives of saints.

They are sacred biographies.

And so I thought that maybe by approaching the multiple genres that animate this tradition into the scholastic genres and the ordinary life genres, I could make sense of the epistemic abundance of this tradition.

But I soon realized that often the theological register of tradition is implicated in and is invoking and is translating and is fully engrossed in everyday life, in the struggle of disciples and vice versa.

And so in the writing of this book, I abandoned that idea classificatory system of genre, and I went with what I call the transgenre traversal of tradition.

And this is a movement that happens within tradition between life and language.

So the life of tradition the practice of tradition, the embodiment of tradition, what Talal Asad, the anthropologist Talal Asad calls ritualization, right? The life of tradition is bound up very intimately with the language of tradition, what Talal Asad calls the discursive tradition or discourse.

So when I refer throughout the book to this phrase, the life of tradition, it's deeply indebted to how Asad has placed discourse and embodiment.

So the discursive tradition, as well as the cultivation of ethical and aesthetic sensibilities that flesh out ritualization.

And in his argument, ritualization can serve as as a provisional antidote to some of the vicious effects of planetary destruction, the vicious effects of the division of life into the private and the public, so some of the more pernicious effects of secularization.

So this movement that happens within genres, within tradition, what I call the transgenre movement of tradition, it is basically a translational movement between life and language.

And in secular translations, you know, Asad talks about three forms of translation that he picks up from the linguist and the semiotician, Roman Jakobson.