This article contributes to Islamicist scholarship on the relationship between modern technology and Muslim thought and practice by closely reading and historicizing a twentieth-century South Asian Ḥanafī treatise on the use of the loudspeaker in ritual prayers. In this treatise, the Ḥanafī jurist Muḥammad Shafīʿ discusses the reasons for changing his legal opinion. The jurist first argued that the use of the loudspeaker invalidates the ritual prayer of the congregant (muqtadī). In his revised position, however, he held that the loudspeaker should be avoided in ritual prayers, but that its use does not invalidate the prayer. While Muḥammad Shafīʿ appears to have revised his position in response to newfound scientific knowledge about the ontological status of the loudspeaker’s sound or for the sake of public benefit (maṣlaḥah), I suggest that his revised fatwā was based on distinctive Ḥanafī modes of legal reasoning. By grounding his revised position in casuistry, the muftī renewed his commitment to his law school’s methodologies in a social context in which scientific knowledge and legal pluralism were weakening Ḥanafī modes of reasoning.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
See, for example, Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). Chapter 4, “Attributes of the Dominant,” is especially relevant for understanding the links between technology and European colonialism’s “civilizing mission.”
David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 18.
See Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
As Ebrahim Moosa writes, “Traditional Muslim scholars, especially in the India-Pakistan subcontinent, remain reluctant to authorize organ transplantation, and the advent of cloning and genetic engineering only fulfills their worst fears of crossing theological red lines” (Ebrahim Moosa, “Human Cloning in Muslim Ethics,” Voices Across Boundaries [Fall 2003], 23-26, at 23). See also Ebrahim Moosa, “Interface of Science and Jurisprudence: Dissonant Gazes at the Body in Modern Muslim Ethics,” in God, Life, and the Cosmos: Christian and Islamic Perspectives, ed. Ted Peters, Muzaffar Iqbal, and Syed Nomanul Haq (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 329-56.
See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): 307-41.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology,” in Heidegger Reexamined, ed. with Introductions by Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, 4 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3:100.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 22.
Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.
Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 5.
See Pekka Gronow, “The Record Industry Comes to the Orient,” Ethnomusicology 25.2 (1981), 251-84; G.N. Joshi, “A Concise History of the Phonograph Industry in India,” Popular Music 7.2 (1988), 147-56.
Ahmad Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 5.
Ron Shaham, The Expert Witness in Islamic Courts: Medicine and Crafts in the Service of Law (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 190-91.
Ron Shaham, The Expert Witness in Islamic Courts: Medicine and Crafts in the Service of Law (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 67.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 705 | 120 | 14 |
Full Text Views | 131 | 12 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 142 | 10 | 1 |
This article contributes to Islamicist scholarship on the relationship between modern technology and Muslim thought and practice by closely reading and historicizing a twentieth-century South Asian Ḥanafī treatise on the use of the loudspeaker in ritual prayers. In this treatise, the Ḥanafī jurist Muḥammad Shafīʿ discusses the reasons for changing his legal opinion. The jurist first argued that the use of the loudspeaker invalidates the ritual prayer of the congregant (muqtadī). In his revised position, however, he held that the loudspeaker should be avoided in ritual prayers, but that its use does not invalidate the prayer. While Muḥammad Shafīʿ appears to have revised his position in response to newfound scientific knowledge about the ontological status of the loudspeaker’s sound or for the sake of public benefit (maṣlaḥah), I suggest that his revised fatwā was based on distinctive Ḥanafī modes of legal reasoning. By grounding his revised position in casuistry, the muftī renewed his commitment to his law school’s methodologies in a social context in which scientific knowledge and legal pluralism were weakening Ḥanafī modes of reasoning.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 705 | 120 | 14 |
Full Text Views | 131 | 12 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 142 | 10 | 1 |