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the question you’re not asking

Here is something I notice every semester without exception. Someone comes into the colloquium with a topic. The topic is usually well-formed, defensible, recognizably academic. Palestinian urban planning. Islamic environmentalism in Iran. Moroccan migrants and religious identity in Berlin. And underneath it, sometimes buried quite deep, is a question that the topic was built on top of — a genuine intellectual problem, something that actually bothers the person, something they want to know that they cannot yet say cleanly out loud.

The topic is the safe version. The question is the real one.

What we did in this session was try to find the gap between the two. Not to collapse it — sometimes the gap is productive, sometimes you need the institutional legibility of the topic to get the funding, the supervisor, the degree — but to see it clearly and know what’s in it. Because what’s in the gap is often the most important thing about the project. It’s where the actual thinking is happening.

I want to say something about why this is harder than it sounds. It’s not just a matter of being more precise or finding better words. The problem is structural. By the time ISME students arrive at the colloquium, their topics have already been through several rounds of invisible negotiation — with what seems supervisable, with what counts as a legitimate question in a Western European university, with what Middle East studies as a field has decided is worth knowing. The topic is the result of all that prior filtering. Which means the real question — the thing that made you care in the first place — has often already been compressed, translated, made to fit. And the compression happened so gradually, and with such good institutional reasons behind each step, that most people have stopped noticing it’s there.

Finding the assumption in a question is one way back.

Every question contains an assumption — something it takes as settled that isn’t actually settled, something it needs to be true in order for the question to even make sense. “How does X resist Y” assumes X has agency and something to resist. “Why did Z fail” assumes failure is the right frame and that there was a single coherent project that could succeed or fail. “What role does W play” assumes W is distinct from the surrounding field rather than constitutive of it. None of these assumptions are wrong, necessarily. But they are positions. They have been taken. And the person who can name their own assumptions explicitly is in a completely different position from the person who can’t — not because the research changes, but because they know what they’re arguing rather than just what they’re describing.

James Scott is worth sitting with as an example because it’s clean enough to be instructive. He went to Malaysia to study peasant political economy. That’s the topic. What he wanted to know — the question that drove the fieldwork, that organized what counted as evidence and what didn’t — was something like: what does resistance look like when open revolt is impossible, or even suicidal? That question contains an assumption: that resistance doesn’t require open confrontation. In 1985, in political science, that assumption was genuinely contestable. Plenty of people would have said: if there’s no open confrontation, there’s no resistance, just accommodation. Scott’s question had something to argue against. It could go either way. That’s what made it a question rather than a topic.

Now here’s the harder version. Scott had fieldwork. He had language. He had eighteen months in the villages. He could look for foot-dragging and gossip and feigned incompetence because he was there to see them. ISME students working on their MA theses often don’t have that access, or have it partially, or have to construct it from a desk in Berlin using sources that were produced under conditions that constrain what they can say. This is not a complaint — it’s a methodological condition that is itself worth analyzing. But it means that the question has to be calibrated not just to what you want to know but to what you can actually find out. And figuring out where those two things diverge — what you want to know versus what the sources will let you say — is part of the work we’ll do together this semester.

Something else happened in the session that I want to name. When we worked through one question as a group the most productive moment was not when someone found a better formulation. It was when someone asked: who would disagree with the assumption in this question? Because suddenly the question had an opponent. Suddenly it was situated in a conversation rather than hovering above one. And you could see the researcher visibly relax into it — not because the question got easier, but because it got real. A question with an opponent is a question you can write toward. A question that floats above disagreement is just a topic wearing a question mark.

Come to the next session with two things. Your question in one sentence. And the assumption it contains — the thing that would have to be true for the question to make sense, that someone in your field would actually dispute. If you can’t find the assumption yet, bring the question anyway and we’ll find it together. That’s what the colloquium is for.


Before our next session: write your research question in one sentence. Then write, separately, the assumption it contains — the thing it needs to be true, that someone could reasonably dispute. If you find yourself writing more than two sentences for the assumption, you’ve probably found more than one. Pick the deepest one. Bring both.

and yet

We didn’t define “monster.” Someone pointed this out right at the end, almost as an afterthought, and I’ve been thinking about it since. We spent ninety minutes inside the problem — arguing about whether consumption is complicity, whether the work survives the biography, whether moral judgment and aesthetic experience can even run on the same tracks — and we never stopped to ask what kind of thing we were actually calling a monster. Michael Jackson came up repeatedly, especially because of the new “biographical” movie that recently started in the cinemas, see a review (in German) here:

Polanski was in the room, and so were Hitchcock, and Weinstein. And yet the word “monster” just hovered there, doing enormous work implicitely, completely unexamined.

That’s not a criticism of the session. I think it’s actually the most interesting thing that happened.

Because “monster” is doing something specific in Dederer’s argument that we’ll need to get at directly. The word has a history. It originally meant something that exceeds the normal, that signals something — from the Latin monstrare, to show, to demonstrate. A monster was an omen, a portent, something that pointed beyond itself toward meaning. Medieval bestiaries are full of them: creatures at the edges of maps that indicated where the known world ended. The monster marked the boundary of what was thinkable.

What Dederer inherits from this, I think, is not the creature but the function. The monstrous artist marks a boundary — between the work we love and the person we can’t forgive, between our aesthetic life and our moral life, between who we thought someone was and what we now know. The monster is the figure that makes a clean position impossible. That’s why Cosby is easier than Michael Jackson in some ways: Cosby’s monstrousness colonized the work so completely that most people find The Cosby Show genuinely unwatchable now. The boundary collapsed. Whereas with Jackson (or also Rowling) — and this is what the session kept circling — something refuses to collapse. Thriller still does something. The voice still arrives. The monster didn’t fully win.

Why?

That’s the question we only touched. Someone said: because we loved it before we knew. That’s Dederer’s stain — the contamination of retrospective knowledge on a memory made in innocence. But someone else pushed back, and I thought this was the sharper move: what if the love isn’t really about who made it? What if loving Thriller is loving something about rhythm and arrangement and the specific texture of that production that has nothing to do with Jackson the person — that would exist identically if it had been made by someone entirely different, someone blameless? Barthes’ death of the author, applied not as a theory but as a felt experience: the work already feels autonomous, already feels like it belongs to you more than to him.

The problem is that this position — clean, logical, defensible — is exactly what Dederer calls bad faith. Not because it’s wrong about the work. But because it’s too convenient. It arrives at exactly the right moment to let us keep consuming without any discomfort. And the fact that it arrives so readily, that we reach for it so quickly, should make us suspicious of it. Arguments that solve the problem too neatly are usually doing something other than describing the situation honestly.

What “love” means here, we barely scratched. But I want to leave a thought about it before next session, because I think it’s the pivot on which everything else turns. Dederer is not really writing about aesthetic appreciation. She’s writing about a specific and somewhat irrational attachment — the kind where the work has become constitutive of something in you, where removing it would require removing part of how you understand yourself. That’s a different thing from finding a film beautiful. It’s the fan’s relationship: the work has done something to you, you have organized something around it, you have used it to become who you are. And this is why the monstrousness lands differently than it would for a work you merely admire. Because it’s not just “can I still watch this film” — it’s “can I still be the person who loves this film.”

That’s the question for next session. And it connects to the one thing we didn’t ask, which I’ll save.

We still haven’t defined “monster.”


Before our next session: read (again) Chapter 3 (“The Fan”) and Chapter 5 (“The Genius”). As you read: find the moment where Dederer distinguishes between admiring a work and being a fan of it. Write down her distinction in your own words. Then ask yourself: for the work you wrote about in the first session — are you an admirer or a fan? If you’re not sure, that uncertainty is the thing to bring.

what we name vs. what we don’t name

Something happened in the first session that I didn’t fully anticipate, and I want to try to say what it was.

We started with the practice descriptions — the 200-word accounts of things people do regularly, in sequence, that produce a reliable state. A morning run in a specific order. Coffee made with deliberate resistance. An evening ritual involving particular music at a particular volume. Small, precise, unnamed. And then we built two columns on the board: named on one side, unnamed on the other. The named column filled up with things that have communities behind them, instructions, criteria for doing them wrong. The unnamed column was full of solitary choreographies that belong only to the person who does them.

named, e.g. ibada? social?unnamed, e.g. ada? individual?
“Sitzplatz”
Waldbaden
self-care?
uniforms?
costumes?
drinking hot chocolate
making tea
connecting with nature
birding
dream journal in the morning
skin care routine
getting dressed
smoking a cigarette after dinner
sport before breakfast

What struck me, looking at the board, was how the unnamed column wasn’t empty of meaning. It was full of it. Just full of meaning that has no address.

That’s the thing I keep turning over. We tend to assume that naming is additive — that you take a practice and you add a name to it, and now it has more. More weight, more obligation, more recognition. But what if naming is also subtractive? What if the unnamed practice has something — a kind of frictionless intimacy with itself, a freedom from the question of whether you’re doing it correctly — that the name necessarily takes away? The Hanafi position on wudu says: if you washed correctly, you washed correctly, regardless of what was happening in your head. There’s something almost relieving about that. It asks very little of the interior. It says: the act is enough. But it also means someone else has defined what the act consists of. Someone else drew the line around it. The freedom from interior scrutiny comes at the cost of exterior definition.

The niyya debate is fascinating because it refuses to settle. The Shafi’i school insists on the intention preceding the act — without it, the washing is just washing. That seems intuitively right to a lot of people, and I understand why: it preserves the sense that the practice is yours, that you are in it rather than just performing it. But it also creates a permanent anxiety. Did I really intend it? Did I intend it enough? Was I thinking about something else when I started? The interior becomes the site of an endless audit that the exterior form was supposed to resolve.

Ibn ʿArabi adds another layer, which is typically Ibn ʿArabi. He says: between the verses of the Fatiha, God is responding. Some people hear that response with their ears. If you can’t hear it with your ears, hear it with your faith. This is either a beautiful accommodation — an acknowledgment that people sense differently, that the thresholds of perception vary — or it’s a theological trap. Because if faith is sufficient to hear what the ears cannot, then the hearing is unfalsifiable. You can always say you heard it. Which makes the whole edifice of auditory spiritual experience impossible to examine from the outside, including the kind of examination that scholarship tries to do.

We didn’t resolve this. We weren’t supposed to. But the moment that stayed with me came near the end, when someone said: the practices in the unnamed column feel more mine because no one can tell me I’m doing them wrong. And someone else said: but doesn’t that also mean no one can tell you you’re doing them right? The room went quiet for a second in a way that suggested something had landed.

That silence is worth holding onto. Because it points at something Stjernholm’s book, for all its careful taxonomy, doesn’t quite get at: that the desire for a name — for religious community, for validated sensory practice — might partly be a desire for a witness. Not an authority who tells you the form is correct. Something more intimate than that. Someone who can say: yes, what you felt was real, and it was this, and others have felt it too. The unnamed practice is yours alone. It has no one to confirm it.

We’re reading Talal Asad before the next session. I want to give you some orientation for what Asad is doing, because it’s easy to read him as just saying “religion is a Western construction” and stopping there, which would be both reductive and, frankly, a waste of a difficult thinker. What Asad is actually doing is more surgical. He’s asking: where did the category come from that allows us to look at wudu and a morning coffee ritual and say one of these is religious and the other isn’t? Who drew that line, when, and under what political conditions? His answer involves the Reformation, the emergence of the secular state, and the specific need of post-Enlightenment Europe to carve off a domain called religion that could be safely privatized and separated from public reason. Before that carving, the practices we now call Islamic didn’t understand themselves as belonging to a category called religion as opposed to categories called law, ethics, medicine, cosmology, politics. They were all of those things simultaneously. The category “religion” didn’t exist as a container for them. It had to be invented, and it was invented, and then it was applied retrospectively and cross-culturally in ways that had enormous consequences for how Muslim practice got understood — including by Muslims themselves.

So when you read Asad, I want you to hold our two columns in mind. Named and unnamed. Ask: who decided which column was the religious one? And what did that decision require to be invisible?


Before our next session: read Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” (the first chapter of Genealogies of Religion, 1993, about 25 pages). As you read, do one thing: find the moment in the argument where Asad identifies what gets lost when the category “religion” is applied to practices that didn’t understand themselves that way. Write one sentence about what he says is lost. Bring it.

conversations: task for May 6 (preparation for May 13)

Before next week, write one page (max 400–500 words total) structured as follows:

1. My current thesis (5–6 lines only)

Describe your thesis as you currently understand it. No improvement. No refinement. Just the working version in your head.

2. The weakest point

Answer honestly: Where does my project stop being convincing — even to me? This is not about “problems in general,” but a specific pressure point, for example:

I don’t actually know if I can access the sources I assume exist
I am relying on categories I haven’t questioned (e.g. “community,” “literature,” “Islam,” “migration”)
my method doesn’t actually match my material
I am assuming a stability in my object that might not exist
I cannot clearly say what counts as data

Be concrete. One main weakness only.

3. What I am secretly avoiding

One short paragraph: What part of this project do I keep postponing thinking about?

This can be:

methodological difficulty
political discomfort
lack of material
fear of narrowing down
uncertainty about relevance
dependence on ideal sources that may not exist

No moral framing. Just description.

4. One fragment of evidence (very important)

Bring ONE concrete thing from your project world:

a paragraph from a text
a quote an interview fragment
a source title a media example
a case detail

And answer in 2–3 sentences only: Why is this here at all in my project?

Not interpretation. Just positioning.

monsters: task for May 5 (preperation of May 12)

Before our next session on May 12, think of a piece of art you love — the one you wrote down in our first session, or a different one. Now write two short paragraphs, no more than 150 words each.

In the first paragraph: make the case for why the work matters. Not why you like it — why it matters. What it does that nothing else does. Write it as if you are defending it to someone who wants to take it away from you.

In the second paragraph: make the case against consuming it. Not against the person who made it — against yourself, as someone who continues to return to it. What does your continued consumption say about you? What are you refusing to look at when you look at the work?

Do not resolve the contradiction between the two paragraphs. Do not add a third paragraph that explains how you feel about the tension. Stop after the second.

Bring both paragraphs to the session. You will be asked to read one of them aloud — you choose which.

sensing: task for May 5 (in preperation of May 12)

Before our next meeting on May 12, I want you to do one thing.

Find a practice you do regularly that produces a reliable feeling in you. Not a religious practice — or not an obviously religious one. Something you do in a particular order, in a particular way, that reliably produces a particular state. It could be small and mundane. It probably is.

Describe it precisely. What do you do, in what sequence, what does the body do while you do it, and what arrives when it works. Write no more than 200 words. Do not explain why you think it works. Do not theorize about it. Just describe it, as exactly as you can, as if you were describing it to someone who has never seen you.

For example: every morning I grind coffee by hand, feeling the resistance change as the beans break down. I load the grounds into the ROK, press the portafilter in, raise the arms — and then I press down slowly, the whole weight of my hands against the resistance of the water forcing through the coffee, about 25 seconds to one minute. While the espresso runs I heat the raw cocoa with the Aeroccino, which froths it into something almost thick. The two go together into one cup. What arrives is not exactly wakefulness and not exactly calm. I don’t have a better word for it than: readiness. The sequence has to happen in this order. If I skip the grinding or rush the pressing, something is missing in the result — but also in me...

One restriction: you cannot use meditation, yoga, prayer, or any practice you already think of as spiritual. The point is to find the thing you have never thought of as a practice at all.

Bring it to the session on May 12.

conversations: preparation for the session on April 29

Before we meet, a word about what this colloquium is — and isn’t.

I have taught versions of this course for long enough to know what happens when a thesis colloquium runs on the usual logic: the instructor presents a timeline, explains the genre conventions of the exposé, offers a template or a model, and students leave knowing what is expected of them. The administrative scaffolding is in place. What is rarely in place, at the end of such a session, is any honest accounting of where anyone actually is.

Where students actually are, in my experience, tends to involve one or more of the following: a topic that interests them genuinely but that they have been told, or have told themselves, is not academic enough; a question they can articulate in conversation but that falls apart on paper; a field they are trying to enter that keeps refusing their question because it doesn’t fit the existing categories; a supervisor they need to find and no clear idea of how to find one whose work touches theirs; a suspicion that their angle on the Middle East is somehow too personal, too political, too located to be legitimate; or simply the vertigo of being asked to produce original knowledge in a field that is anything but neutral, inside an institution that was not designed with their question in mind.

None of that gets addressed by a timeline and a template or a required presentation of a potential topic. So I am not offering those on Wednesday — or at least, not leading with them.

What I want instead is for the first session to begin from wherever you actually are. Which means you have to come having thought about that. Not having prepared a presentation, not having already resolved the difficulty into something manageable — but having sat with it long enough to be able to name it, roughly, in a room with other people who are in adjacent versions of the same position.

The sessions from there will be shaped by what you bring. I have no fixed agenda beyond the dates and the final deadline. If three people are stuck on the same methodological problem, we spend a session on that. If someone’s question keeps dissolving under scrutiny, we spend time on why. If the room needs to talk about what it means to research the Middle East from inside a German university in the current moment, we talk about that. The shape of the semester belongs to what you bring to it.

This is not a way of avoiding structure. It is a different kind of structure — one that starts from the actual situation rather than from an imagined ideal student moving smoothly toward a finished document. The document will come. But first, Wednesday.