Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

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.

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.

sensing: task for April 28

Several of you have written to me that you cannot find the book. I want to address this — not by sending you a link, but by making the situation itself into the first task of the course.

The book is Simon Stjernholm’s Sensing Islam, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2025. It costs around 60 euros to buy new. It is not open access. It is not currently in our university library. It is available at other universities in the region — which means whether you can walk in and read it depends on where you happen to be enrolled.

Before our first session, I want you to try to get the book. Not just to have it, but to notice what the attempt requires. Try at least two different routes — whatever routes feel available or appropriate to you. Document what you tried, what worked, what didn’t, and what you ultimately decided to do.

Then write one short paragraph — no more than 100 words — not summarizing what you found but answering this: what did the process of trying to access this book tell you about who academic knowledge is produced for?

I am not telling you what the right answer is, or what the right route is. I am asking you to notice what you actually did, and to be honest about it — with yourself first, and then with the group. We will spend the opening of our next session on this, before we discuss anything in the book itself.

One more thing: I understand the expectation that materials arrive immediately, that a course comes with a reading list that is simply there, accessible, ready. That expectation is worth examining too. It is part of the same question.


Then, when you got it: Just read the book. Notice what it does to your body.

can you manufacture the divine?

There is a question I have been sitting with since the first session of my new reading course, one of those questions that seems, at first glance, almost technical — a question about psychology, or phenomenology, or cognitive science — and then slowly reveals itself to be something much less comfortable. The question is this: if you train yourself, through sustained practice, through repeated bodily gesture, through the daily choreography of attention, to feel the presence of God — is what you end up feeling real?

I want to resist the too-quick answer. The too-quick answer — yes, of course it’s real, all feeling is real — is satisfying in a way that should make us suspicious. And the other too-quick answer — no, it’s obviously manufactured, the product of conditioning — is equally satisfying in a way that should make us even more suspicious, because it relies on a fantasy of pristine experience, feeling that arrives from nowhere, untouched by culture or habit or repetition, which is not a description of any experience anyone has ever actually had. Both answers are ways of closing down the question before it gets interesting.

What got me, in the session, was something William James said — not in the session itself, but in the background of it, like a voice from another room. James argued, notoriously, that we do not cry because we are sad; we are sad because we cry. The physical state precedes and produces the emotional one. Run from the bear, and the running is the fear, or rather the fear is nothing over and above the body doing what running bodies do: heart speeding, breath thinning, attention narrowing to a single point. Take away the physical cascade and you have not pure fear remaining; you have nothing. This is a disorienting position if you hold it long enough, because it suggests that there is no emotional bedrock beneath or behind the body’s performances, no inner state to which the gestures merely correspond. The gesture goes all the way down.

If James is right, then the question of whether trained religious feeling is “genuine” begins to dissolve — not because the question doesn’t matter, but because it is resting on a distinction that does not hold. Trained feeling just is feeling, eventually. The pianist who has practised a passage ten thousand times does not execute it less genuinely than she would have in some hypothetical state of spontaneous mastery. The body’s knowledge is not diminished by its acquisition. Tanya Luhrmann, who has spent years studying how people learn to experience God as real and present — through particular techniques of prayer, particular ways of attending to inner sensation, particular methods of interpreting the vague and ambiguous traffic of the mind — reaches something like the same conclusion from the other direction. The training doesn’t produce a fake. It produces a new capacity. The scaffolding, once erected, disappears into what it made.

And yet. There is something in this that the tradition itself refuses. Not all Muslim traditions, not in any monolithic way, but something recurring and insistent: the concept of niyya, of intention, which Islamic jurisprudence places before and beneath every act of worship. A prayer performed correctly — every posture, every word, every timing — but performed without genuine orientation toward God, is not merely a lesser prayer; it is, in certain readings, no prayer at all. The form can be perfect and the substance absent. This is not a small claim. It means that the tradition draws a line between the outer performance and the inner reality that practice is supposed to produce, and insists that the two are not identical, cannot be rendered identical by repetition alone. You cannot train your way into sincerity. Or if you can, something has gone wrong with our understanding of sincerity.

I find this genuinely difficult. Not as an external observer of a tradition that is not mine, but as a question about what I think experience is. Because the Islamic insistence on niyya is not obviously wrong. There is something we recognise in the person who has gone through all the motions without any of them meaning anything, who has accumulated all the correct forms without the thing the forms are supposed to carry. And we recognise it partly because there is a difference visible even from outside — something in the quality of attention, in what Luhrmann elsewhere calls “absorption,” in whether the body seems inhabited or merely operational. The tradition is pointing at something real even when it insists on a distinction that James would unsettle.

Perhaps the trouble is with the word “genuine.” We use it as though it were simple, as though there were a clearly identifiable thing — an experience, a feeling, a state — that either has the property of genuineness or doesn’t. But genuine in relation to what? Genuine compared to what standard? If I ask whether a trained experience of divine presence is genuine, I am already assuming that I know what an untrained experience of divine presence would feel like, that I have access to some baseline against which the trained version can be measured and found wanting or sufficient. But no one has that baseline. There is no pre-cultural, pre-habituated, body-free access to experience of any kind, let alone experience of the transcendent. The question of whether manufactured feeling is real may be a question that has a hidden impossibility built into it: the impossibility of the unmanufactured.

What I keep returning to, though, is a different problem, one that I find more troubling than the philosophical one. Even if we grant that trained feeling becomes real feeling — even if we accept that there is no meaningful distinction between acquired and native experience once the acquisition is complete — there remains a question about authority. Who decides? When a community develops highly specific practices for inducing particular states, and those practices are effective, and the states are real in the sense that they are genuinely felt and genuinely transformative — who determines which states count as God’s presence and which count as something else? The training doesn’t just produce experience; it produces experience with a name, an interpretation, a place in a structure of meaning that someone built and someone maintains. The felt presence is real. The naming of it is a claim. And claims can be wrong, or contested, or politically useful in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of the experience they describe.

I don’t know how to resolve this. I am not sure it can be resolved, exactly, so much as held — with sufficient discomfort, without the relief of a conclusion. What I want to say to the students reading Stjernholm this coming week is: pay attention to the moments when he describes practice producing experience. Notice whether you believe him. Notice what would have to be true about your own relationship to feeling and authenticity for his descriptions to make sense. And then notice whether your answer changes when the practice in question is not someone else’s unfamiliar religious form but something you do every day — the song you play when you need to feel something, the route you walk when you need to think, the posture you unconsciously adopt when you want to seem confident. We are all, always, already training ourselves to feel particular things. The question of whether God is on the other side of the training might be the smaller question. The larger one is what we think we are doing every time we use a practice to produce a state — and whether we would be comfortable calling that prayer.


The videos we watched/listened to during the session: