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.

