Ali Altaf Mian demonstrates how attention to genre and embodiment illuminates the concepts and practices of the Islamic tradition--and how theologians, Sufi mystics, and ordinary Muslims respond to the incapacitating tribulations of creaturely existence in modernity. Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is grounded in the vast textual archive of one of modern South Asia's foremost Muslim theologians and Sufis: Maulana Ashraf ?Ali Thanavi (1863-1943). Through a close examination of Maulana Thanavi's corpus of writings, Ali Altaf Mian offers new insights into tradition as a discursive and affective crucible of ethical transformation and spiritual sovereignty. Philologically attuned and philosophically oriented, Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty elucidates connections between traditions' forms of life and forms of language. Mian shows how intended and unconscious movements between genres in the life of tradition attend to the felt and perceived needs of the ensouled body at the dual scales of singularity and collectivity. Through a novel attention to textuality and psychic life, Mian elaborates a trans-genre reading practice to appreciate ritual law and ethical agency in the modern world. Insofar as modernity has been about individualism, the rise of literalism, and the disciplining of desire, religious traditions' capacity to respond to these hardships depends on renewing community, engaging textuality and the play of genres, and bracing the unknowability of desire.
Ali Altaf Mian is the Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies and assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida. He is the author of many peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Islam in South Asia, Sufi thought and practice, Hadith studies, Islamic philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis.
"Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is an insightful and textured case study of embodied, affective, and transformative elements of the religious tradition. The book opens up new avenues, not only in the study of Islam and modernity, but in broader dimensions of comparative religions and cultures." --Marcia Hermansen, co-editor of Varieties of American Sufism "This book is unmatched in the breadth of its engagement with Ashraf ?Ali Thanavi's vast oeuvre and in its sophistication. Mian has provided us with an extraordinarily vivid sense of how the constraints of particular genres shape articulations of the Islamic tradition and what it has meant to inhabit and experience that tradition in conditions of modernity." --Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of Islam in Pakistan
