Concluding Remarks

My comments are brief because my interlocutors have brilliantly and fairly elucidated the aspects of For God or Empire that are its major strengths and weaknesses. Every book and every author face this Manichean reality and must do so as gracefully as possible. Accordingly, brevity of authorial response is the best course. I limit myself to two observations that will hopefully extend the conversation rather than end it with some sort of authoritative and final reading. They concern the forms of history and the form-of-life, their intersection and disjuncture. Walter Benjamin’s critical insights on time and history, language and life, animate this book in its structure and the flow of its argument. Though he was not the sole inspiration for the final product (which was touched to varying degrees by the emerging rich historiography and ethnography of the Indian Ocean World; Agamben and Foucault; Butler, Asad, and Mahmood; and, most importantly, the ‘Alawi Way’s canon of texts and shrines), Benjamin was a primary conduit enabling me to connect my personal memory of living a spiritual life when younger to the historical experiences of Sayyid Fadl. In turn, I was inspired on the one hand to forge from that connection a hopefully meaningful history of a world that was being made global through the devices of competing sovereignties, which were reconceptualized in the process — as universal, singular modern state sovereignty. On the other hand, trying to trace this global history through Fadl’s documented historical experiences while sorting through flashes of our combined memory, a persistent question surfaced about the proper life of history in relation to a life thought to be out of time. Among his many insightful essays, Benjamin’s study of Proust is filled with rich nuggets of how a text that is itself overflowing with time, not as history but as remembrance, not as boundless but as convoluted, effects an image of the author. Proust’s obsessive pursuit of meaning in times remembered and forgotten ultimately reveals that “Only the actus purus of recollection itself, not the author or the plot, constitutes the unity of the text.” While Benjamin’s appreciation of the mystical is well known, his insight takes on a whole new character if applied to an actual mystic (even with all the limitations of that translation): the Sufi Sayyid Fadl. It might be said that Fadl, precisely because of his Sufi tradition as thick textuality and exercises of the self, appreciated the power of remembrance (dhikr) to bend and pierce time and to make life Other in more intimate and visceral ways than Benjamin. Proust “frenetically” sought happiness in the difference between the finitude of lived experience and the infinity of the “remembered event,” wherein the remainder was the florid written word. For Fadl, the proper relationship to written language as a vehicle for capturing time’s passage had been modelled by his ‘Alawi predecessors of the preceding centuries. In this accumulated tradition, history’s finitude and therefore its relative insignificance was indeed thought in relation to the infinity of remembrance; however, the in-between was not exclusively literary flight, rather an ecstatic condition, with its plenitude of happiness, love, freedom, and the annihilation of the melancholy of everydayness. Dr. Mian illuminates this strand of the work most effectively and surely more cogently than I did in the book. I would only add, in light of Dr. Willis’s comments about historical occlusions, that the accelerating terms of Istanbul’s urban modernity during Fadl’s stay there in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and how that quickening of time might have affected his historical consciousness and the trajectory of …