Welcome to Part Five of the project “Interviewing Religion,” where I interview scholars of Middle Eastern religions about their research, discuss how their work connects to broader public issues, and ask for suggestions for further reading. [You can read the other interviews here!] A huge thank you to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Luce Foundation, who supported my work with one of their Advancing Public Scholarship Grants. I couldn’t have launched this project without their assistance.
For my fifth interview, I’d like to introduce Dr. Adam Gaiser. Gaiser is a professor at the Department of Religion at the Florida State University, where he teaches courses in Islamic Studies. His research focuses on the development of early Kharijites and Ibadiyya, and on medieval Muslim sectarianism in general. His publications include books and articles on Ibadi Muslims, such as Muslims, Scholars, Soldiers: The Origin and Elaboration of the Ibadi Imamate Traditions. Most recently, he published a book on the main Muslim sects and schools, explaining the origins and details of these sectarian divisions in Islam. Gaiser is an expert on Ibadism and I’m excited to share his thoughts with you.
I recently spoke to Gaiser, who graciously answered a few questions about his research, publications, and upcoming projects. I encourage you to get a copy of his books and check out the great resources he mentions here.
1) How did you first get interested in studying the early Kharijites and the Ibadiyya?
Gaiser: I went to the University of Virginia (UVA) and, growing up in the 1980s of Ronald Reagan near Washington DC, the punk scene was raging. So, I was interested in these rebel groups that existed on the side. I worked with Aziz Sachedina (now at George Mason) and when it came time to start thinking about a dissertation, I thought I really like the Kharijites because they messed everything up. They’re revolting all over the place and I thought that would be really interesting.
But when I started looking at it, of course, it’s very hard to write a dissertation about the Kharijites because the material is problematic. This was the 1990s, there was even less material around. Then I discovered the Ibadiyya and I thought here’s this tangential, semi-related group and there’s not a whole lot of work done on them. UVA had a connection with Jordan – a good place to do research because there had been a Jordanian scholar who did some good work on the Ibadiyya. So, I ended up on a Fulbright in Jordan with access to pretty decent materials at the time and I fell into a dissertation on Ibadism.
So basically, I tried to do the Kharijites, couldn’t do it, discovered there was this other group, and there wasn’t a whole lot on them. That of course has changed a lot, now there’s quite a lot of published material on Ibadism. But when I was doing it in the early 2000s, there was only a small group of people who were interested in the Ibadiyya. And that was part of the appeal too.
2) You’ve been asked to present your work at a local community center. How would you describe your research on Ibadi Islam?
Gaiser: I have a two-sentence thing I say that usually does the trick. The Ibadis are not Sunni and they’re not Shiite, they’re this remnant from an earlier group that’s about 2% of the Muslim population. I find them interesting because they preserve a perspective that is somewhat unique, especially the early period that I focus on. They have some unique positions on events that happened and theologies.
If anyone asks me more about that, the more detailed answer is that I find Ibadis unique in broadly two ways: one is the way that they think about the consequences of what it means to be a faithful or an unfaithful person. And to be a faithful person means to be an Ibadi. To be less than an Ibadi is to be somehow less than a full Muslim, almost in a kind of (I hate to say) Kharijite way, because that word is fraught with problems. A lot of Ibadis will tell you that they do not descend from the Kharijites, so they don’t really like to use that term, but there is a kind of resonance in the way that this group is thinking about what it means to have the full measure of faith. To have the full measure of faith, you’re an Ibadi, and if you don’t have the full measure of faith, you can’t really be considered a full Muslim. We might treat you like one, but you don’t get the full package.
The other way I find Ibadis unique, and this is what I wrote my dissertation on, is that they have an incredibly detailed, intricate, and complex Imamate system. This has four different ways of thinking about an imam which is related to four different situations in which the community can find itself. Without getting too deep into the weeds, for example, if the community finds itself in a defensive posture, it can elect a kind of provisional imam called a defensive imam. The intricacy of the imamate is very interesting too. There are Ibadi communities in Oman and there are Ibadi communities in North Africa. And the ways that they think about those two things are not entirely 100% until about the 14th century, when they seem to be somewhat standardized. So even the regional communities have their own way of thinking about these things.
3) Tell me about your recent projects and publications. Which works are your favorites and why?
Gaiser: My most recent book was a book that I had under contract for many years on Islamic sectarianism and it’s called Sectarianism in Islam: The Umma Divided. It’s meant to be an introductory work and I’m pretty happy with the way it came out. I tried to find a way to talk about groups like Sunnis, Shiites, Murji’ites, and Muʿtazilites in a somewhat responsible way. And I think I succeeded, or I hope so.
I think about sectarianism as a story that people locate themselves in or are located by their birth and their circumstances. I call this the narrative identity approach, riffing off of people like Margaret Somers — we are who we are because we’re caught up in certain kinds of stories. They orient us and help us to make sense of the world. I tried to write the book from that perspective, as opposed to Weberian typing, which has been the way that people talk about sectarianism. There, you create a definition and then fit people to it, and in practice, it’s not particularly helpful. I think we’ve all agreed in the field that we should not do that, but I don’t think we’ve offered much more that we should do. And so this book was my offering.
The work I’m most excited about is an introduction to Ibadism (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) because I think it’s about time for an introduction to Ibadism to appear in the field. It’s exciting to be thinking about what people need to know, at least from my perspective. What do I think is important to know about Ibadism? It’s a fun challenge. I thought I was going to write it at lightning speed, but actually, I find myself hitting the brakes a lot. I feel I really need to do this right and I’m trying to make this something that’s helpful for people.
4) Your neighbor wants to know more about your field. What books, websites, videos, or other resources would you recommend to them? (why?)
Gaiser: One of my answers is going to be my friend Hannah-Lena Hagemann’s book on the Kharijites (The Kharijites in Early Islamic Historical Tradition: Heroes and Villains), which I think is fantastic. It’s the dissertation that I wasn’t smart enough to write. She did write it and it is excellent.
There are not a whole lot of websites on Ibadis, but there are two I can mention. One is Paul Love Jr.’s blog (ibadistudies.com) which I think is really good and the other is a French organization (ibadica.org). That second site is in French, and it’s a French group run in part by a gregarious young scholar named Soufien Mestaoui. They are collecting a lot of material, finding a lot of material, and publishing some as well. They’re a really vibrant young group of Ibadis who are also scholars. They’re doing great work and I can’t promote them enough.
The field of Ibadi studies is at a point where it needs some of these things now. In the past, what we have needed was very specialized technical work on manuscripts and collecting and collating sources, with some synthesizing. Now we’re at a point where we’re going to need more introductory stuff, but before the field was not at a place where it could produce that. The work of putting out the manuscripts had to happen first and Abdulrahman al-Salimi and Wilferd Madelung did a lot of work on the early manuscripts. The ministry in Oman has also cleaned up and republished a lot of the works that way back in the day would have errors on every page. A lot of the work is putting out the sources, publishing them, and trying to get a handle on basic historical developments and early theologies. That work is getting done. But you can only do broader, introductory work once you’ve done that other, more technical work.
5) How does your research connect to broader public issues? What overlap do you see between the topics you study and contemporary issues around the world today?
Gaiser: There are a couple of ways I could answer that question. I’m a medievalist, so I love the fact that I don’t connect. On the other hand, what I tell my students is that when you study history and you study religion, what you’re really studying is people. There’s always a connection to how people operate.
The other angle to that question is that news people have contacted me over the last six years and tried to get me to talk about how ISIS and the Kharijites are similar. I have been very insistent on disappointing those people because I think it’s very irresponsible to compare a modern militant group to a medieval sectarian group that we don’t really know that much about. You’ve got to look at these groups on their own terms, look at ISIS on its own terms, and stop trying to make too much of that connection.
6) What other scholars/writers do you think are doing the most interesting work on religion in the Middle East?
Gaiser: I already mentioned Hannah-Lena Hagemann’s book and Paul Love Jr.’s website. I also like Paul’s other work a lot. His book Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition came out with Cambridge a couple of years ago. Paul is also doing manuscript work, more specifically cataloging manuscripts and thinking about libraries and library connections. The book he just finished (The Ottoman Ibadis of Cairo: A History) is about this library/publishing house/collection of scholars called the Buffalo Agency (wikālat al-jāmūs), an Ibadi publishing agency in 17th-20th century Cairo.
Paul reminds us early medievalists that the Ibadi manuscripts we have (and the paper they’re written on) are 16th century at the earliest. Yes, that can be considered quite early, but we have to acknowledge that there’s a process that the community goes through to preserve, select, and curate these works. I like the way Paul is constantly reminding me that there’s a modern angle that I need to consider when I’m thinking about the sources in the early period. I think Paul is an outstanding scholar, just like Hannah, and I have immense respect for the two of them. In addition, Cyrille Aillet, writing mostly in French, is probably one of the most important scholars on Ibadism today – his new work L’archipel ibadite has definitely had an impact on the way I think about Ibadism.
Outside my field of Ibadi Islam, Najam Haider is doing great work as well. I really like his book The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam, thinking about history as narrative or history as rhetoric. And how communities, when they were narrating history, were narrating to audiences with certain expectations about what history was. I like the way that Najam presents this in a way that allows us to think about history and the creation of history in the ancient world in a more responsible fashion. I think it’s a great book and everybody ought to read it.
7) How can people find out more about you and follow your work?
Gaiser: My faculty website is a good place to go, and people can e-mail me too (agaiser@fsu.edu). In fact, I’m more than happy to answer an e-mail. If someone would like to contact me, I would love to talk to them.
Thanks so much to Dr. Adam Gaiser for speaking with me and sharing these details about his studies of the Ibadiyya and medieval Muslim sectarianism. I really encourage you to check out his books (I’m eagerly awaiting his introduction to Ibadi Islam) and also consult the other great resources he mentioned here. For a complete list of the books, websites, and articles listed in this interview, you can also visit Interviewing Religion’s Books and Resources page.
And look for more interviews like this to come soon! You can subscribe to my blog here to get new posts directly by email.
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