ABSTRACT

Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic, published in 2016, has significantly impacted discussions on the definition of Islam. This article focuses on Ahmed’s reconceptualization of Islam as ‘hermeneutical engagement with Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text of Revelation to Muḥammad’. As an Islamic tradition which greatly contradicts various normative Islamic traditions, Alevism is a valuable locus for testing Ahmed’s reconceptualization of Islam. In the first part of this article, I aim to show how Alevis formulated their relation to Islam in their poetry and other classical texts, in order to address whether we can situate Alevism within the sphere of Islam as defined by Shahab Ahmed. In the second part, I compare Ahmed’s conceptualization of Islam to those of Alevis. For both parts, I use as my source the historical and literary documents of Alevism, such as buyruḳs, mathnawīs, dīvāns, and poems in poetry collections. I argue that including cases like Alevism to Islam’s landscape of contradictions (limited to Sunni Islam in Ahmed’s work) not only deconstructs our (in this case, Ahmed’s) existing conceptualizations of Islam, but also serves to reconceptualize Islam.

摘要

Shahab Ahmed 的《什么是伊斯兰教？：成为伊斯兰教徒的重要性》，于 2016 年出版，对伊斯兰教定义的讨论产生了重大影响。本文重点关注艾哈迈德对伊斯兰教的重新概念化，即“对穆罕默德启示的前文本、文本和上下文文本的解释学参与”。作为一种与各种规范的伊斯兰传统有很大矛盾的伊斯兰传统，阿列夫主义是检验艾哈迈德对伊斯兰教的重新概念化的宝贵场所。在本文的第一部分，我旨在展示 Alevis 如何在他们的诗歌和其他经典文本中阐述他们与伊斯兰教的关系，以解决我们是否可以将 Alevism 置于 Shahab Ahmed 所定义的伊斯兰教范围内。在第二部分，我将艾哈迈德对伊斯兰教的概念化与阿莱维斯的概念化进行比较。对于这两个部分，我都使用 Alevism 的历史和文学文献作为我的来源，例如buyruḳs、mathnawī s、dīvān和诗歌集中的诗歌。我认为，将 Alevism 等案例纳入伊斯兰教的矛盾景观（仅限于 Ahmed 作品中的逊尼派伊斯兰教）不仅会解构我们（在这种情况下是 Ahmed 的）现有的伊斯兰教概念，而且有助于重新概念化伊斯兰教。