ESSAY The Multiplicity of the Pre-Modern Islamic Tradition Marion Katz New York University Perhaps more than any other set of contributions by an anthropologist, the work of Talal Asad has come to inform scholarship on pre-modern as well as modern Islam. Its wide- spread impact has contributed to an unprecedented degree of conceptual overlap and dialogue across sub-fields within Islamic studies. As a specialist in pre-modern Islamic legal traditions, I have been enriched by Asad’s insights but also believe that scholarship on pre-colonial Islamic thought and practice can be brought to bear on some of his expli- cit and implicit assumptions about the pre-modern tradition. In my reading, Asad has envisioned the continuity of modern Islamic forms of piety with the pre-modern Islamic tradition in two fundamental ways that stand in potential tension with each other. One is the famous idea of Islam as a “discursive tradition” whose trans-temporal continuity is constituted not by the transmission of static doctrines or practices but by an ongoing debate about the right way to enact Islam: Alasdair MacIn- tyre’s “argument extended through time.” In this view, as Junaid Quadri has recently noted, even when modern Muslim scholars diverge from pre-modern precedents, “that disagreement or difference is what makes [their opinions] part of the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence.” 1 While this strand of argumentation emphasizes diversity and disputation as constitutive features of Islamic tradition, an equally pervasive aspect of the Asadian model emphasizes the centrality and persistence of a specific approach to piety that does not appear to be subject to fundamental variation or dispute. This approach (informed in part by MacIntyre’s focus on virtue ethics) is characterized by an emphasis on Islamic law and piety as means of ethical cultivation, on ritual as a means to the embodied habituation of moral dispositions, and on pedagogy and moral correction (nasīh a, “advice,” and h isba, “forbidding the wrong”) as social technologies of moral formation. In these brief comments, I’d like to focus on this second component of the Asadian model and suggest that it should itself be understood to be subject to the kind of diversity, disputation and transformation over time implied by Asad’s model of the “discursive tradition.” Thus, it should not be used as a criterion or diagnostic for con- tinuity with pre-modern forms of Islamic piety. To the extent that Asad cites Islamic primary sources to elucidate his model of Islamic piety as virtue ethics, they are uniformly modern (with a modest degree of engagement with secondary sources addressing earlier periods). For example, in Formations of the Secular his analysis of “‘Sharīʿa’ as a traditional discipline” is based on selected elements of an 1899 work by Muhammad ʿAbduh, whose emphasis on the Shariʿa as “a way for © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Marion Katz marion.katz@nyu.edu 1 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003), 221 (cited in Junaid Quadri, Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2021), 12). POLITICAL THEOLOGY 2022, VOL. 23, NO. 7, 679–684 https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2022.2092331