Asking the Right Questions

I have an adviser who has guided me through pushes and pulls in one direction and another. Whatever I started school with is now much more his- it always seems to work like this with graduate students. One of his I'd give to anyone interested is that most of academics is asking the right question. In academic writing this is always important, but I'm also thinking of how particular selection of questions should guide the content I'd want to form here.

In this, somewhere between work at school and personal life, resides politics. And it doesn't make sense to strenuously censor that from a personal blog, especially not a student of modernity and modernization. But, I do want to focus here on a particular kind of questioning at the intersection specialized work in the Western academy, and public life in the world that has been made to fit Western categories and purposes.

Generally speaking, I want to use this space not to think about the merits of well-established positions in public intellectual questions related to personhood, religion or social politics, especially those where traditionalist and progressive alternatives are clearly marked.

Rather, I want to think about what and how assumptions are made regular within the structure of the debate itself, how they assume or do not assume particular kinds of personal flourishing and social solidarity as needing protection or advancement.

The defining example of this genre of questions for me is the class of questions Islamicists call personal status. When colonial powers remade Islamic legal traditions they created a separate space within new law codes to preserve traditional culture: where marriage, divorce and inheritance can be adjudicated according to the sharīʿa, as the colonists interpreted it as long as one was counted as Muslim.

This is useful shorthand for me for a wide variety of what contemporary Americans call "social issues". In the 19th-century West, they were called the "woman-question", the "Jewish question" and so on. All the divides between public and private, between imperial and indigenous, between modernizing and traditional are with us, and they give our worldview its familiar contrasts. See this week's Economist if in doubt about the "real world"; the debate within the academy is more long-winded but nonetheless conforming to familiar contours.

In terms familiar to the former British empire: rather than assessing what kind of counter-position feminism or gay rights poses to the formal Victorian social order, it is more of interest to me here to see the lineaments of that order in the framing of alternatives themselves. The interlocking of concepts of personal integrity and community standing, the publicity and privacy of the family and the centrality and indefiniteness of religion are orders that seem natural but result from particular historical pressures and social formations. To rethink these courses of modernization with the resources of other traditions, in my case I try with Islamic and Chinese traditions, might not produce different answers to the established alternatives of experiment and deference. But it may yet alter the sense of familiarity in the oppositional questions with which we are all so familiar.