Over a decade ago now, Aysha Hidayatullah found herself at the “edge” of the Qur’an where she could longer claim with intellectual honesty that egalitarianism could be found in the Qur’an using even feminist hermeneutics. At this edge, the political goals of feminism and the textual realities regarding gender in the Qur’an are incommensurate. Hidayatullah challenged feminist scholars to “to think in new ways about the Qur’anic text that can help us produce stronger arguments and strategies for pursuing practical victories.”[1] Other feminist scholars like Kecia Ali have suggested a more queer approach that seeks to revel in, rather than reconcile textual and theological ambiguities.[2] This emergent wave of feminist Muslim scholarship highlights radical uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity as fruitful ground for theological reflection and Islamic ethics.
But what does uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity look like in practice? And how might it be a foundation for Muslim piety? I suggest playing as praxis for a feminist/queer theology of uncertainty. Rather than standing at edges, frozen in despair, we instead dance between worlds, between competing truths, and across impasses with playful delight. Through a playful approach, religious studies scholars, theologians, and practitioners alike may discover new ways of being and knowing while being bodily engaged in radical uncertainty. In my paper I argue that play can be generative in carving out alternative pieties for marginalized Muslims, especially queer Muslims.
My paper is based on my ethnographic study of Union Square Halaqa– a queer Muslim-led devotional circle in Boston. Through interviews and observations I explore play as imaginative and generative of “as if” worlds and argue that playing enables my interlocutors to engage in world-building through aesthetics, experimentation with method, and novel temporalities. This world-building is itself a form of piety, but also creates the conditions for queer Muslims to continue flourishing in faith. And while one of the aims of my paper is to highlight the joys, fun, and ludic dimensions of Muslims piety, and to unburden scholarship on Muslims from perpetual seriousness, I also delve into how pain almost always precedes and necessitates play.
Playing has long been theorized psychoanalytically as crucial to healthy child development. For example, Alfred Winnicott developed a theory that children cope with the transition from full maternal dependence to independence through playing with “transitional objects” like teddy bears or blankets. A child whose play transitions them successfully grows up with the creative and imaginative capacity necessary for philosophy, science, and creating art. Psychoanalytic theories of play have also been appropriated by religious studies scholars and theologians. Some scholars in the study of religion have suggested that Winnicott’s transitional object morphs into the idea of God for people later in life, while others suggest that religious symbols are examples of transitional objects.[3]
Christian theologians like Courtney Goto have written about “playing” in its various connotations as facilitating “revelatory experiencing” in Christian education. And she rightly identifies how play can seem like a threat to orthodoxy for its ability to spawn new and challenging ideas. Revelatory experiencing facilitated through art and play allows for “translucence” between physical and metaphysical worlds, and creates the conditions to be unexpectedly changed. Play is a site for revelation, one that invites anyone wanting to seek the Spirit to do so, including those at the edges of the church.[4] While not going so far as to call it revelation or revelatory experiencing, Daniel Birchok writes about adult Indonesian Muslim men who explore inscrutable transcendent truths through playfulness. During classes meant to prepare men for death and afterlife, Acehenese men often asked questions like “how deep is hell” and “what If I die in the bathroom?” It may seem that being jocular with classmates does little more than lower the temperature in the room, but engaging theological questions in this register allows greater degrees of candor, curiosity, and contemplation of what is ultimately unknowable.[5]
Play is not only my object of inquiry, but also my primary methodological approach. Mary Dunn suggests that the academic study of religion be seen as a “species of play” and that religious studies scholars take a “ludic” approach in studying religion. There are two parts of this– to see religion itself as a playful endeavor with a capacity to hold multiple and seemingly contradictory truths, and to understand the work of the scholar as that of play. A Ludic, playful approach to scholarship delights in what cannot be reconciled, but still allows for claims to be made with a recognition that such claims are just as absurd, temporary, and at risk of coming undone as anything that came before or will come after. This approach is potentially liberatory for both the scholar and subject by providing an alternative to dominating texts into submission to secular historicity and mandatory critique.[6]
This is certainly the case for the queer Muslims I interviewed, where play is synonymous with liberation, a matter of faith or unfaith. My interlocutors identified two divergent paths available to them as queer Muslims– to leave Islam, or decide to access Islam differently in order to maintain their faith. At Halaqa, queer Muslims choose the latter; they can show up as themselves and play with different ways of being Muslim and accessing God. Through experimentation and play, queer Muslims are able to reorient themselves in faith and experience something like “revelatory experiencing” where memories are unlocked and queer Muslim futures come into view.
[1] Hidayatullah, Aysha A. Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 193.
[2] Ali, Kecia. "Destabilizing Gender, Reproducing Maternity: Mary in the Qurʾān." Journal of the International Qur'anic Studies Association 2 (2017): 89-109.
[3] Jacobs, Janet Liebman, and Donald. Capps. Religion, Society, and Psychoanalysis Readings in Contemporary Theory. Boulder, Colo: WestviewPress, 1997.
[4] Goto, Courtney T. The Grace of Playing : Pedagogies for Leaning into God's New Creation. Horizons in Religious Education. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2016.
[5] Birchok, Daniel Andrew. "‘Don't Be so Serious’: Ethical Play, Islam, and the Transcendent." The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28, no. 2 (2022): 406.
[6] Dunn, Mary. "Playing with Religion: Delight at the Border between Epistemological Worlds." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, no. 4 (2021): 1208-1228.
Current trends in feminist Muslim scholarship highlight radical uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity as fruitful ground for theological reflection and Islamic ethics. But what do uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity look like in practice? How is uncertainty lived and felt, and how might it be a foundation for Muslim piety? Playful Piety: How American Muslims Play with/in Islam explores how contemporary American Muslims cultivate pious subjectivities through various forms of playfulness, and how tradition and authority are negotiated in these processes. I suggest that playing could be the praxis for a feminist theology of uncertainty. My present case study explores how a queer Muslim devotional circle “plays with tradition.” Through analysis of my ethnographic data I argue that playing is a legitimate form of Muslim piety and offers novel epistemological and theological approaches to tradition, especially for marginalized Muslims.