Roundtable Discussion on Caner K. Dagli's "Metaphysical Institutions"

As we study religion what axioms concerning the nature of reality do we employ? When we define religion and explore religious topics what axioms concerning ultimate reality do we employ? What are our “metaphysics” or our assumptions about ultimate reality determine our analyses and conclusions about religion and all that it encompasses. Caner K. Dagli’s Metaphysical Institutions: Islam and the Modern Project explores the underlying philosophy and nature of religions, cultures, civilizations, and traditions. The work centers on this philosophical question and takes Islam and modernism as case studies. This roundtable discussion engages this question from various angles: by scholars of Islam who altogether explore the underlying philosophical constructs of the category of religion in both religious and specifically academic expositions concerning religion. The plan for the discussion is that it would entail 10 minute presentations by four panelists, a 20 minute response from Dagli, 15 minute discussion between Dagli and the panelists, as well as a 10 question and answer session. The first presenter will focus on Dagli’s discussion of how a certain kind of meta-language is deployed in Western intellectual circles to promote a specific conceptualization of Islam that renders it unfit to be a part of the Modern Project. Dagli faults this language that poses as universal as ultimately parochial because it cannot encompass other institutions and realities, such as Islam, with its own competing vocabulary and truth-claims. The presenter engages Dagli’s analysis of how the inability to transcend this conceptual deficiency leads apex communities of the Modern Project to brand Islam as irrational and immutable in its opposition to the modern world. The second presenter will first reflect on a recurring feature of Dagli’s argument, which questions the capacity of social constructs to perform “real” agency in the world. The presenter wonders if, in some of the prior theorizations of the academic category “Islam” that he critiques, Dagli underestimates the extent to which “imagined” mental and social constructs (if “Islam” is actually such) can indeed shape communities and perform empirical “work” in the world. Secondly, the presenter aims to reflect with Dagli on the possibilities and limitations of pursuing inquiry into the “metaphysical” within the context of (“Western”) academia, with its attendant norms and mores (and its enduring imperialist and Enlightenment legacies). The third presenter will turn to a more particular religious topic, that is, gender, asking: what implications does Dagli’s proposed conception of the human being and Islam have for studies of sex, gender, and sexuality in lived contexts on in our scholarly reconstructions of the past? How is the conceptional framework Dagli offers of potential inspiration to feminist and other constructivist thinkers who use analytical frames not just to describe but to intervene in “mystical institutions.” The fourth presenter will seek to explore the relative interpretive possibilities of Dagli’s work against those of Shahab Ahmed and A. Kevin Reinhart. In particular, the presenter will interrogate the significance for Dagli’s project of his claim that “by their very nature... metaphysical institutions can only be fully theorized by identifying the authoritative community and how its members transmit a legacy through their lived practice” by testing how the theories of these scholars can help us understand key cases from Sufism and Twelver Shiism. This will then allow the presenter to reassess the role of authority in defining Islam, be it that of Muslim insider, academic, or scholar-practitioner. Each of these talks do not aim to speak about only the book itself, but to discuss the philosophy of religion while looking at the case of Islam and the modern project in particular. Appendix description of “Metaphysical Institutions”: In “Metaphysical Institutions,” Caner K. Dagli explores the ultimate nature of the realities we call religions, cultures, civilizations, and traditions through the lens of a particular question often limited to religious studies, history, and anthropology, namely: "What is Islam?" The book is both a philosophical treatise about the nature of shared thinking that uses the encounter between the Modern Project and Islam as an illustrative example, and an exploration of the conceptualization of Islam in light of the metaphysics of consciousness and meaning. Dagli first develops a comprehensive theory of the institution and then expands its meaning to include a new category called “metaphysical institutions,” with the goal of establishing both necessary and empirically variable features of all institutions, including those that deal with ultimate questions. The new model is then used to analyze questions of authority and autonomy, rationality and imitation, the universal and the particular, and other enduring questions.