The present entanglement of capitalist, imperialist, and ecological catastrophe has ushered in a new age of political nihilism. While critique can powerfully name and detail these forces, we are in desperate need of something that moves beyond it. In this paper, I will argue that by re-thinking our ontological assumptions, we might open our minds (and maybe even our hearts) to new modes of understanding our connection to the other, the natural, and the divine.
Our contemporary crises re-reproduce themselves through unspoken assumptions about the metaphysical separations between the self and the other. This cognitive discursive boundary produces embodied political separations. The metaphysical self/other divide manifests itself in the social relations and dichotomies of laborer/owner, tenant/landlord, and native/settler. Within this framework, the human emerges outside of the natural. Beyond the secular, the bounded separation of the human is extended even against the divine.
To re-think these separations and produce intellectual openings for new kinds of social and political configurations, this paper will venture backwards in time to the intellectual archives of twentieth century Muslim scholars who, instead, foregrounded ontologies of unity. These intellectuals, Ubaidullah Sindhi and Ali Shariati, articulated the connections between political liberation and spiritual liberation through their engagement with an ontology that troubled the boundaries between the human, the natural, and the divine. Both thinkers were heavily influenced by Islam’s mystical tradition and drew upon its metaphysical account of the relationship between the human and the divine in their political projects. By troubling the assumed separations between the human, natural, and divine, these thinkers imagined political alternatives to capitalism and post-colonial ethnonationalism in their respective historical moments.
One of these thinkers, Ubaidullah Sindhi, politically deployed an ontological concept in Islamic mysticism to caution against the mid-twentieth century Partition of India on the basis of religion. Sindhi was a Muslim political organizer actively involved in the Indian struggle for post-colonial independence and deeply skeptical of the religious nationalism that would dominate the subcontinent following its independence in 1947. Sindhi’s work explores the political implications of an ontological concept within Sufi metaphysics that traces back to the thirteenth century. This concept, wahdat ul-wajud, or “Unity of Being,” describes differentiated worldly objects as manifestations of a single, unified consciousness. For Sindhi, this view not only disrupted the metaphysical separations between the self, the other, and the cosmic latent within liberal, secular thought, but also had tangible political implications for the eruption of Hindu-Muslim violence in the final years of British rule. Sindhi argued that wahdat ul-wajud challenged the self-other dichotomy undergirding these communal divisions, while also acting as a theological basis for uniting Hindus and Muslims in the struggle against British colonialism.
In Iran several decades later, Ali Shariati deployed a related ontological concept in his critique of capitalism. Shariati was a sociologist whose thought is often credited with influencing the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In his writings, he pushed the bounds of the concept tawhid beyond its traditionally understood meaning as a declaration of the oneness of God and Islamic monotheism. Instead, he interpreted tawhid as a description of the blurred metaphysical separations between self and other, human and nature, and Creator and creation. Tawhid acted not only as an ontological description of the world for Shariati, but also as a political assertion of a cosmological tendency towards unity and away from the divisive propensities of contemporary capitalism.
Both Sindhi and Shariati abandon the ontological self-other dichotomy foundational to Enlightenment thought in their work. Instead, they begin with the ontological suppositions associated with 12th century Andalusian mystic Ibn ‘Arabi. Ibn Arabi and his later commentators are best known for the concept wahdat ul-wajud, or Oneness of Being. While the concept tawhid, or “Oneness of God” is expressed repeatedly in Islam as an assertion of its monotheism, wahdat ul-wajud expresses the oneness, the “wahdat” of “wujud,” which simultenously expresses God’s being and all being in the world. Because it emerges from a religious tradition, wahdat ul-wajud was primarily concerned with expressing the relationship between the divine and the worldly. But in doing so, it also expresses the relationship between all human and nonhuman existence – described as God’s attributes – as a unified entity. Wahdat ul-wajud therefore blurs the separations between self, other, human, and nonhuman as unified traces and signs of the divine. Wahdat ul-wajud depicts differentiated worldly objects as manifestations of a single, unified consciousness, reminiscent of Neo-Platonism’s account of “The One.” Shariati and Sindhi use this as the ontological foundation for their respective political critiques.
Sindhi and Shariati’s respective temporal and spatial situatedness within 1940s India and 1970s Iran enabled them each to offer unique applications of seemingly abstracted ontological concepts to concrete political projects. This process of arming theoretical concepts with historical and geographic texture is what Stuart Hall and Gillian Hart refer to as articulation. Sindhi and Shariati creatively articulated wahdat ul-wajud and tawhid to challenge the colonial and capitalist forces that characterized their respective historical moments. My project here is to document how Sindhi and Shariati articulate mystical ontologies into the realm of the political preceding the Indian Partition in 1947 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
This paper will therefore begin by theoretically attending to this process of articulation before offering some background on the concepts of wahdat ul-wajud and tawhid in Islamic metaphysics. I will then explore the ways that Sindhi and Shariati themselves engage in articulation to give these spiritual concepts new political lives in their respective regions and historical moments. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the so-called “ontological turn” and its attempt to bridge the rift between the ontological and the political. I will note the potential openings this move might offer for intellectual work that aims to move from critique to worldbuilding.
Amidst our contemporary catastrophes of capitalism, imperialism, and ecological destruction, I follow the lead of Sindhi and Shariati in asking how troubling the analytical separations between the self, the other, the natural, and the divine might allow us to reimagine the possibilities for political transformation. I argue that their historical articulations might offer our contemporary movements something by way of example, showing us how a spiritual vernacular is not a barrier to political consciousness but rather an avenue through which anti-capitalist and anti-imperial struggle can be imagined.
This paper documents how non-dualist ontologies within Islamic mysticism were mobilized by twentieth century political critics of capitalism and empire in the Muslim world. The project centers the mystical doctrine of wahdat ul-wajud, the Unity of Being, which troubles the metaphysical separations between the human, natural, and cosmic and sees all creation as separate appearances of a divine unity. I explore how this cosmology of oneness was politicized in the writings of Indian theologian Ubaidullah Sindhi (d. 1944) and Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati (d. 1977). By offering English translations of Sindhi’s Urdu work, I put his political re-imagining of wahdat ul-wajud in pre-Partition India in conversation with Shariati’s translated writings on tawhid (the declaration of God’s Oneness) in pre-revolutionary Iran. I argue that both authors use the doctrine of metaphysical unity as a basis to render the political domination of the other ontologically incoherent.