Encountering the Boundaries of Islamic Tradition: Approaches through Technology, Racialization, Sensory Experience, and Literature

Many Muslims have recently embarked on the exploration and experimentation with LLMs (Large Language Models) on religious texts. Some are developing their own AI chatbots based on the Qur'an. As these AI models are designed to respond to queries about Islam, AI enthusiasts coalesce their belief in the "transparency" of the Qur’an with their belief in the "transparency" of algorithms. Examining the design and perception of Qur’an-focused AI chatbots, this paper explores the cultural logic of un/translatability of the Qur’an in the age of LLMs: What does AI-ification do to the Qur’an and its un/translatability? In what ways do the ideas of transparency, explainability, and interpretability traffic between AI and the Qur’an? If LLMs’ "understanding" of language is not just statistical but also dependent on probabilistic reasoning, what happens to the theology of the Qur’an’s language? Can AI bring forth a new conception of the Qur’an’s miraculousness (ijaz)? 

This paper investigate the way the question of and the need to refute of Islam's presumed "ontological antiblackness" reflects what Calvin Warren would describe as a form of ontological terror. In his monograph of the same title, Warren argues that the affect associated with answering such questions is mani-fold; not only because it provides the power of finding "solutions" but because pressing ontological questions provokes terror, a terror related to the issue of existence "outside the precincts of humanity and humanism," (Warren, Ontological Terror, 4). Utilizing the work of Warren and Frank Wilderson as conduits to the Black Radical Tradition; this paper demonstrate how scholarly attempts to refuse Islam's presumed "ontological antiblackness" reveals how the question forms the basis of a contemporary ontological terror, one that isn't abated by recounting the complicated past, particularly as the religio-political conditions that circumscribe Black Muslim being in Muslim American communites remains unchanged.

Malcolm and Betty Shabazz’s grave in Westchester, New York, as well as key sites in northern Manhattan constitute a funerary complex, in the global tradition of revered Muslim saints and scholars. Individuals visit throughout the year but on May 19 hundreds make pilgrimage and perform a ritual commemoration. The grave and visitation practices were created to activate an embodied, material interaction of reverence and relation to Malcolm and later Dr. Shabazz. I argue that Muslims who participate in visitations, even with contentions around its permissibility, maintain an ontological assumption that the dead are in active relation with the living. Visitations are then an interaction where remembrance brings the past into the present, activating the knowledge and spiritual power of ancestors to transform the self and the world. Finally, the open, collaborative nature of this site creation, including women’s leadership, has contributed to the continued multifaith nature of this religious site.  

This paper reads Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire to demonstrate this thesis: by using Sophocles’ Antigone as intertext, Shamsie places Islam in the role that philosophy has traditionally put Antigone and, by extension, women. The disavowal of Islam from the “western” tradition is what “ironically” constitutes it. Sophocles’ play has been a well for Continental philosophers, particularly around questions of politics and gender. Hegel famously used the play to define women as the “irony” of the community and the “internal enemy.” European and American feminists and queer theorists have reread the play to successfully push back on Hegel’s sexist understanding. Yet, they have maintained a seal around “western” philosophy, excluding the importance of Islam to modern understandings of the Greeks. In this way, they have replicated Hegel’s basic move, but replaced “women” with “Islam.” By reading Home Fire, this paper shows how Shamsie gives the lie to this exclusion.