Politicizing Islamic Ontologies of Unity: Wahdat Ul-Wujud and Tawhid in Twentieth Century Muslim Political Thought

Sarah Merchant, UC Berkeley

How might troubling the analytical separations between the human, the natural, and the divine allow us to re-imagine the possibility for political liberation amidst contemporary capitalist catastrophe, ecological destruction, and secular crises of meaning? Through the writings of twentieth century intellectuals Ubaidullah Sindhi and Ali Shariati, this paper will offer a few insights to this provocation. Writing in early twentieth century India, Sindhi explored the political implications of wahdat ul-wujud, a perspective within Islamic metaphysics that understands differentiated worldly objects as manifestations of a single, unified consciousness. Sindhi argued that wahdat ul-wujud not only challenged the self-other dichotomy undergirding Hindu-Muslim communal violence but also acted as a theological basis for the formation of a religiously integrated postcolonial India. In Iran several decades later, Shariati deployed a related ontological concept in his critique of capitalism. He saw tawhid not only as a declaration of Islam’s belief in a monotheistic God, but as a description of the blurred metaphysical separations between self and other, human and nature, and Creator and creation. Shariati’s tawhid was not only an ontological description but also a political assertion of history’s movement towards the destruction of capitalism. In and through understanding how they used these concepts in their particular contexts, both scholars demonstrated how seemingly abstracted, ontological accounts of the relationship between the self, the other, the natural, and the divine within Islamic metaphysics could be creatively articulated for concrete political projects. I argue that these political articulations of Islamic ontologies may offer creative theoretical repertoires for contemporary movements ushering vernacular spiritual idiom into the realm of liberatory political struggle.

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 Presented in Session 131. Islamic Political Thought, Sovereignty, and Alternative Modernities