Humanistic inquiry is not just about timeless questions and human experience. Viewed historically, it is equally about working within the constraints of a world of ideas shaped by a small set of exemplars. In this chapter I look at concrete instances of the use of canons in the history of the humanities. Different cultures designate different works as canonical. The point is not that everyone interested in the questions posed by the humanities should be reading the same works, but rather that humanistic inquiry in each community (however defined) must designate certain works as canonical in order to reap the scholarly benefits of a shared world.

The epilogue sketches, in broad brushstrokes, the afterlives of the Greater India discourse in the postcolonial period, with particular reference to the writings and politics of Jawaharlal Nehru, the academic realm, and the Hindu nationalist imagination. It examines how the Greater India imagination reconfigured Nehru’s understanding of India’s ancient past and future role in global politics. It also shows that the story of the ‘glorious’ spread of Indian culture became a canonized theme in post-independence nationalist historiography and was promulgated by influential historians including R.C. Majumdar and K.M. Panikkar. Yet although the ‘discovery’ of Greater India had opened a new window on the ancient past, it also marginalized histories of connection and entanglement, most notably pertaining to India’s Islamic traditions, that did not fit the master narrative that celebrated an expansive ancient India as Asia’s cultural and spiritual fount. Finally, the epilogue reflects on how the legacies of the Greater India movement are mobilized in contemporary India to bolster visions of Akhand Bharat and position India as a civilizational actor on the global plane.

Chapter 1 offers a brief historical overview of nineteenth-century urban Senegal, with a focus on Saint-Louis. It begins with the never-ending territorial rivalry between the Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch, which ended with French dominance in the eighteenth century. It discusses the ethno-cultural groups who lived in and contributed to the economic life of the region. These were the originaires or first inhabitants of Saint-Louis, European merchants, traders, administrators, civil servants, and the métis – the product of mariage à la mode du pays (marriage according to the custom of the country) between European men and African women, whose female offspring became known as signares. The French referred to these groups collectively as habitants. Of the habitants, the signares played a significant role in the economic development of the region, and feature prominently in the chapter. They engaged in trade, including the slave trade, which, in addition to inheritances, enabled them to acquire substantial holdings in real estate, river boats, and slaves, among them children, who remained in their households as wards after the abolition of slavery. The chapter ends with the harmonious coexistence of the habitants who practiced Islam and Christianity and the Catholic religious orders that served the community.

This chapter focuses on heavy metal music and culture in the Middle East. It provides a summary of previous research on metal in the region and touches upon common clichés of metal as a source of counterculture, revolution and change. It then addresses the complicated relationship between metal studies and Orientalism. It is the author’s contention that research on metal in the Middle East has been directly influenced by Orientalist discourse. The author further argues that the impact of this discourse has led to the politicisation and exoticisation of a particular figure – the ‘Muslim metalhead’. This chapter seeks to contribute to the current discussion on ‘Oriental metal’ as an attempt to exotify the very existence (and art) of metalheads from a region that has been geopolitically framed as the ‘Middle East’.

Clifford Geertz was undoubtedly the leading anthropologist of his generation, a broad-scale thinker whose influence extended far beyond his own discipline. His study of Islam in Indonesia, however, might appear not to have been reprised in his Moroccan work whereas, in fact, one could argue that it was. For in his study of the souk, the Moroccan bazaar, Geertz not only presented one of the most detailed and theoretically sophisticated studies of this form of economic structure but also showed how everyday Islamic assumptions and orientations suffuse that domain. In this sense, Geertz did do a study of Moroccan Islam, indeed one that demonstrates its connection to multiple domains of everyday life. In that sense, too, it is the encounters in this most important realm where religion lives and where it must be understood.

Until recently it was thought that the mathematical solution to the formation of nonreplicating patterns that go on to infinity had not been solved before current advances in Western mathematics. But the discovery of such patterns at several Islamic religious sites prompts us to ask why it mattered to the Muslim artisans of that day to solve the mathematics and create such patterns. Just as Western cathedral art represented a cosmological view so, too, we may conjecture that to these Muslim craftsmen the representation of a world that is full of individual elements that relate to one another in unique ways replicates in the visual world what Allah has created for mankind in the world of social relations. By linking the art form and the mathematics to this broader social vision, we may be able to understand why the masters of that age chose to represent on the walls of their religious structures this particular cosmological pattern.

The rule of law, it has been said, is at best a vague concept and at worst a myth. Yet as one looks at any given society, it is a notion that takes on local meaning, in the Middle East and North Africa no less than elsewhere. In this chapter, it is suggested that there is a significant reality to the concept of the rule of law in Muslim nations but that much of that local meaning turns not on substantive rules or the formal organization of institutions so much as the procedures followed and the cultural presumption that inform the finding of facts. By tracing these features through concrete cases and related sources, we can see that Islamic concepts of the rule of law are mostly about process and the assessment of persons, rather than of material evidence and the structure of judicial power. As such, we can also see that when various Muslim cultures encounter one another and the legal systems of the West, some misunderstanding of why failing to appreciate that no cases are thought to be identical and that persons take precedence overs ‘facts’ can readily lead to misperception and misguided encounters.

Tribes are often seen as territorial, pugnacious, and collectivized. In fact, they are quite resilient, individualistic, and readily accepting of others’ practices. When one turns to the law, we can see these features at work in the Berber and Arab tribes of the Middle East, both currently and historically. By starting with the practices of the Berbers of North Africa and then comparing the features they exhibit in their customary law – both substantive and (more importantly) procedural – the similarities to Islamic law are striking. Moreover, it is suggested, this is not surprising, as much of the procedural aspects of classical and modern Islamic law developed out of the tribal background of the Prophet’s day and finds additional support in the precepts of sacred texts. Thus, the comparison of Berber tribal law and Islamic law underscores the continuity of Islamic law, one reasons why it could spread into diverse regions of the Middle East and North Africa so quickly, and why we need to see the spread of Islam not simply as having been carried by military conquest and economic contact but by a form of law that readily resonated with the tribes the new religion encountered.

This chapter introduces the book’s main arguments and discusses four interrelated developments as the primary causes ofL6:L8 the resilience of the Islamic Republic. They are: the institutional makeup and legitimacy of the state; the state’s underlying and not always obvious underbelly – the so-called deep state; the dynamics that allow for the management and resolution of intra-elite tensions and conflict, even if only partially, and facilitate intra-elite circulation and rotation; and, the state as an institutional venue for and a profitable source of rent-seeking.