"Fantasies of Capital: Alienation, Enjoyment, Psychoanalysis"
— A Jnanapravaha Mumbai Conference (December 16 - 18, 2016)

Day 3 / Session 2 — Faisal Devji, "Idols, commodities and Islam"

Abstract: Contemporary forms of Muslim piety, from neo-traditionalism to Islamism, Salafism and even militancy, are dominated by two anxieties: idolatry or the misrecognition of God, and hypocrisy or the making invisible of this misrecognition. More than the external threats of non-Muslim and indeed ‘Crusader’ or ‘Zionist’ enemies, in other words, it is these internal deceptions that are of greatest concern to such movements. If idolatry has become so important for modern forms of Islam, this is because it no longer refers to the ‘actual’ icons of other religions, and like a copy of a copy has come instead to name an almost infinite series of successors, from unjust rulers and false saints to the nation-state and democracy.

Reproducing itself by metaphor, idolatry takes myriad new shapes, and this is what makes it so deceptive and therefore productive of hypocrisy. The desire to unmask hypocrites and topple idols, then, becomes a task that can only be accomplished by the destruction of every ‘false’ object of reverence within as much as outside Islam, but this is impossible because the idol simply reappears elsewhere. The self-destructive logic of such a desire, I want to argue, not only militates against any notion of Muslim authenticity, but ends up replacing or compensating for all that is solid and sacred with an endless and infinitely reproducible chain of commodities. These range from articles of clothing like veils, robes and skullcaps to halal food, entertainment and investment.

The problem arises when this logic threatens to overwhelm even the sacred objects of Muslim devotion, the Prophet and Koran. So if the great dramas of Muslim outrage in our time tend to be about ‘blasphemy’ and ‘sacrilege’, this is not because they represent some medieval inheritance, but in order to protect Islam from its own internal logic of destruction and reproduction. Yet the only way this can be done is by rendering the Prophet or Koran immobile, so that they are saved from the fate of the commodity to become Muslim property taken out of circulation.