Pedagogies of Uncertainty

This article pays ethnographic attention to the different pedagogies developed and mobilized by seminary (hawza) teachers to enable future generations of Shi‘i scholars to disclose the shari‘a. These pedagogies lead seminarians away from the search for certitudes, truths, or even consensuses that drives much of modern intellectual production. Instead, they stress the frailty and contingency of human knowledge. To support this argument, I examine the role that doubt plays in these pedagogies—the debates it triggers, the disagreements it authorizes, and the scholarly pursuits it makes possible. I emphasize the work of doubt also to show that the ability to perform ijtihad hinges not only on expert knowledge and reasoning operations learned in classical treatises. The intellectual aptitudes and agility required to confront the questions of our times through ijtihad are also made possible by certain pedagogical techniques and strategies that are best studied ethnographically.