Commentaries on Irfan Ahmad's Rappaport Lecture, “Drinking Secularism”

As an admirer of the work of both Irfan Ahmad and the late Shahab Ahmed, I find this sh‘er by the Urdu poet Amjad Islam ‘Amjad’ to be an apt opening for my comments on Irfan sahab's Rappaport Lecture, which is a trenchant critique of Shahab Ahmed's seminal work, What is Islam? For in this brief essay, while I agree with some of Irfan Ahmad's critiques, and explore how they open new ground for Islamic studies, I do not wish to discard the valuable insights that Shahab Ahmed's book has brought to the larger field of Islamic studies and to my own understandings of Islam. This essay, then, is an attempt at synthesis, at reconciling Ahmad and Ahmed.