Islam and Its Conditions: An Anthropological Concept of Transcendent Force

ABSTRACT This article critically examines a constituent tension within the anthropological inquiry of the Islamic tradition. It focuses on the contentious relationship between Islam and liberalism and on its elaboration in some literature in the subdiscipline of the anthropology of Islam. Along these lines, the article articulates this tension through a discourse regarding the internal practices necessary for an Islamic form of life and the extrinsic conditions of liberalism that are often deemed inimical to the development of this form of life. I argue that there is an important ambiguity in the very texts that have articulated an inimical encounter between Islam and liberalism. Rather than suggest that this ambiguity debilitates their account of Islamic life, I suggest the need to exploit this ambiguity so as to develop the conjunction between the internal conditions of Islamic normativity and the extrinsic conditions that situates the Divine within the struggles of the world.