Subject Formation Early Islam

BEING AN INTELLIGENT SLAVE OF GOD
Discursive Strategies and Subject Formation in

Early Muslim Thought
Faraz Sheikh
ABSTRACT
How did premodern Muslim thinkers talk about living authentically as a
Muslim in the world? How, in their view, could selves transform themselves
into ideal religious subjects or slaves of God? Which virtues, technologies of
the self and intersubjective relations did they see implicated in inhabiting or
attaining what I shall call ʿabdī subjectivity? In this paper, I make explicit
how various discursive, ethical strategies formed, informed, and transformed
Muslim subjectivity in early Muslim thought by focusing on the writings of
an important ninth century Muslim moral pedagogue, al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857).
This study illustrates the advantages of approaching early Muslim texts and
discourses through the tools and methods made available by comparative
religious ethics in order to reexamine our understanding of Muslim subject
formation and the role of ethical and theological discourses in the same.
KEYWORDS: subjectivity, discourse, al-Muḥāsibī, self-formation, Islam, ethics,
comparative religious ethics, virtues
1. Introduction
How do we think about and reimagine secular and religious ways of being
in the world? That conceptions of proper or authentic selfhood are ethically
relevant seems beyond dispute. And moral philosophers and religious eth-
icists are well positioned to contribute to these conversations because reli-
gious traditions (including secular traditions of thought) continue to
provide the tools for attaining, and articulating the nature of, authentic
selfhood. It behooves scholars of Islamic ethics then to ask: How did pre-
modern Muslim thinkers talk about living authentically as a Muslim in
the world? How, in their view, could selves transform themselves into ideal
Faraz Sheikh is Assistant Professor of religious ethics at the College of William & Mary. He
received his Ph. D. in Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His research in-
terests intersect the fields of comparative religious ethics and Islamic studies with a special
interest in the comparative study of religious and moral subjectivity in both the premodern
and modern contexts. Faraz Sheikh, fmsheikh@wm.edu.
JRE 47.1:125–152. © 2019 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

126 Journal of Religious Ethics
religious subjects or slaves of God?1 What, in their view, could a person do

to transform their thoughts and dispositions in ways that would enable
and signal proper, as opposed to deficient, self-formation? Which “virtues,”
“technologies of the self” (Foucault 1993, 203), and intersubjective rela-
tions did they see implicated in inhabiting or attaining what I shall call
ʿabdī subjectivity? Any scholar of Islamic ethics who attempts to address
these questions by looking at premodern Islamic texts must confront a fun-
damental methodological challenge: How can one raise such questions
when terms such as “subjectivity,” “virtue,” and “technologies of the self”
(or easily identifiable equivalent terms) are not found in medieval Muslim
texts? This essay draws on a Foucauldian conception of ethics and a discur-
sive approach to texts exemplified by scholars of comparative religious eth-
ics (CRE) to offer an innovative, reconstructive ethical analysis of an
important early Muslim moral pedagogue and theologian, al-Ḥārith b.
Asad al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857) (henceforth Muḥāsibī) with a view to making ex-
plicit his account of the nature and formation of ideal religious subjectiv-
ity.2 Why, one may ask, is it important for religious ethicists and Islamic
studies scholars to understand medieval conceptions of Muslim selfhood?
The short answer, which I shall elaborate upon in the final section of the
essay, is that selfhood is historical and invites genealogical analysis. We
can better understand and evaluate contemporary accounts (and there are
many) of the right or best way of being Muslim in the world if we under-
stand the trajectories along which such notions have developed over time
and the ways in, and reasons for, which they have differed and competed in
different social and historical contexts.
The work of Michel Foucault (1988, 1993) and Pierre Hadot (1995), cen-
tered around the themes of “technologies of the self” and “spiritual exer-
cises” respectively, has provided theoretical energy to much innovative
work in comparative religious ethics. The study of subjectivity and self-
formation are important features of “third-wave” CRE scholarship (Bucar
1
In the case of Muḥāsibī, the figure whose work is the subject of this study, Talal Asad’s
observation regarding the close connection between the concept of a “Muslim” and that of “a
slave indissolubly bound to God” is apt. With the exception of some mystical traditions, Asad
rightly notes, Islamic sources often speak of persons as bound or subjected (muta’abbid) to a
Master or Lord (Rabb). Asad is right to assert that in such cases, slave of God, rather than
the less harsh- sounding servant or worshipper, is the best rendering of the Arabic term
ʿabd. See Asad 1993, 221. Muḥāsibī says that knowing oneself to be a subjected slave (ʿabd
marbūb) is the first thing a person ought to realize should he wish to fulfill God’s rights (al-
Muḥāsibī 1986, 44).
2
For an important discussion of rational reconstruction, as distinct from intellectual his-
tory, as a way of interpreting past thinkers, see Richard Rorty 1984, 49–75.
Being an Intelligent Slave of God 127
and Stalnaker 2012).3 CRE scholars have insightfully explored relations

between specific discourses (religious and philosophical) and subject for-
mation both in contemporary societies (Gade 2004; Mahmood 2005; Bucar
2011) and in premodern religious contexts (Stalnaker 2006; Schofer 2005a,
2005b). The study of subjectivity (and intersubjectivity) in the wider field of
religious studies also continues to advance apace (Furey 2012, 2017).
Unfortunately, non-anthropological approaches to the study of Muslim eth-
ics (especially as it pertains to premodern Islamic textual sources) have
remained unaffected by these developments in CRE and religious studies.
While it is difficult to say definitively why Islamic ethics has lagged in this
respect, Bryan Van Norden’s concern about what he calls “the lexical fal-
lacy” is relevant (Van Norden 2003). According to Van Norden, “a thinker
can have the concept of X even though they have no term in their lexicon
for X” (2003, 101). As I mentioned earlier, it is generally agreed that terms
like morality and ethics, let alone subjectivity and self-formation, do not
have precise terminological equivalents in medieval Muslim sources.
Perhaps some scholars of Islam are guilty of committing the lexical fallacy.
The temptation to commit the lexical fallacy is all the more important to
address in the study of Islam (and thus Islamic ethics) because of the way
the field has developed. It is pertinent to quote the prominent scholar of
Sufism and Persianate Islam, Shahzad Bashir, at some length on this
point. Bashir observes:
Due to the philological roots of Islamic studies, we are hesitant to go beyond
the surfaces of texts, to reconstitute the social relations that gave rise to the
works and are embedded in them. I believe this situation needs a corrective.
We should see medieval Islamic materials such as Sufi texts as products
of human experience and speak to the categories we use to analyze more
familiar societies such as those in which we live. We should attempt to recon-
stitute the social imagination that underlies medieval Islamic texts, using
methods employed in other fields of humanistic inquiry. Our historiographic
effort can then be a kind of cross-cultural study that both illuminates the
past and highlights cultural alternatives comparable with the patterns that
govern our own lives. (2011, 23)
Generally speaking, Islamic ethics follows what may be called a source-spe-

cific or source-driven methodology. For instance, scholars pursuing Islamic
ethics may examine Islamic theological discussions (Hourani 1985; Vasalou
2008, 2015; Attar 2010) or Islamic legal (fiqh) texts (Reinhart 1983; Weiss
1998; Kelsay 1994, 2007; Ali 2010) or Sufi/mystical writings (Awn 1983;
Heck 2006) or Islamicate works of literature (ʾadab) (Metcalf 1984; Ormsby
3
Much has been published in the JRE, and elsewhere, about the history, development,
present state and future direction of CRE as a field of study. See Stalnaker 2005; Bucar
2008; Kelsay 2010, 2012; Bucar and Stalnaker 2012, and Lewis, Stalnaker, Schofer, and
Berkson, 2005.
2010; Chiabotti, Feuillebois-Pierunek, Mayeur-Jaouen, and Patrizi 2017)

or the Quranic text itself (Sachedina 2001; Rahman 1980). These studies
share the methodological assumption that “Islamic ethics” is whatever nor-
mative claims or discussions of moral value one may find at the surface
level (a notable exception being Reinhart 1995) in the particular kind of
source (legal or mystical or theological and so on) in question. When stud-
ies of Islamic ethics are thematic, to take the edited volume Islamic Ethics
of Life: Abortion, War and Euthanasia (Brockopp 2003) as an example, they
regularly treat those themes by taking past Muslim thinkers not only as
subjects of critical analysis but often also as authorities in a way that, as
Kevin Reinhart rightly laments in the afterword of the same volume, “an
eighteenth-century Catholic seminarian would have approached Aquinas”
(Reinhart 2003, 214). There are, of course, notable exceptions to this ten-
dency (the tendency to defer to Muslim thinkers as authorities on ques-
tions of contemporary interest) among feminist studies of Islamic sources
(for instance Ali 2010, 2015; Chaudhry 2013; Bucar 2011) and also descrip-
tive (often encyclopedic) surveys of particular topics or themes across a
range of textual sources (see Friedman 2003; Cook 2004; Vasalou 2008;
Reinhart 1995). However, these latter, purely descriptive works display a
marked lack of interest in the living, breathing human subjects and their
way of being in the world and do not venture beyond the surfaces of texts.
By contrast, scholarship analyzing accounts of selfhood in other religious,
philosophical, and literary traditions continues to grow (see Taylor 1989;
Cottine 2016; Schofer 2005b; Stalnaker 2006; Furey 2017) helping us un-
derstand how various types of discursive performances formed and trans-
formed selves in those traditions. Departing from source-driven (and one
must add, faithful to the tradition’s own classifications of texts and reli-
gious knowledge) and surface-level approaches to Islamic texts can be
problematic and challenging.4
But this challenge is not unique to the study of Islamic texts. Comparative
religious ethicist, Jonathan Schofer, to take one notable example from
among numerous that could be cited, reports and admirably overcomes a
similar challenge in his study of an influential rabbinic text, The Fathers
According to Rabbi Nathan which, prior to his study, scholars of Jewish
thought (and Jewish scholars throughout history) had taken to be a legal
4
At the risk of a minor digression, I find it important to mention the long shadow cast on
Islamic studies by Edward Said’s powerful (in its original form quite circumscribed and
limited) critique of Orientalist scholarship about Islam and Muslims (Said 1978) (which is
now often used as a whip to suppress critical, humanistic scholarship about Islam and
Muslims) and by Talal Asad’s forceful argument (pertaining aptly to anthropologists of his
day but often taken out of its original context and deemed required across all areas of
Islamic studies) about the importance of studying a tradition “on its own terms” (Asad 1986).
For an important critique of this Asadian position, shared by other anthropologists today,
from a religious-ethics perspective, see Miller 2005.
and liturgical text, pure and simple. In his insightful and innovative study,
Schofer ventures well beyond a surface-level reading, and traditional inter-
pretations of the text (even as he rigorously attends to its rabbinic termi-
nology) and makes explicit how various discourses in the text (such as
metaphors, narratives and stories of past sages, dialogues, and maxims) in
this rabbinic text function as “strategies that aim to persuade, entice, and
guide followers along the rabbinic path” (Schofer 2005b, 170). Schofer does
not simply take the text to be a repository of legal principles and liturgical
incantations. Rather, it is his ethical interest in questions of self and
self-transformation that guides his reading of the text. He is able to notice
and make explicit the roles subjection to authoritative others, and “inter-
nalization” of particular discourses, play in rabbinic thinking about
self-transformation (Schofer 2005a, 2005b). He is able to show how the
text, implicitly but clearly, speaks to contemporary ethical questions that
interest him as a researcher.5 The present essay takes Schofer’s approach
to Jewish legal-liturgical texts as a model for interrogating the role that
discourses play in Muslim self-formation in an important text from early
Islam, namely The Book of the Observance of God’s Rights (al-Riʾāya li-
ḥuqūq Allāh) by the important Muslim thinker Muḥāsibī.
Even as this is not an essay in intellectual history and since we know
very little about Muḥāsibī as a historical figure anyway, a few words about
him and his context are in order. From reports about him in Sufi and other
biographies, we know that he was a moralist, preacher, and a theologian
(Van Ess 1961). He lived in Abbasid Baghdad most of his adult life, moving
there from Basra as a young child and dying there an unpopular man,
with only a few people reportedly attending his funeral. We know from his
works that he was critical of the rationalistic, speculative theologians of
early Islam, the Mutazilites. He is sometimes regarded as a Shāfi’ī jurist
by some biographers. He was considered a Sufi master by later Sufi think-
ers like al-Qushayri and is well-known in the tradition as the teacher of
Junayd al-Baghdādi, who is considered by many the father of sober Sunni
Sufism in Islam (Karamustafa 2007). He was sharply criticized by the fa-
mous hadith collector and traditionalist, Ibn Hanbal (d. 847) for engaging
in speculative theology (Picken 2008). According to Arab biographers, he
was given the epithet “Muḥāsibī” (one who takes himself to account) be-
cause he had a habit of, and reputation for, rigorous and frequent self-ex-
amination. He is well-known to have been a major influence on the famous
5
For thorough, sophisticated discussions of, and explicit and implicit responses to, objec-
tions that such an approach to pre-modern texts i) would always simply find what it sets
about looking and thus ii) would pre-determine the results of one’s inquiry in advance and
iii) would amount to reading into and thus distorting the real, intended meaning (agreed
upon by insiders and historians) of these texts see Stalnaker 2006, 17–62 and Schofer 2005b,
7–22.
Muslim theologian and mystic, al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), a key figure in Islamic
intellectual history (Smith 1936). In short, Muḥāsibī is an understudied
but important figure in early Islamic thought. This study is, albeit only
indirectly, a small contribution to the slim but gradually growing body of
work on Muḥāsibī in the English language.
A word about how CRE has informed my approach to Muḥāsibī’s texts.
Scholars of Islamic ethics have typically interpreted pre-modern Islamic
texts as representing systems of thought and styles of moral reasoning
pertaining to groups and collectivities. The focus has typically been on
communities, institutions, and schools of thought. Little to nothing has
been said, for the premodern period, about the individual person who is
supposed to have been the subject, for instance, of the moral and legal
codes discussed in legal (fiqh) texts or the human subject of mystical dis-
courses found in Sufi texts. CRE insists that the ideas recorded in texts,
no matter how specialized or elitist in their origins, are always produced
within larger socio-cultural realities which they implicitly, if not explic-
itly, reflect. They are received and encountered by actual people, even if
we know little about who those people were and to what extent they were
actually affected by those texts. Schofer rightly observers in this regard
that discourses “enable humans to describe and constitute who we are”
(Schofer 2005b, 14). He suggests that the terms that comprise a discourse
should not be understood only as hypostatic entities or theoretical princi-
ples with fixed meanings. Terms, as used in a given text by a person facing
a certain situation, can be read as components of discursive practices that
would have allowed persons (in and outside of those texts) to describe but
also construct a particular form of life for themselves, and by extension,
for their community. Following Schofer, I call this a discursive approach
to texts that invites us to focus on the kinds of relations that individual
selves (perhaps not actual historical selves but selves as they are presented
in pedagogical texts as models to be emulated) create with themselves
through appropriating and internalizing particular discourses, narrative
or otherwise. Our scholarly focus needs to broaden to include individual
subjects and not just the communities of which they were a part. In a
sense, we need to complement a Durkheimian collective effervescence of
individuals with a Foucauldian attention to subjectivity and self-govern-
mentality. Prominent Muslim ethicist Ebrahim Moosa made an important
observation more than a decade ago which, unfortunately, continues to be
relevant. He observed that “our knowledge of how the self is culturally con-
ceived in Islamicate societies and how it has served as a historical index
of personal and social transformation is still at its infancy” (Moosa 2006,
213). Clearly there is a need for studies that can help us understand the
social and religious transformations of the Islamic tradition, and studies of
selfhood can help because the self, as Moosa notes, is a kind of “historical
index” (2005, 213) of such transformations.
2. Of Squaring Circles: Models of Muslim

Subjectivity and Muḥāsibī
Scholars of Islam could point to at least two well-known, general ac-
counts of Muslim selfhood (or two modes of Muslim piety if you may) that
have been prominent among Muslims since at least the tenth century. In
one account, a proper religious agent is understood to be a mukallaf, a per-
son under obligation who is responsible for properly performing the duties
made incumbent by the Sacred law (sharīʿah). In the words of Bernard
Weiss, well-known scholar of Islamic law and history, “all was duty” in
this scheme of things (Weiss 1998, 147). Some have referred to this as a
“sharīʿah-minded piety” (Hodgson 1974) and a way of being Muslim that
meant engagement in what Reinhart calls “the fiqh-process” (Reinhart
1983) and Kelsay calls “sharīʿah reasoning” (Kelsay 2007). In brief, it is
a way of engaging the authoritative religious sources, namely the Qur’an,
Sunnah, consensus of scholars (ijmāʿ) and analogical reasoning (qiyās), so
as to find justifications in favor of certain legal-moral positions or deter-
minations (in preference to or as against alternative possibilities). To thus
discover God’s commands for all aspects of one’s practical life and abide
by them makes for an ideal religious subject. A person who is not deemed
eligible to engage in such reasoning himself, due to lack of knowledge or
capacity, is to be an unquestioning follower (muqallid) of the opinions put
forth by legal experts or scholars (ʿulamāʾ).
In the other, more spiritual conceptualization of being or rather doing
Muslim, variously termed mystical or Sufi, an ideal Muslim is a seeker and
aspirant (murīd) initially and, finally, a realizer (ʿārif). He was expected
to tread upon a spiritual path, traversing it to attain an ever-fuller inner
discernment (maʿrifa) of God (Chittick 2008). Such a person was expected
to travel a path (ṭarīqa) under the close supervision of, and obedience to,
a spiritually advanced teacher (shaykh) or religious guide (murshid) and
engage in a range of practices of remembrance (dhikr) that were thought
to gradually unveil hidden truths to the seeker and bring him closer to the
divine. In the more advanced versions of this account of self-realization,
these spiritual transformations gradually culminated in the annihilation
of self in God (fanāʾ fillāh) and the self’s subsistence in/through God alone
(baqā billāh) (Sviri 2002; Chittick 2013; Todd 2014). In ethical terms, schol-
ars have often regarded the former, juridical mode of being Muslim as reg-
ulated by a sort of divine command ethics (Attar 2010; Reinhart 2005). The
Sufi mode of being an ideal Muslim often is described in the language of
moral cultivation and virtues of character (ʾadab and akhlāq) (Moosa 2006;
Heck 2006; Khalil 2015) through practices that include, but move beyond,
ritual worship. Notwithstanding gross over-simplification due to limits of
space and scope, these two styles of being Muslim as described here would
be readily recognizable to educated Muslims and scholars of Islam today.
A brief mention of these two modes of piety serves to acknowledge that one
or more of these modes of piety may appear, to some, to be sufficient and
appropriate for understanding Muslim subjectivity and subject formation
in any given premodern Islamicate society. And prior to the development of
these two modes, scholars generally invoke the all-encompassing and ubiq-
uitous (in all pre-modern religious cultures) idea of asceticism. Some schol-
ars, for instance, characterize Muḥāsibī and the mode of piety he teaches
not as mystical but ascetic. He is described as a non-mystical pietist (Sviri
2002) and a proto-mystic, interiorizing renunciant (Karamustafa 2007).
It is indeed true that fear of God (khawf) and fear of committing sins
(taqwā) are ubiquitous in Muḥāsibī’s writings and in that sense, he can be
described as an ascetic. Historians of Islam see a shift in Islamic societies
from an earlier, near-Eastern ascetic piety focused on fear of God’s punish-
ment toward a more mystical piety, more focused on love of and union with
God (Melchert 1996). From this point of view, Muḥāsibī has been seen as
a product of a transitional phase from ascetic proto-mysticism to Islamic
mysticism proper. This account of Muḥāsibī as teaching a “hybrid” piety is
not satisfactory mainly because the criteria often used (associating talk
of fear of God with asceticism and talk of love of God with mysticism) is
not sophisticated enough and seems to me to too quickly foreclose other
interpretive possibilities. There is other evidence to suggest that Muḥāsibī,
and a Muḥāsibīan subjectivity, is not best examined with the help of these
categories. Let me briefly explain why.
First, Muḥāsibī is explicit that a purely legal account of religious sub-
jectivity would be inadequate. Of course, his entire teaching is centered
around the idea of fulfilling God’s rights, that is, one’s duties to God, but
he rejects the adequacy of obeying God only through the members of one’s
body (jawāriḥ) or fulfilling one’s duties outwardly. For instance, Muḥāsibī
is explicit that while a person might be pure and sinless outwardly (fī ẓāhir
mutaṭahhir), insofar as his relationship with God is concerned, he might
still be inwardly unclean and sinful (fī bāṭin najs fājir) (al-Muḥāsibī 1986,
177). He has well-considered views about why outward ritual piety is not
only inadequate but a potential harbinger of inward impurity. He argues
that since an outwardly obedient person forbids his self (nafs) bodily plea-
sures, the nafs tries to make up for these lost pleasures by seeking subtle
or hidden pleasures (shahawāt khafiyya) in the praise and aplomb one gets
from others for one’s outward obedience to God (1986, 154). He thinks that
in addition to fulfilling God’s rights with the body (fil jawāriḥ), a slave of
God also needs to fulfill them “at the time the suggestions (khaṭarāt) of the
heart call or invite him to good and evil” (1986, 92). It is clear that out-
ward, bodily obedience does not suffice in Muḥāsibī’s view.
Alternatively, then, we could take Muḥāsibī to be proposing a mystical
mode of being Muslim. Indeed, the first study on Muḥāsibī in the English
language by the British scholar Margaret Smith (1935), is titled An Early
Mystic of Baghdad. Smith understands Muḥāsibī to be a mystic because

of his discussion of divine love. The second most comprehensive English
language work by Gavin Picken on Muḥāsibī after Smith’s pioneering effort
rejects Smith’s characterization of Muḥāsibī as a mystic. Picken urges us
to think about Muḥāsibī as an “introspective moral psychologist” (Picken
2011, 218), which is indeed an intriguing suggestion. Picken is explicit that
Muḥāsibī is not a mystic striving for union with the Divine. But Picken’s
analysis of Muḥāsibī is curious in its own right. He spends much time in
his book elaborating on the concept of self-purification (tazkiya al-nafs) in
classical Islamic sources (Quran, hadith, and other Muslim writings) and
finally comes to analyzing the same concept in Muḥāsibī’s writings. And
then he makes a rather startling observation, worth quoting at length:
Upon surveying the works of al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī, it is of little surprise that
the compound term tazkiya al-nafs is found. However, what is surprising
perhaps is the fact that the incidence of this phrase is very rare, occurring
only on a few occasions, and what is more surprising is that it is not used at
all in the context used thus far in this exposition. Indeed, on each occasion
the phrase is used in an exclusively negative context [emphasis added] . . . to
indicate self-praise, this being considered a blameworthy quality. It is worth
noting that al-Muḥāsibī, when discussing this concept even uses one of the
verses mentioned above, namely, Quran verse (53:32), ‘And do not attribute
purity to yourselves’ (wa la tuzakku anfusakum), when commenting on the
issue of a person attributing ‘purity’ and excellence to himself, particularly
regarding religious practice . . . Muḥāsibī himself comments in this regard
saying that a person who engages in such self-praise (zakka nafsahu) has
indeed been afflicted with self-conceit (al-ʿujub) and consequently does not
censure his soul regarding its contradiction of the divine command, which
may ultimately lead to his destruction. (Picken 2011, 168–69)
Clearly, Muḥāsibī does not see self-purification in a positive light or as a

means to attaining some sort of virtue. But Moosa, in his study of Ghazali,
perhaps the only study of Muslim subjectivity as represented in pre-modern
Islamic sources, remarks that Muḥāsibī epitomizes a particular genealogy
of Islamic ethical thinking that, according to him, combined “purification
of the heart with the observation of law” (Moosa 2006, 239). Moosa, whose
main focus is Ghazalian subjectivity, characterizes a mystical account of
self and self-formation as such: “human actions produce the appropriate
pious effect on both the inner and outer self, culminating in the seeker
becoming an expert at inner discernment” (2006, 239). This inner discern-
ment, which Moosa is wise to not characterize as virtue in the Aristotelian
sense, nevertheless culminates, in the Sufi scheme of things, in “mysti-
cal unveilings and divine intuitions” (2006, 260). It thus seems to me that
both Picken’s description of Muḥāsibī’s negative appraisal of self-purifica-
tion and Moosa’s account of Muslim mystical subjectivity as centrally in-
volving self-purification problematizes our characterization of Muḥāsibī
as proposing a mystical model of ideal subjectivity. Furthermore, Moosa’s

pictures of a Ghazalian mystical subjectivity, despite his characterization
of it as being intensely dialogical, remains Aristotelian in the end. In his
view, the self’s pedagogy is eventually “accomplished” and certain desir-
able habits become second nature to the person. It is these virtuous habits,
now a part of the self, that lend dignity to the self. It is the spontaneous,
effortless enactment of particular behaviors, as a matter of self-mastery,
self-understanding, and one’s power to discern, that makes the self a dig-
nified, virtuous self. Sara Sviri, in her study of self-transformation in early
Sufi literature, presents a similar picture of a self’s gradual transformation
until it reaches the final spiritual station: union with God (Sviri 2002, 206).
Richard Todd’s account of what he calls al-Qūnawī’s metaphysical anthro-
pology echoes Sviri’s findings (Todd 2014). Atif Khalil too describes the cul-
tivation of gratitude (shukr) in Islamic mystical ethics as the cultivation of
a virtue (Khalil 2015). In stark contrast to these mystical, gradualist-per-
fectionist (and undeniably Aristotelian) models of self-transformation and
moral cultivation, consider Muḥāsibī’s moral anthropology:
Indeed, the command of God for slaves is that they struggle against their
desires. They have not been commanded that there remain no faculty in the
self (la yakūn fī al-nafs gharīza)6 that calls them to satisfy their sinful appe-
tites (shahwa). And they are not commanded to get rid of the whisperings of
Satan, which he presents in their inner hearts (fī ṣudūrihim). Rather, God
has given them rational faculties and bestowed on them awareness and
knowledge which are established in their intellects. They are tested with
their faculties. He made Satan to provoke human beings through their facul-
ties, attracting them towards the (sinful) things they love. He commanded
that the slaves struggle against the calls of these faculties, and against those
things which Satan makes desirable and that are agreeable for the faculties
of the nafs, with the help of those faculties that God has fortified with aware-
ness and knowledge. Nothing other than this is expected from the slaves of
God (fa laysa ʿalā al-ʿubbād ghayra dhālik). They do not have the power to do
more and it is not expected of them. There are some who are stronger than
others in this. And they are those who struggle until the calls of the nafs are
weakened calls, but without any change in its essential nature (min ghayri
taghayyar al-ṭabʿa. (In such a case) the nafs gives less suggestions or incite-
ments than before and the incitement (khaṭra) is weaker than it was in the
beginning. What remains on the slave of God is to struggle and forbid the
nafs from following its desires. The transformation of his nature is not his
responsibility (lam yukallaf taghyyīr ṭabʿahu) so that it becomes like the
6
gharīza means something natural or native, implanted by God, good or bad.
Lexicographers give cowardice and courage as examples. It seems then that these are things
somehow already planted in one’s nature that one cannot fully remove. Thus, one may do
things to make these qualities manifest (or not) in one’s behavior but no new substance is
added to, planted in, or removed from the self as a result of one’s practices. Lane, Arabic-
English Lexicon, s.v. “gharaza.”
nature of an angel (ḥattā yanqalib fa yajʿalahu ka ṭabʿ al-malāʾika). His re-

sponsibility is to refuse to follow that to which his essential nature the word
here is al-ṭabʿa and not nafs) calls him. (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 249–50)
It should be clear from this rather remarkable passage that Muḥāsibī does
not think it is possible or even desirable that a slave change or transform
the nature of his nafs and thus his own nature. It seems that the nature
of the nafs is not separable from a person’s overall, essential constitution.
Constant struggle (mujāhada), of the rational faculties against faculties
incited by the nafs, seems to be the ultimate lot of even the most knowl-
edgeable and intellectually sound people. Human beings remain human,
subject to the incitements of their lower selves and Satan as part of God’s
plan to test humans, and the desire to entirely eliminate such calls and
incitements of the nafs and to transform one’s nature is a futile and pre-
sumptuous desire to attain a super-human, angelic form of life. Muḥāsibī
is emphatic that in his view, God does not expect this from his slaves and
does not command them to transform their natures in such a way. We
have already seen that Muḥāsibī speaks disapprovingly of the idea that any
person can ever claim to have achieved “purification of the heart,” a core
element of ideal mystical selfhood according to Moosa. In sum, given the
evidence provided above, it is difficult for us to maintain that Muḥāsibī’s is
a mystical account of ideal subjectivity.
As for taking Muḥāsibī to be an ascetic, a few brief observations should suf-
fice. Muḥāsibī did not practice or champion celibacy (often seen as the quint-
essential ascetic lifestyle), and he is reported to have lived in a large house
and to have loved sumptuous clothes (Van Ess 1961). He was staunchly in
favor earning one’s livelihood and he was sharply critical of those who gave
up work and shunned lawful material acquisition (iktisāb) under the pre-
texts of renunciation (zuhd) and scrupulousness (waraʿ) (al-Muḥāsibī 1986,
97). He was critical of those who may see their solitude and renunciation of
society/company as a secure path to superior piety (1986, 465). Muḥāsibī’s
work is replete with criticisms of the ascetics or renunciants (zuhhād) of his
age on account of their desire for worldly acclaim, self-conceit, and self-delu-
sion (al-ghirra) (1986, 461). In sum, to characterize Muḥāsibī as epitomizing
and teaching a purely legal, an exclusively mystical, or an essentially ascetic
mode of life as the ideal way of being Muslim risks obscuring the more nu-
anced, finer features of his account of ideal religious subjectivity.
3. Foucault as a Resource for the Study of Islamic Ethics

While many readers of the JRE might find my remarks about Foucault
in this section too basic, I think they will nevertheless be useful for those
students of Islam and Islamic ethics who may not be aware of Foucault’s
relevance beyond their graduate seminars or his widely noted influence on
Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. According to Arnold Davidson, Foucault
isolated a “distinct stratum of analysis” in the study of ethics that other

philosophers had overlooked (Davidson 1986, 228). Moral philosophers
were predominantly concerned with justifying or studying moral codes
while sociologists focused on the actual, empirically observed moral be-
havior of people. In Foucault’s view, both approaches managed to ignore
the living, self-reflexive subject of those moral codes. In Davidson’s view,
Foucault wanted to shift away from a discussion of codes and doctrines
towards how “the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral
subject of his own actions without, however, denying the importance of ei-
ther the moral code or actual behavior” (1986, 228). Thus, one of Foucault’s
most basic contributions to ethics is to define it as “the self’s relationship
to itself” (1986, 228). In Foucault’s own words:
Analyzing the experience of sexuality, I became more and more aware
that there are in all societies, I think, in all societies whatever they are,
techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a cer-
tain number of operations on their bodies, on their souls and on their own
thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform
themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of
happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let us call this kind
of techniques, a techniques or technology of the self. (Foucault 1993, 203)
It is this study of what Foucault also described as “forms of understanding

that a subject creates about himself” (1993, 203) that he sees as the subject
matter of ethics, and it is in this meaning that I use the term ethics (and
its derivatives such as ethical) in this study. To my knowledge, this defini-
tion of ethics and thus the kinds of questions one may ask when one studies
Islamic ethics has not found a sympathetic ear among scholars and stu-
dents of Islam.7
7
Foucault conceptualized ethics along four related axes: ethical substance, mode of subjec-
tion, practices/techniques or technologies of self-formation, and telos. Ethical substance des-
ignates those aspects of a self or its behavior (feelings, thoughts, desires, judgments, and so
on) that are addressed and engaged by a moral code. The mode of subjection is the linkage
between a moral code and the thinking subject. It attempts to capture “how the (moral) code
is to get a hold” on the self. For instance, a story about the exemplary behavior of a well-
known religious figure (saint, sage or prophet) could be called a mode of subjection under
Foucault’s schema for it exercises power over a person. A third aspect, closely related to the
latter, is what Foucault calls “techniques or technologies of self-formation,” which “concern
the means by which we change or elaborate ourselves in order to become ethical subjects”
(Foucault 1993, 228–29). While the mode of subjection focuses on the transformative force
latent in the moral code and could be appealing and authoritative for a person, techniques of
self-formation refer to those actions of a self that a person undertakes (such as remembering
one’s past, deliberately arousing certain feelings in oneself and suppressing others, writing
letters to others, examining one’s conscience, and so on) that form him into a subject of the
moral code in the service of attaining a pre-given and desired end. It is in this meaning then
that I use the phrase technologies (or strategies) of ethical formation in this study. The fourth
aspect, telos, that is often part of the moral code, describes “the kind of being” to which one
aspires or ought to aspire and which is thus the goal of technologies of self-formation.
Foucault’s conception of ethics allows us to move beyond considerations

about the type or genre of the textual source or a surface level terminolog-
ical analysis of the moral/legal/theological code as decisive for the kind of
ethical questions we can ask of a text. Instead it shifts the focus to persons
as they are presented in the text as relating to themselves in particular
ways and all the things that they may do to achieve a desirable way of
being religious in the world. It allows us to simultaneously consider multi-
ple types of codes and discourses and the kinds of relationship (of the self to
itself and to others) they make possible or disallow. Another important cor-
ollary of Foucault’s conception of ethics is to make us aware that discourses
are not simply expressive of meaning but productive of subjectivity in and
through the exercises of agency required in their subjective performance.
Instead of trying to decipher the juridical or mystical or ascetical mean-
ings of Muḥāsibī’s writings, Foucault’s conception of ethics invites us to
focus on the pedagogical and productive potentials of these discourses and
to think of them as discursive practices with power to shape an individu-
al’s and community’s form of life. Discourses cease to simply be repositories
of mystical, legal, theological, and other meanings but can instead be ex-
amined as practices through which persons are understood to be forming
themselves into subjects of particular kinds. To think of texts as such is to
also take seriously MacIntyre’s (1984) and Ricoeur’s (1992) points about the
centrality of narratives, and Schofer’s additional point about the relevance
of authoritative ideas, maxims, and reminders (not just longer narratives),
to being and becoming a particular sort of self (Schofer 2005b, 265).
Having discussed at some length the limitations of using existing ap-
proaches in Islamic ethics to interpreting Muḥāsibī’s teachings about
selfhood and having briefly discussed theoretical tools for the study of reli-
gious ethics made available by the work of Foucault and CRE scholars, let
me now turn to examining Muḥāsibī’s discourses as discursive strategies
and illustrate, with the help of two examples, what we can learn about his
account of the nature and formation of ideal religious subjectivity by using
a discursive approach.
4. Discursive Strategies and ʿAbdī Subjectivity:

A Muḥāsibīan Account
Scholars have already noted that Muḥāsibī gives a prominent place to
constant self-examination (muḥāsaba), reflection (tafakkur), watchfulness
(tayaqquẓ), and scrupulosity (waraʿ) as central for fulfilling God’s rights
properly, both outwardly and inwardly (Smith 1935; Picken 2011). But how
exactly do these reflective and self-examining practices work? What role
does discourse play in constituting such self-reflective practices and how
do they transform (if at all) a person into an ideal subject? In the remain-
ing essay, I shall consider two examples of specific discursive practices
in Muḥāsibī’s main work, the Riʿāya, and describe how they work to form
what I have called ideal or ʿabdī subjectivity for which the closest phrase in
Muḥāsibī’s discourse is “an intelligent slave of God” (ʿabd ʿāqil) (al-Muḥāsibī
1986, 78). The first discursive practice I shall refer to as the barāʾ-tawakkul
strategy and the second, a qadar-centered discursive technique.
4.1 Barīʾa-Tawakkul strategy and ʿAbdī subjectivity

Barīʾa is an Arabic noun that generally means “disavowal” or “the freeing
of oneself from something, disclaiming association with or responsibility for
something.”8 The verbal form tabarraʾā means “to disavow.” Tawakkul used
in a religious context refers to trust in or reliance upon God. The immediate
textual context of the discursive strategy I want to focus on is Muḥāsibī’s
discussion of a person who has meticulously examined his past, one sin at a
time (dhanban dhanban) (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 75), realized how sinful he has
been to this point in his life, and finds himself desiring repentance. Referring
to how such a person should understand his predicament, Muḥāsibī offers a
comprehensive discursive strategy that begins as follows:
When hope swells in him, on the basis of what he knows and reckons (of his
sinfulness), a hope that he finds a way to his Lord’s forgiveness, (he should
see that) that is the time or moment at which God gave him a special rank
and completed His help to him so that He may cleanse him before the meet-
ing with Him and make him presentable before Him. That is why God gave
him the resolve to repent from all of his sins that he recalled doing. (1986, 77)
It seems to matter much to Muḥāsibī how a person understands, and re-

sponds to, his resolve to repent at the moment he finds himself wanting
God’s forgiveness. Note that the slave has already done the arduous and
unpleasant work (unpleasant for the nafs) of recalling his sins to himself,
“one by one” (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 75). Importantly, however, purification or
cleansing of his sins is something that the ideal slave should take to be
God’s intention for him (not something he can attain) and the slave ought
to see his nascent resolve to repent as the moment at which he is the recip-
ient of God’s favor. This is because the slave is far from being out of trouble
and instead should see himself at the mouth of a new moral abyss.
Muḥāsibī’s discourse, and hence the slave’s performative self-formation,
continues:
When the slave resolves upon observing God’s rights after understanding
this (i.e. that he needs to be cleansed of sins), at that moment the enemy,
Satan, and the nafs deceive him, making it seem to him that he was able to
reach the observance of God’s rights because of resolving upon it with his
own intellect and strength (bi-ʿaqlihī wa quwwatihī). But he does not have
8
Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. “baraʾa.”
any power over the enemy and the nafs after making a resolve to repent.
He forgets tawakkul on his Lord. As a result, God does not protect him from
failing to fulfill His rights (fa la yumin ʿalayhi al-khizlān). (1986, 77)
Muḥāsibī wants the person who finds himself resolving to repent to see
himself as confronted with the challenge of thinking correctly about his
condition in the moment he inclines towards repentance: the enemy and
the person’s own nafs tells him that he has resolved upon repentance with
his own strength and power of will. To accept this suggestion would be an
unintelligent thing to do as it would deprive him, the slave, of the ability
to see God’s power and favor. Instead, the intelligent slave of God would
discursively engage with himself, and God, as such:
If the slave of God was prudent or intelligent (fa ʾin kāna ʿabd āqil), he would
return to the weakness of his nafs and remind himself of the enabling power
(quwwa) of his Lord, then he would ask Him for assistance (maʿūna), as a
favor from Him, in fulfilling His rights and observance of them. He secretly
confers with God in his heart, conversing with Him: ‘I would surely forget
unless you remind me. I am totally incapable and powerless unless you en-
able me with your power and I would fail to fulfill your rights unless you
make me persevere (in fulfilling them). (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 78)
An ideal slave of God would not, on Muḥāsibī’s account, see his own strength
and intellect as the cause of his resolve to repent and would instead tell
himself, as a discursive intellectual strategy, that he is powerless before
both the nafs and Satan and incapable of acting on his resolve.
What work does this discursive strategy do in forming ideal subjectiv-
ity? It is important to mention here that the error or mistake a person may
make of taking his intellect and strength as responsible for his resolve is
an inevitable one for Muḥāsibī because in his view, it is known by an in-
controvertible, definitive knowledge that one is the agent of the choices one
makes. Consider Muḥāsibī’s view on the subject:
Your awareness that you did an action is an awareness that is firmly or
clearly established by nature (maʿrifa qāʾima fil-ṭabʿ bil iḍṭirār). You do not
have to struggle (to make yourself aware) that you did the action. And you do
not need to remind yourself of this and do not need to talk to or address your
nafs (lā mukhātiba nafsak) regarding it. (1940, 210–11)
It is because the slave experiences the making of his resolve as an act of his
own will in Muḥāsibī’s account that he thinks the slave will need a strategy
to overcome the threat to proper subjectivity that a reliance on his own in-
tellectual capacity confronts him with. The slave needs to address himself
and talk himself out of feeling good about himself. For Muḥāsibī, relying
on one’s agency in this situation (that is, when one is making a resolve
to repent for one’s sins) is problematic for attaining proper subjectivity in
at least two related ways and the barīʾa-tawakkul discursive strategy is
presented as a solution to both challenges to proper subjectivity. Let us

briefly consider each in turn.
First, this discursive strategy is the slave’s defense against the sugges-
tion or inclination (khaṭra) to conceit (al-ʿujub) presented to the slave by his
nafs and by Satan at the time of his resolving to repent. This suggestion to
conceit essentially invites the person to attribute the power and desire to
repent to himself. This self-reliance and resulting self-exaltation threaten
to sabotage his status as a slave subjected to God’s power and in need of
God’s favor. Thus, ideal subjectivity is threatened at the very moment the
person attempts to attain or restore it. Muḥāsibī offers a discursive strat-
egy that the person can use to overcome this challenge. He says:
When God warns the slave, and arouses him to repentance, the intelligent
slave understands that this is God’s favor to him and disavows his nafs
from this i.e. (from the claim that he resolved to repent because of his own
strength). (He understands that) it is a resolve that is contrary to what the
nafs loves or likes (khilāf muḥabbatihā). The nafs did not help him repent ex-
cept by compulsion. It did not help him until he made it afraid (of God’s pun-
ishment). How can, then, these conditions (ahwāl) (i.e. the resolve to repent
and fear of God’s punishment for past sins), which are contrary to the nafs’s
liking and in which it did not aid the person except when compelled and even
so only begrudgingly, how then can that which the nafs hates and does not
want, come from it? (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 79–80)
The ideal slave resolves to fulfill God’s rights and then recalls his nafs’
dislike of obeying God (which is presumably why he had lived a sinful life
prior to this moment). He addresses himself and asks: how can I claim
to have willed to do what I had been unwilling to do up to now? The rea-
son for denying oneself the power to repentance is to avoid what Muḥāsibī
calls the suggestions to conceit (khaṭarāt al-ʿujub) (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 79). In
Muḥāsibī’s view, conceit is a grave, calamitous threat faced by many slaves
of God (ʾāfa fī kathīr min al-ubbād aẓīma) (1986, 335). Conceit inverts a
slave’s perception of reality causing him to misrepresent his real condition
to himself. Muḥāsibī says, “conceit blinds the heart so that the conceited
person sees himself excellent in his obedience to God when he is in reality
disobedient and sees himself saved when he is damned and sees himself
doing the right thing when he is doing wrong” (1986, 335). The ideal slave
must think that the suggestion to see his resolve to repent as the fruit of
his understanding (fiqhihi), intellect (ʿaqlihi), and his own determination
and strength (ḥazmhi wa quwwatihi) is an unwarranted addition to the
nafs (yuḍīf ʿala nafsihi) that the nafs does not warrant. It is thus compel-
ling to say that no substantive quality or virtue (of piety or repentance or
resolve to obey God, and the like) can be attributed to the nafs, for to do so
would be to embrace conceit. To deliberately and consciously disavow one’s
nafs as the source and self-sufficient agent of one’s resolve to repent is a
strategy for avoiding a foolishly high opinion of oneself, especially when

the very resolve to repent comes on the heels of making oneself keenly
aware of one’s sinful past and continuing difficulty in obeying God.
Second, through this process of discursive self-engagement involving
the concepts of disavowal and trust in God, the slave comes to have a good
opinion of God. Without a disavowal of his nafs as the one responsible for his
turn to repentance, he cannot really see the latter as God’s favor. Muḥāsibī
seems to recognize that having so zealously recollected one’s persistent
sinfulness, one would find oneself unable to hope with any confidence that
one could henceforth be a different, “better” person. Recall his views men-
tioned above about the impossibility of changing or transforming one’s na-
ture. Muḥāsibī thinks that when the slave sees (raʾā) what the nafs did in
the past (qad maḍā min afʿālihā), he understands that he should blame
it and not rely on it nor hope from it (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 80). If the nafs is
happily repenting now, why was it sinning prior to this moment? If it is not
repenting because of a real, dependable transformation it may have gone
through, how can one be hopeful, given one’s sinful past, that one would
be able to fulfill one’s resolve? How can a repentant yet sinful slave feel
honestly hopeful about his resolve to fulfill God’s rights properly? Consider
how the barīʾa-tawakkul discursive strategy works to address these chal-
lenges to ideal subjectivity when a person engages in the following:
It (the nafs) is what afflicted him, prior to his repenting, with its desires.
Indeed, the one who caused it to enter (the resolve to repent), against its
liking, is its Lord and its Maker and the Exalted. Praise is due to Him and
thanking Him is incumbent for the slave. Trusting Him becomes easy for the
slave and it is easy for him to have a good opinion about what is to come in
the future (i.e. in terms of his fulfilling God’s rights in the future) because
of what he sees of the traces of gracious bestowal and preferential favor and
it is easy for him to trust the one who bestows His favor in this manner (al-
istirāḥa ilā al-mutafaḍḍal bi-zālik). (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 80)
A proper ʿabdī subjectivity would require that one is honest in one’s resolve
to obey God. To have such honesty, one would need to have reasonable (or
rather reasoned) hope of fulfilling one’s resolve to repent and obey God
despite one’s sinful past. This hope will come not from thinking highly of
oneself at the time of making the resolve (which would be conceit) but from
having a good opinion about God which could sustain hope for God’s protec-
tive help in the future. The ideal slave discursively transforms his natural
first impression of his own agency (intellectual prowess and strength of
will) into a perception of being powerless before Satan and his own nafs
and of being protected and favored by God. Thus, the notion that God will
protect and help one in the future is no longer simply ungrounded, wishful
thinking but, for the subject in question, an honest, rational (rather ratio-
nalized) stance based on discursively established evidence of God’s present
favor and help. The barīʾa-tawakkul discursive strategy is not simply a

reminder of some previously established truth. In this context, Muḥāsibī
does not invoke remembering or reminding oneself of something one al-
ready knows. The slave creates this truth for himself through engaging
himself in the barīʾa-tawakkul discursive strategy. To put it another way,
from being a slave (ʿabd) subjected to various suggestions and desires and
from being a self-conscious agent of his efforts and actions, he attains the
standpoint of God’s slave (ʿabduhū) and a recipient of God’s favor, care, and
assistance.
One important ethical implication of ideal subjectivity as described
above is that such a subject is always aware that the power and ability to
bring one’s desire to practical fruition (in this case, the desire to repent
from sins) is not entirely within a person’s reach. A recognition of the im-
portance of reliance on God’s favor makes the slave take the plight of other
people (especially those he sees as sinners) as involving more than that
person’s conscious will. A sinner may well be lacking the favor necessary
for avoiding sin. Alternatively, an apparently pious person owes as much to
God’s favor as his own intention to obey God for his acts of piety and hence
cannot claim any essential goodness for himself over and above those that
others may have. Secondarily, Muḥāsibīan ideal subjectivity makes ample
room for memory (of what one has done in the past and how one felt while
doing it) as important for avoiding the vice of conceit. One cannot simply
forget oneself and must instead always see oneself as a person with a past.
Thus, while the God the slave connects himself to might be ahistorical
and transcendent, being an ideal slave of God is a thoroughly and ines-
capably historical and dialectical process. These implications are import-
ant for us to consider today when claims about being in possession of, and
embodying, absolute truth abound among Muslims and are often tied to
claims about the absoluteness of God and about the divine origins of the
Quran. And yet, a person can still hope for a future different, and better,
than their past on account of God’s favor expressing itself in the form of a
human desire to change and avoid what he takes to be sinful and immoral.
4.2 Qadar-centered discursive strategy for overcoming the inclination to

hypocrisy (al-riyāʾ)
For Muḥāsibī, the inclination to show-off, or hypocrisy (al-riyāʾ), is one of
the most vicious suggestions (khaṭarāt) of the nafs and Satan. A person
does not accept this suggestion except when three elements are present in
his heart (qalb), which Muḥāsibī also calls the inner self (ḍamīr al-nafs).9
These three elements are: love of praise, fear of rebuke, and coveting what
9
It is interesting that the heart is interchangeable with the inner self indicating that for
Muḥāsibī, the heart is a part of the self and not a separate entity or substance from the nafs.
others have in their possession (such as wealth, high status, knowledge,

piety, and so on). The ideal slave has to struggle against the suggestion to
hypocrisy and in order to do so, he needs a way to neutralize these three
elements within his heart. I want to suggest that a discourse centered
around God’s (not man’s) qadar or divine predetermination functions as a
discursive technique that allows the slave to make the praise and rebuke
of others equal (istawā) in his eyes, attaining ideal subjectivity and becom-
ing an ʿabd āqil (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 177). Qadar is a deeply controversial
term in Islamic theology and history. It is a confusing word and can at once
mean human free will and what is often considered its opposite, divine
predetermination or predestination. My interest here is not the early
Islamic theological debates about qadar and the limits of human free will
in relation to God’s power and omnipotence. Rather, I wish to make explicit
how Muḥāsibī’s discourse (bayān) about God’s predetermining power (it
shall become clear why this is the meaning given to this concept by
Muḥāsibī here) serves as a technique for forming ʿabdī subjectivity in the
face of suggestions put forth by Satan and the person’s own nafs to hypoc-
risy, that is, the pretention to be or have what one is not and does not have.
We can think of Muḥāsibī’s narrative below as a qadar-centered discursive
strategy for overcoming one’s inner drive for the love of other’s praise, fear
of their rebuke and covetousness for the other’s possessions. Muḥāsibī
would have a person think about his predicament in the following way:
One must be well acquainted with the heart’s hypocrisy and the scattering
or frustration of the heart’s aims in desiring praise (from others) to which
there is no end because the one who works to please others does not attain it
because some of them are pleased by that which displeases others. If a person
did what some of them are pleased with, others would be displeased with
him for it and if he did what displeased some of them, it would please others.
This is so because some of them think wrong what others think excellent and
some praise him for the thing that others reproach him for. Those that the
person pleases are pleased with him and those he ignores are displeased. His
heart is fragmented and divided and his aims and purposes become numer-
ous and confused because he does not attain fully what he desires from them
(approval and praise from all and censure from none). He attains or gets
what comes to him from them (the people) with great hardship and (at the
cost of) what he leaves from God in the world and in the hereafter. These peo-
ple cannot increase, with their praise, the slave’s life-span or his sustenance.
Nor will it (i.e. their praise) bring health or protect him from trials, nor will
it repel what he hates (of life’s tribulations) of that which God has already
decreed (mimmā qaddar Allāh). As for coveting that which others possess,
he cannot get what has not been decreed for him (mā lam yuqdir lahu). If
something came to him, then what came was decreed for him (mā qaddara
lahu). If he made his servitude pure or sincere for his Lord, (then he would
understand that) that what reached him (of other’s praise, their dispraise
and of what they possess) could not but come to him. But rather he destroyed
his action and earned the anger of his Lord and lost his reward, without any
increase in his sustenance and increase in his life-term and without getting
any benefit in religion (dīn) or world more than what was already decreed for
him. So how can a reasonable person (al-ʿāqil) not abstain from what would
harm him in this world and in the hereafter without adding any benefit for
him in this worldly life? (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 175)
Similarly, a person should think the following thoughts when one finds
oneself fearing the rebuke of others such that one may be tempted to be
hypocritical and put up a show simply to avoid their censure:
As for the reproach (of people), no trial or harm befalls him except what was
decreed for him. And no reproach that was not already decreed could have
ever reached him. If he purified his actions (for God), this reproach is in fact
praise! Perhaps it was decreed or predetermined that they would belie him
in their hearts and reproach him. When he runs from their reproach, it does
not change anything about his life’s term (its longevity) or his sustenance,
nor does it reduce the life-term that the Merciful one has already decreed
for him (mā qaddarahu al-Raḥmān). (If he feared their dispraise), he would
destroy (the sincerity of) his actions without repelling the harm that comes
to him and he would not lessen (the hardships or rebuke) that are decreed or
predetermined (lā zawāl maḥzūr min al-maqdūr). As for the rebuke that was
not decreed for him, it can never afflict him. How can a reasonable person
not abstain from these three dispositions or conditions (khilāl) (i.e. the love of
praise, fear of dispraise and covetousness for other’s possessions) if he under-
stood their harm (for making his actions insincere with respect to God) and
he understood that no benefit can come to him from them in his world for the
decree of God has already settled these matters (wa innā ʾamr Allāh mafrūgh
minhu). (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 175)
I want to raise several questions about these passages. What work does talk
about God’s predetermination and decrees do in the moral life of a slave
who addresses and queries himself in the ways indicated in the passages?
What transformations to subjectivity does a qadar-centered discourse en-
able and how? And paradoxically (this paradox should not be lost on us),
what choices does the talk (or rather self-talk) about God’s predetermined
decrees ask an intelligent slave to make and omit? It should be plain that
Muḥāsibī does not invoke God’s predetermining power and prior decrees
to make an argument against human agency and choice. We should ask
what is to be gained by a person, in terms of forming himself into an ideal
moral and religious subject, through an engagement with the discourse
about divine predetermination. As such, I want to highlight one important
aspect of the narrative in the passages quoted above. We see that seeking
favorable opinions, fearing others’ dispraise, and coveting material posses-
sions that others have are presented as attitudes that are to be seen by an
intelligent slave as the cause of much psychological burden and hardship
with no real rewards. An ideal slave should then see it unnecessary to bear
such burdens, not by negating the love of praise and fear of dispraise but
by discursively associating the good (and bad) that may come one’s way
with God’s predetermined and thus unchangeable decree. To think that
God has already decreed certain goods (and undesirables) that one expe-
riences (or is deprived of) is an exercise of thought that aims to relieve the
slave from the anxiety, fatigue, and frustration that inevitably result, in
Muḥāsibī’s view, from trying to please all others (or avoid their rebuke) and
then failing in this impossible goal.
An intelligent slave tactically invokes the idea of God’s predetermina-
tion when confronted with the suggestion to be pretentious, to convince
himself that he cannot get less good, or more harm, than what God has
predetermined for him. He tries to attain, through discourse, to a stand-
point where he would see the pointlessness of seeking after others’ praise
and dreading their dispraise. To invoke qadar is a pedagogical and perfor-
mative technique that a slave uses to resist the temptation to seek after
people’s approval (and covet their possession) or to spend energy trying to
prevent being rebuked. It is to attain a stance where one sees oneself not
beholden or accountable to others but, instead, subject to the decrees of
God. It fixes the outcome of one’s choices in the agent’s mind not to negate
or constrain his choice but to empower and direct it in a direction that
relieves him of psychological burden and resists hypocrisy. It is clear then
that this is not a systematic philosophical commentary about or theory of
the nature of human agency, epistemology, or ontology. Nor is it a generic
call to completely cease all concern about what others might say or think
about one’s actions. Rather, it is best understood as an ethical (self-forma-
tive) discourse. It ought to be read as a specific discursive practice, a peda-
gogical technique of self-formation, aimed at attending to the psychological
and moral threats to one’s status before God, discursively transforming
one’s dispositions and standpoints in the right way in a given situation. In
the case of God’s qadar, the ideal slave sees certain outcomes as the result
of God’s inalterable will so that he may no longer direct his will, motiva-
tional energy, and emotional capital towards those ends. He frees up his
will and agency elsewhere to tasks and ends that he can more readily ac-
complish such as rejection of hypocrisy. One important ethical implication
of this particular view of God’s qadar is that it encourages the ideal slave
to resist and minimize the amount of influence that the opinions of others
may have on his choices. The ideal slave should thus not allow himself to
be an entirely heteronomous subject and invoke God’s qadar as a predeter-
mined consequence to justify some level of autonomy within the broader
framework of attaining subjection to God.
5. Conclusion
One may still ask: what do we stand to gain as scholars of Islamic ethics or
comparative religious ethics by retrieving medieval conceptions of Muslim
selfhood? How do these conceptions help us understand Muslim thinkers
and what might they contribute to our accounts of self and subjectivity?
Even this partial account of ideal Muḥāsibīan religious subjectivity should
make clear that such a subject cannot be thought of as a virtuous sage who
gradually develops and perfects his moral character or a mystical aspirant
who seeks or achieves unity with the divine. While not wrong, it is obvious
and thus banal to say that an ideal Muḥāsibīan subject is obedient to God
and fulfills God’s rights. Sure, an ideal slave of God must indeed aim, as a
matter of telos, to observe God’s rights inwardly and outwardly. Muḥāsibī’s
entire book, and one can say his entire corpus of extant writings, is geared
toward the goal of teaching the interlocutor how to properly observe God’s
rights. This study has shown that a Foucauldian conception of ethics, and
the study of subjectivity in CRE, can help us interpret Muḥāsibī in a more
sophisticated way and retrieve his account of ideal subjectivity. As we have
seen, Muḥāsibī does not think it is simply a matter of a singular, discrete
intention or act of will or even a series of substantive self-transformations
that would cause a person to start acting as an ideal or intelligent slave
of God. Rather, a series of discursive self-engagements is the process by
which ideal standpoints of the self are tendentiously and momentarily at-
tained if the slave thinks in the right way, invokes the proper concepts
at the right time, raises the right questions and feelings in himself and
resists (through discursive means) the suggestions to embrace vices like
hypocrisy and conceit that would compromise his status as an ideal slave
of God. How can we theorize about Muḥāsibī’s account of ideal subjectivity
(and perhaps other early Muslim accounts of subject formation) given that
traditional accounts (mystical, juridical, ascetical, or even an Aristotelian
virtue ethics account) leave unresolved puzzles and leave us dissatisfied?
Comparative religious ethicist Aaron Stalnaker has argued that contem-
porary virtue ethicists and moral philosophers tend to rehash Aristotle’s
famous distinction between skills and virtues and tend to minimize the
ethical value of skills in relation to the virtues (Stalnaker 2010). Stalnaker’s
careful analysis of early Confucian thinkers leads him to theorize three
related but distinct types of skills, each carrying moral weight. He calls
them “skills of production” (that allow for the production of beautiful and
valuable objects or things such as a fine piece of music), “skills of perfor-
mance” (social skills that allow timely and proper performance of certain
actions, e.g. performing a ritual masterfully and so on) and “processual
skills” (that are not about timing but about attending carefully to the sub-
tleties of a given situation and then drawing on some cultivated capacities
to respond in ways that manifest one or another virtue). Stalnaker thinks

of processual skills as composites of skills and virtues. He suggests that
careful attentiveness to instances of suffering develops hand in hand with
compassion toward sufferers, and the virtue of benevolence includes a strong
tendency to notice and attend to certain sorts of suffering as well as the more
usual definitional criteria regarding caring and beneficent action. (2010, 423)
This tripartite conception of composite skills (composites of skills and vir-

tues) seems quite useful for thinking about a Muḥāsibīan account of ideal
subjectivity. It leads us to fully acknowledge the moral anthropology im-
plied by the idea that any person (regardless of their current spiritual stat-
ure or past piety) can be struck by both good and bad suggestions (khaṭarāt)
at any time (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 92). An intelligent slave of God must attend
carefully to the occurrence of, and rationally examine the nature and
sources of, these suggestions (lest it accepts them without even realizing it
has done so), skillfully distinguish the good from the bad ones through the
use of intellectual capacities (tathabbut bil ʿaql) (al-Muḥāsibī 1986, 95),
mentally weigh the consequences of accepting and rejecting them, and
then display the virtue of trust (in God and God-given awareness) in refus-
ing to accept what it has identified as evil suggestions, thereby fulfilling
God’s right properly in that particular instance. It is my hope that this
Muḥāsibīan account of ideal religio-moral subjectivity, partial as it surely
is due to limits of space, and the approach modelled in this study to
pre-modern Islamic sources, can spur further thinking about a range of
issues, such as accounts of subjectivity and self-formation implicit in
pre-modern and modern Islamic sources, novel and more insightful ways of
interpreting familiar Islamic texts by attending more closely to develop-
ments in CRE, and last but not least, thinking through the ethical, social,
and political implications for Muslims (and non-Muslims) of contemporary
Muslim allegiance to one or another conception of ideal subjectivity.10
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BEING AN INTELLIGENT SLAVE OF GOD

Discursive Strategies and Subject Formation in

JRE 47.1:125–152. © 2019 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

religious subjects or slaves of God?1 What, in their view, could a person do

and Stalnaker 2012).3 CRE scholars have insightfully explored relations

Generally speaking, Islamic ethics follows what may be called a source-spe-

2010; Chiabotti, Feuillebois-Pierunek, Mayeur-Jaouen, and Patrizi 2017)

2. Of Squaring Circles: Models of Muslim

Mystic of Baghdad. Smith understands Muḥāsibī to be a mystic because

Clearly, Muḥāsibī does not see self-purification in a positive light or as a

as proposing a mystical model of ideal subjectivity. Furthermore, Moosa’s

nature of an angel (ḥattā yanqalib fa yajʿalahu ka ṭabʿ al-malāʾika). His re-

3. Foucault as a Resource for the Study of Islamic Ethics

isolated a “distinct stratum of analysis” in the study of ethics that other

It is this study of what Foucault also described as “forms of understanding

Foucault’s conception of ethics allows us to move beyond considerations

4. Discursive Strategies and ʿAbdī Subjectivity:

4.1 Barīʾa-Tawakkul strategy and ʿAbdī subjectivity

It seems to matter much to Muḥāsibī how a person understands, and re-

presented as a solution to both challenges to proper subjectivity. Let us

strategy for avoiding a foolishly high opinion of oneself, especially when

favor and help. The barīʾa-tawakkul discursive strategy is not simply a

4.2 Qadar-centered discursive strategy for overcoming the inclination to

others have in their possession (such as wealth, high status, knowledge,

to respond in ways that manifest one or another virtue). Stalnaker thinks

This tripartite conception of composite skills (composites of skills and vir-

2005 “Origins of Islamic Ethics: Foundations and Constructions.” In

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2005 “Origins of Islamic Ethics: Foundations and Constructions.” In