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Gijs Kruijtzer, "Justifying Transgression: Muslims, Christians, and the Law - 1200 to 1700" (de Gruyter, 2023)
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
So good, so good, so good.
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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Imani Antar
hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Imani Antar and I thank you for listening in today. I am so pleased to welcome Dr. Gijs Kruser, whose book Justifying Transgression Muslim Christians in the law 1200-1700 is the focus of our talk today. Since obtaining a PhD in history from Leiden University, Gais Kreutzer has held postdocs at Yale University, Humboldt University and the University of Vienna and worked as a lecturer and an archivist. His latest book is Justifying Muslim Christians and the law from 1200 to 1700. In the book that we will be discussing today, our author's study is driven by a fascinating question, how do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian, Muslim and Latin Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, this book shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating and writing about proscribed practices. Through a comprehensive discussion, Dr. Kruster compares how people in these two worlds came to terms with the prescriptions of sodomy, idolatry and usury. When historians speak of the gap between pre modern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that fill this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been allowed to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in ways people came to terms with the various laws and rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds. Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake. With the help of a diversity of sources, this book will appeal to historians and non historians alike, including those without religious expertise and those unfamiliar with the law during this period. So without further delay, I would like to welcome Dr. Krister. Dr. Kluster, it's so nice to have you. Thank you for being here today. How are you doing?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yes, I'm doing great and I thank you for having me, Amani. And it's great to be here on the New Books podcast, which is something that a lot of my friends talk about, so it's very good. Yes.
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Imani Antar
Well, I'm so happy to have you here today, especially as a fellow early modern historian. It's always so wonderful to examine and kind of discuss and talk about the works of such brilliant scholars. So let's dive right in. Prior to getting to kind of the substantive discussion and analysis of your book, I wanted to begin with understanding some of the personal trajectory of the author. So how did you become interested in early modern history and particularly the Persian and Latinate worlds? Very often you find scholars who concentrate on one region in the early modern world, either Latin, Christendom or the Islamicate. But you really take on both in this study. So I guess that's kind of a two part question, how you became interested in early modern history and also how you kind of came to explore the Persian and the Latin worlds in this particular work.
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, that's interesting. So it's also a question I could ask you, of course, because you're also an early modernist. So that's something we share, but we can talk about that later. Guys, I was originally interested in industry of India broadly, and then I was in the history department at Leiden University in Netherlands. And one of the things, one of the ways to do history of South Asia was through the Dutch East India Company archives. And Those cover the 17th and 18th centuries, which is the early modern period. So then I was smack bang in the early modern period. And then I realized that there was a lot of material that was really about the South Asian courts and the people in South Asia themselves in these records. And then I also realized that I needed to learn Persian to have another source base because I love the court chronicles and the state's documents, official documents were in Persian. So I also needed to learn that. So then I, that's how I got into learning Persian. And from there I sort of came into this Persian world and from that. So yeah, then I, my, my first booker survive was back to India in the 17th century. And then for this new book, I wanted to do comparison because I like doing comparison because I'm more of a lumper than a splitter, I guess, and I like to look for the commonalities between people from different cultures. And then Europe offered itself as a point of comparison because it's so densely studied, as you know. And also dipeshakrabarti has warned us in his Provincializing Europe that in Western style academic writing it is very hard to escape any implicit comparison to the history of Europe. All studies about the Middle east and India that I know do implicitly or explicitly at some point somewhere in a narrative where they will make comparisons, running comparisons to what was going on in Europe. So I thought it was best to bring this comparison to the forefront and make it very explicit.
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Imani Antar
Yeah, that's so fascinating and so appreciated and so kind of well illustrated in your work. So thank you for that response, Ghais. So what led you to kind of specifying now, kind of what led you to your interest in researching the history of transgression? I mean, we know that of course there's ample research and studies on Islamic law, Sharia, different schools of thought, and also in the Christian world, works on canon law, the early church fathers, I mean, but there's really kind of less, I would say, in my own kind of experience on transgressive modes of behavior. So what really kind of propelled that interest?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Well, it was also started with a personal incident, as you can read in the Dakota to the book. I had a personal run in with the law in the mid-90s. It had something to do with me trying to get my luggage after hours from a locker at the central station here somewhere. I Don't want to go into these details now because it's a bit of a story, but it got me thinking about the various ways of interpreting rules. And that, again, made me think of what I already knew about Persian poetry in which the description of transgression, or near transgression, almost transgression, is such a key figure already from the Middle Ages onwards and Even through the 19th century and up to today. For instance, even somebody like Khomeini, famous of the Iranian Revolution, does a bit of poetry where he is sort of dallying with transgression. A little bit, of course, not very, very heavily, but a little bit. And I was then, and I'm still a great fan of the work of the 14th century poet Hafiz, who is a master of taunting those who saw themselves as the guardians of divine law.
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Imani Antar
Yeah, that's so interesting. Thank you, Ghais. That's just. It's always really wonderful, I think, when. And I think very, you know, it makes a work kind of that much more profound when sometimes a part of it is coming from a personal incident. So I think that that's really interesting that you mentioned that.
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah.
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Imani Antar
So you have kind of these four categories that kind of structure your analysis in conceptualizing transgression and how individuals went about justifying prescribed acts, circumvention, exception, compensation, and stridency. So can you really kind of elaborate on these modes of analysis for listeners and how they effectively elucidate the processes of transgression in the early modern period?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, so I do work with these four categories because they. They do this, indeed, elucidate how transgression was presented by the transgressor and by those around them. I took a cue here from Pierre Bourdieu, who has pointed out that it makes a great difference to societies with what intention one breaks the rules. The question is also who decided that an act was transgressive? These are two important points. But maybe I should go briefly over those four categories, not to spend too much time on them, but just very briefly outline them in one or two sentences. So in stridency, this is one of my categories. The transgressor openly breaks a rule, and he opposes the system that upholds the rule as well. Or he purposely. Yeah, he purposely breaks the rule to oppose that system. In the Persian world, this could be part of a lifestyle that was often called rendi. And for a while there was also such a lifestyle in the Latin world, which is called libertinage. And then the second category is compensation. This is the Breaking of a rule without any attempt to hide that fact, but with an attempt to placate the upholders of the moral legal system of which the rule was a part. And they would do this through paying a fine, doing penance, showing remorse, et cetera. This was also very much what Jerry was talking about. In circumvention, the perceived intention of the transgressor is to break the rule as others see it. There is a divergence between the norm of adhering to the rule and the intention of not adhering. Circumvention does not aim to contest the rule. And then there's exception. This kind of takes the rule to a higher level of abstraction by relating it to certain principles. The ruler, the rulemaker, sorry, the rule breaker becomes a rule maker in his own right, actually, in this case. So these are the four categories and they are important for structuring the comparison. But at the same time, I don't want to reify them too much because there were many shades between. There are many, many shades of action that seem to fall somewhere between these categories. Or sometimes they had aspects of two of these categories. For instance, in homoerotic poetry, one could on the one hand, circumvented law by pretending that the forbidden act was not engaged in. But on the other hand, there could be sort of a strident rejection of the right of the self appointed guardians of divine law to tell the poet off for what he was not doing. But it looked like he was doing it, but he was sort of pretending, half pretending not to be doing it. So this is sort of in between circumvention and stridency. And there was also much ambiguity on the level the individual, which again gave rise to ambivalence on the level of the community, I think.
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Imani Antar
Yeah, thank you, Ghais. And that really brings me to the next question, which I think is really kind of fascinating, is that kind of notion of ambivalence. It's in many ways kind of a notion that I think would really resonate with modern day readers and even kind of people who identify with a certain type of faith or confession. In my estimation, many people from religious traditions approach the religiosity, I think contemporaneously and also maybe historically with that same kind of ambivalence that is kind of a recurring theme throughout your work. It's even theorized in some ways by Stuart Schwartz, who argues in his all can be saved. And you also turn to his work. I mean, you, you cited that communities were far less rigid in their religious interpretations. Than hitherto acknowledged. So how does. I mean, you kind of. You alluded to it just now. How does ambivalence characterize religious praxis for some in this period? And how is it really integrated into the religious landscape of. Of this era?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, well, first of all, but you mentioned Stuart Schwartz. I do tie in with his arguments where he detects some skeptical attitudes in rustic folks. Rustic, quote unquote. They were designated by the people who are persecuting them as rustic sometimes in the 16th century Iberian Peninsula. And he finds some very skeptical attitudes with them and also tolerant attitudes. And just like Schwartz, I try to find out how the Dr. Trends laid down by the authoritative writers of the age went down with the common people, as difficult as it is to find traces of that thinking. And then. Yeah, you mentioned the ambivalence. I think it's important to make a distinction between ambivalence and ambiguity. Ambivalence is located in the. Sorry, ambiguity. Let's start with ambiguity. Ambiguity is located in expressions and can give rise to multiple interpretations. Ambivalence is located in the mind of the individual or the collective consciousness of a community. When a person makes an ambiguous expression, it does not necessarily mean that they are ambivalent. I think. I think, yeah, sorry, this is a bit. So a bit of a distinction. And it can also mean that they're quite set on one interpretation, actually, that they have in mind the preferred interpretation of their expression. But they leave it. Well, they leave it ambiguous for people who may not share their view and to stay away from the controversial interpretation. I tried to show this for some cases, especially this chapter on justifying sodomy, where I use evidence about the lives of certain artists to get at the question of what would have been their preferred reading of their own ambiguous works. So I tried to show that they did have a preferred reading. But what this ambiguity does point to is an ambivalence on the level of the community. Some in the community were putting in the direction of strict interpretations and some in the community were pulling into direction of flexible interpretations of divine law. And this, yeah, the community level, this created a great ambivalence, I think. But yeah, ambivalence on the individual level, it's much harder to establish. I see some cases of it in my work, but the ambivalence that comes out my work is more about the community level.
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Imani Antar
yeah, thank you G. And that's such a really interesting distinction is that between ambiguity and ambivalence. So I appreciate you kind of explaining that. It's just, yeah, very interesting. And also that dynamic of course between the personal and the communal kind of dimension. So moving on to kind of the geographic parameters of the book, the foci of your of your study is in the Persian world and Latin Christendom broadly. So defining the Persian world seems to be more complicated than for example, the defining of kind of the parameters of Latin Christendom. So what really can you kind of explain to us what's the language of exchange, the language of administration? And why in your expertise is the Persian world less defined. And how does your book kind of elucidate this further?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yes, it's very good to clarify this a little bit for the listener because we kind of jumped right into things. But I mean, now we sort of need to delineate things a little bit. So what I mean by the Persian world is the. Is Iran, current day Iran, present day Iran and Central Asia and South Asia. And it's. It's actually more correct as you. Whereas using the term Persianate is more. Would be more correct than Persian because not everybody there was Persian, but they were using Persian language and expressions and Persianate culture. But I chose, in the book, I chose to just call it Persian World because I didn't want to scare away readers who might find that a bit cumbersome and just sort of. It's a bit academic. And then the other hand at the Latinate world, and that's Western and Central Europe. Yeah. A lot has been written about the definition of the Persian world, Persianate world. It's almost. Some people like to define it by the soft power of Persian and then it's. They look at Persian as the. The language of exchange. So and then it becomes a very, very broad then because really big region and it goes into western China, well, like Xinjiang, Art of presentation, Zhang, Ottoman Empire, even up to the Balkan can even go up to the Balkans. So. But I chose a bit narrower distinction, a bit narrower definition, which looks at the hard power also. And that was where the language. The places where it was used as a language administration. But there is. Yeah, there are different schools and there's a bit of a. Quite a bit of a debate about how it should be fined, et cetera. Uh, and then there are also people saying, was it a thing anyway, because Arabic was also important throughout this world because it was also the language actually of juridical dis. Some of most of juridical discourse was actually in Arabic and theology also. Often. So people are saying like, well, shouldn't we just consider one Muslim world and not divide it into Persian, Arabic, et cetera, worlds? And then Latin, the Latin Christendom, the Latin world. It is. Yeah, it is much more commonly used. Yeah, region, because it's. Yeah, there the right of the Latin Church coincides with also the use of Latin as an official language. In any case, in the Middle Ages, although of course also Middle Ages differentiators start to be used more. So it is more easy to define Latin worlds because sort of there the religious discourse and the power discourses sort of coincide as what's as far as Latin is concerned anyway. But I don't really have a stake in this debate about how to define these two worlds. I just needed to define them in some way that I could start my comparison. And I must admit that I wanted to keep the Persian world a little bit narrow because otherwise there would be no end to my research. Really. Yeah.
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Imani Antar
Thank you, Ghais. And that's, yeah, it's important that, yeah, there's, I mean, you know, it's, it can be handled in some way. I mean, the research that you already approached is, and that you utilize is very vast. So, so that's, thank you for that. So now kind of moving to the kind of more core of your work. In one of your chapters and you kind of, you explained Hafiz's poetry is something that has profound, profoundly kind of impacted you. So in a passage from one of your chapters, you begin with this kind of, with Hafiz's poetry. And I'm just going to quote the excerpt. You say, well, Hafiz says, bring wine into Hafez's hand. Give first on condition that word does not go from the circle of friends to the door. So this is from his Dyn. So how does this really encapsulate some of the substantive features of this study or kind of the tenor of the period in some ways? And why, I mean, did you find this quote revelatory?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, this quote, think it is a very nice quote of my favorite poet indeed. And I think it highlights two important strands that came out in the research for this book. First of all is that there was a separation of private and public spaces, which goes back much further than we or some historians think that often historians think it goes back to the only to the 18th century or so. But we see it in the Muslim world, we see it going back much further and we see it very explicitly already with thinkers like the 11th century Al Ghazali, who very explicitly says, like, you should not really cross the doorstep of a place to investigate if somebody is transgressing the law, et cetera. And I don't know if Ghazali says that, but. Yeah, no, he does say, for instance, that you should not go into a bathhouse, for instance, to take images out, for instance, if you're against idolatry. And but some theoreticians of that period in NK said it already. And then you see it also coming, especially in the post Reformation Europe, you also see that boundary of the home coming up as an important boundary for enforcing laws, especially also, again, the law on idolatry. So people can be have their idols at home about what the Protestants considered idols, but Catholics considered images of saints, etc. Anyway, but that people in their Protestant lands could have those at home and then be left in peace with them. And yeah, you also see that in the Persian world that's very strong. So that's one. This distinction between private and public spheres is very important. And then there's another distinction that I see coming out of a lot of the literature is that between sort of circles of people who consider themselves elect or enlightened in a way. So there were a lot of transgressive poets in both Persian worlds and later on, from the 16th century, 16th century onwards, also in the Latin world, describing all sorts of transgressive behaviors. But they were sort of saying, like, you should keep it from the common folk. This is only for our people in our elect circles. And you see this is very recurrent this, and you even see it among people who are quite stern, actually, in the interpretation of divine law. But then they say, like, well, you know, the elect people, maybe they can do a little bit more and they can go a little bit further in certain practices, etc. So this is another distinction we see coming up. So because Hafiz, in this quote that he gave, he mentions the circle friends, the Manchlis, which was very important. So you were keeping things in this Majlis gathering.
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Imani Antar
Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, that kind of distinction between kind of the common folk and the elect. And also the fact that I think this would be very surprising for contemporary readers to. To distinguish and to see that that distinguishment, that that distinction was made. And so I think that's really, really fascinating. Thank you, Ghais. So you, I. I want to know, or you can kind of explain to listeners what are the Alamgirian. Sorry, and you'll have to forgive my pronunciation, the Alamgirian rulings. And how did they reveal so much about the legal territory of this period?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, thank you. So the actual title, which is mostly given in Persian, is the Fatari Alamgiri, which I translated as Alamgirian rulings, the rulings of the Emperor Alamgir. And it's actually written in Arabic, this work, but the title is mostly given in Persian. And yeah, there's some debate on. On what it actually is, actually. I know quite a few scholars are interested in this. What actually is it? Is it a code of Rusch to be seen as a codification of the sort of the rules as they were set by the Hanafite School of Law, which is the Hanafi School of Law, was the school, one of the four schools of law. And this was the school that was prevalent in the Persian world. Or should we see it as just fatwas? Which is. Fatwas are what they call in Jewish students, they call it responsa. It's basically answers to questions from laypeople. Lay people would come like, can I do this on that occasion? Or in this situation, can I do this? Or can I do that? And then all things related to the injunctions of divine law and what one could do in certain situations and in situations where it got complicated. And so the Alamedian rulings, they contain only the second part of the fatmas, basically. They don't contain the question parts, but they contain answers that scholars gave for certain situations. And there is a sort of dynamic in the work that sort of doesn't put all these rulings by all these centuries of scholars on the same footing. They sort of try to hierarchize them. So they sort of try to say, like, this is what we prefer. But there are also these and these and these other opinions. So they do leave the divergent opinions. They do leave them in, but they sort of give their own preference. So in that way, it was sort of a drive to unify what people should do, which and especially judges should do with Sharia law if somebody came to court. Yeah. And it's mainly based on what jurisprudes scholars of Sharia law said in Central Asia and in South Asia. But there is a few cases that come from outside Central Asia. There's, for instance, one scholar who's quoted about the punishment for sodomy, I think, and that's somebody from Egypt. Hanafide scholar from Egypt. And. But on the whole, it's all these great men from the Central Asian and South Asian tradition of Hanafi jurisprudence.
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Imani Antar
Yeah, thank you, Ghayz. That's fascinating. I actually hadn't even come across them before, so I really was interested to hear about them throughout the book. So my next question, I wanted to ask you about transgression. I mean, this is kind of related to the question on Hafiz that we began with. How is transgression related to poetry in this period? And this is also someone who. I mean, I am. I mean, I just love poetry. I love writing poetry, I love reading about poetry. So this is kind of inspired by that quest, by that personal passion. So what does this tell us of kind of the porous boundaries between the creative realm of literary discourse and also its impact on Religious praxis.
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah. So a key argument of the book is that the discourse of jurists and theologians about divine law was not so far removed from daily practice as some scholars of the periods. Some scholars who study the periods have suggested. They often suggest that people weren't really aware that they were doing all kinds of stuff, but they weren't really aware that it was forbidden in canon law or in Sharia, for instance, and that they were just going heads, oblivious to what was happening in the realm of all these jurisprudes who were just arguing among themselves. So I argue very much against that. I'm making clear that people were very much aware very often of the discourses of the theologians and the jurists about divine law, but that they were making all kinds of justifications to. Yeah. To make it palatable for themselves and others, what they were doing. And so poetry is one of the domains in which these two realms come together so that they practice people would want to do something, but they notice it's forbidden, and they bring together this tension in the poem. I see that in a lot of these. This poetry in the Persian world, and we also see it in the 16th, 17th century, also in some poetry in the Latin world. So that's one thing that poetry does, and the other thing poetry does, it was also a space where one could explore transgression in an ambiguous way. So while the example I already gave. So people could sort of pretend to be doing something and. Or they could sort of hint at doing something, but then pretended they were not really doing it, so that in that way they could explore the tension that divine law created in the lives of people who wanted to do the things that were forbidden. And in the Persian world, poets often saw themselves as contestants for the soul of Shariya. So they really saw themselves in competition with the theologians and the jurists of Sharia for defining what Sharia was exactly and how it should be interpreted, and they very much thought it should be viewed by the spirit. Well, what Within. Yeah, in the. In the Latin world, we have come to call the spirit of the law. So they were very much in favor of that. And in the Latin world, we also see a little bit of that. For instance, we see that Theophile de Viau, in the early 17th century France, he was characterized by one of his detractors as someone who saw himself as a grand legislator, quote unquote. So. So he was really accused of precisely what a lot of poets, yeah. Seemed to be doing, which was arrogating to themselves to the mantle of the jurisprud
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Imani Antar
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that so much. And I mean, just even that kind of notion of poets as contestants with theologians I think is just really fascinating. And I think that even, you know, listeners or kind of contemporary readers of your work might not actually recognize when you think of kind of early modern, the early modern historical landscape, that kind of sophistication, because people tend to, I think, really kind of see religious practitioners as very kind of monolithic in their. In their search kind of for self.
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah.
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Imani Antar
Yeah. Thank you, Ghais. So in this study, I think the use of artwork is used as kind of a critical historical source. And I think this is maybe kind of similar to your other book on xenophobia in 17th century India, where you integrated the use of miniature paintings and stone reliefs in your research. So in this case, how is the discourse around artwork distinct from that of textual sources? In what ways does it amplify some of the themes of your work more poignantly than perhaps kind of legal texts?
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Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, thanks. That's a very good question. So in my view, there are two kinds of art historians. I hope they will not take this very unfavorably. But there's one kind of art historian who is very much like, well, you can't really know what the intention of the maker of the work was and what it wants to express, etc. And then there's another strands of art historians who are much more open to iconography and even iconology, really going very far in interpreting what the artwork wants to tell us about the world and the ways of living, et cetera. And I cite some. The artist from inside cites are mostly those who are very free in. Or they go quite far in interpreting, for instance, Eba Koch for the Persian world and Angela Van Halen for Dutch art, Netherlandish arts. And so I'm a fan of going a bit further in this interpretation and especially for the chapter on the justification of what some deem to be idolatry. The visual arts were very important source because they were the expression of artists who were also the people who were often bore the brunt of the argument that they were making about or that they were making idols. So, I mean, these artists, they were the very people who got accused of making idols. And I found quite a few instances, I think, where artists were making a point in their paintings or their sculptures about why their work was acceptable and should not be considered idolatrous. And so that's where it came in especially. But I also use it in other chapters a little bit. Yeah, I don't want to make too much of this as a methodology. I think. I think we should just try to be a little bit more open to sort of strong interpretations of artwork.
- [42:38]
Imani Antar
Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, I think that that's really especially for historians that concentrate exclusively on textual works. I think that that's kind of refreshing to kind of open ourselves to the possibility of exploring kind of different sources in our work. So I thank you for. So in your. You have this kind of section where you explore idolatry within these kind of four categories, again, of analysis, and you explore how Muslims in South Asia in this period employed Sharia, suffused language to justify the continuing. A continuing function of temples. So how was this done? If you could kind of let our listeners know? I think it's really interesting.
- [43:23]
Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, it was very much done in various steps and various ways. The first step was to equate temples with churches and synagogues of the people of the Book, because the people of the Book were the Jews and the Christians, and they were already, from the early days of Islam, seen as people who deserved protection. And so if people who worshiped in temples, the Hindus of South Asia especially, could be equated to them, then they also deserved protection along with their temples. But this protection came with the need for compensation. So there my category of compensation comes in because the protected status depended on payment of the jizya, the poll tax for non Muslims. And there were also some other special taxes that were, in some cases, like pilgrimage taxes that were sometimes linked to this. So that's one important mechanism through which temples, the continued usage of temples in South Asia was allowed in South Asia under the Muslim rulers. And then there was also another mechanism which was to make a distinction between old and new temples. So sometimes some rulers and jurispruds said we should make a distinction between there's. It's not allowed to build new temples, but people can keep their old temples, old temples can stay. So that was another mechanism through which temples were allowed to exist. Well, of course, I mean, historians will say, of course, of course, because otherwise they couldn't have ruled South Asia, Muslims, Muslim monarchs. But in any case, these were the sort of justifications that theologians came up with or scholars of Sharia law came up with to support the rule of these Muslim monarchs in South Asia.
- [45:45]
Imani Antar
Thank you, Ghais. Yeah, that's really interesting. So in your section on idolatry, you explore how authorities in both the Latinic and Persian world focused on, I mean, the role and position of images. I mean, I think you can see that I was very interested in this chapter. I mean, just the whole concept of idolatry and whether they pertain to the public or the private sphere and where they were in fact, serving as objects of veneration. And I think that this is really a fascinating point since, I mean, many would kind of see this as just, you know, antithetical to Islamic praxis historically and contemporaneously. So, for example, you explore how rafiyaddin Shirazi in 16th century describes these cave temples as secular monuments and that he actually admired the workmanship of these temples and he criticized his predecessor for destroying these temples. So in doing so, I think that you kind of argue that he evacuated idol from its meaning of unbelief and imbricated it with kind of a new meaning of art and workmanship. So I just wanted to ask if this is kind of a recurring strategy. I don't know if I characterized it properly, but that was kind of how I read that.
- [47:05]
Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah. So there are various mechanisms at work here. There is this distinction between art and an idol, which is, by scholars of European history, often seen as something that arises in Europe after the Reformation when people start to take paintings out of the church and putting them in secular spaces. But we see it also in the context in the Islamic world, especially where the placement of Images was already very important much earlier. Like if you had images in a book. So that's why miniature painting is such an important art. If you had them in a book, they were not in a position where they could be adored or venerated, so that was completely fine. But if you were to put them on the wall in a vertical position, then they were in a position where an idol could be. And that was problematic. And a lot of. And especially if they were in the line of vision when you were doing prayer. So there's a lot of. Quite a few jurists had written about this and. Yeah, so that's. But we see this. This is. Yeah, it's definitely. I see this as a parallel development instead of this emphasis on placement on the end, on the one hand, which was also important in Reformation Europe, where images were placed outside the church. And then this emphasis on appreciating images as art. Yeah, we see this in both. I think we see this arising in both regions over this period. And then there's this whole Neoplatonic distinction between the internal and the external, where people made the argument, and very much also in both worlds, because both worlds were influenced by Neoplatonic thoughts, where people made this distinction between what you do. With the meaning of the image and what you do with its exterior presentation. And there was a lot of people were making the claim both about idols in Hindu temples, but also about what the Protestants considered idols in Catholic churches, that they were. People were only. Were not venerating the image in itself, but what the image refer to the sort of the internal meaning of the sculpture.
- [50:06]
Imani Antar
Yeah, that's so interesting. I really appreciate that response. Thank you, Ghais. So I'm just going to. I mean, you've been so generous with your time, so I don't want to take too much of it. So I'm just going to kind of move to some just kind of closing remarks on this really wonderful study. So I was kind of. I looked at a review of your work and they were. They provided this very insightful comment on the enduring relevance and the contemporary implications of your study. And I wanted to highlight this. I mean, the review explains how your study dismantles the perception that the west was this pure expression of European Christian or Judeo Christian culture, but rather constitutes a manifestation of an Abrahamic cultural sphere that included Dar al Islam and is therefore as much African and West Asian as European and which had in the pre modern era, the Mediterranean at its vital center. So, I mean, I wanted to kind of hear what you thought about that kind of assessment of your work. And also I wanted to know if this was kind of like an organic product of the research that you. You carried out yourself when you kind of.
- [51:13]
Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, yeah, great question. So I think this is. A lot of scholars have already pointed to this, that this is really one world. For instance, David Nirenberg, with whose work you are familiar, because we just talked about it, who worked on Spain in the Middle Ages. He talks about. When he talks about the Western tradition, he means Christianity, Judaism and Islam as the Western tradition. So a lot of people have already seen that this is why really one tradition. So that's not so new. But it's very important for my comparison because it. Because it's sort of. Because they're coming from one origin. All these divine law prescriptions are coming from one source, sort of. I think that makes it easier to compare these two worlds. And then there's another strand that is shared is the heritage of Greek philosophy and especially Neoplatonism. And this is something that's been worked on a lot by Jos Omans, for instance, who was my professor at Leiden University. So that's also something that other people have worked in. But what I think is new in my work is that. And something that I also find surprising is that the justifications that come up in relation to divine law were also very similar, if not exactly the same, in some cases, were exactly the same. Just to mention an example from the chapter on usury, which we haven't mentioned so far, but there's one chapter on usury and the taking of interest on loans, for instance. What people did in medieval Europe as well as in the medieval Persian world, was dressing a sale loan up as a sale. So making a sale. Sorry, making a loan look like a sale. And in that way they could claim that they were not really taking interest, but it was a profit on the sale. So in that way they could disguise it. Goes a bit too far to explain all the details now, but it's very complicated construction. A lot of very complicated construction. But they're very. Yeah, practically. Yeah. Really exactly the same between the Persian worlds and the Latin world. Yeah, yeah.
- [53:37]
Imani Antar
That's so, so interesting. I mean, I have a lot more to say about that, but I'll save it for later. It just. It's fascinating.
- [53:45]
Commercial Announcer
So my last.
- [53:46]
Imani Antar
Yeah, I have two last questions and then I will let you get on with your day and just. I appreciate your time so much. Ghais. There's. I think there's this kind of. Kind of. I mean, I would interpret it and characterize it as a kind of ingenuity, inventiveness, related to the ways in which transgression can be accomplished and kind of successfully deployed, how conventions are thwarted. I think that would be just really surprising for people who are less familiar, I think, with the early modern period. So I wanted to know if you kind of agree with this assessment or what your thoughts are.
- [54:25]
Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, this is also something that surprised me, that there's this endless creativity, riffing of certain themes about the internal and the external or about the ways one could disguise things or claim or redefine things. There were endless ways, or there were endless ways in which people were able to do that. Well, not endless. They were always riffing of a few, found a few points that they could attach their reasoning to, but then they sort of created endless different strands of reasoning to get out from under certain prescriptions. Yeah, I agree with you.
- [55:15]
Imani Antar
Yeah, thank you, Ghais, for that response. And so now kind of we've looked at this really fascinating work and I appreciate your time. And I just wanted to know, I mean, what's next for you? Other projects that are on the horizon? What can we look forward to?
- [55:33]
Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Yeah, thanks for. Thanks for asking that. I have projects on the horizon. So one of the core arguments of this book was that justifications are cumulative, so they build on each other. So all these de. Endless variations that we just spoke about, they continue to build on each other. And at some point, certainly justifications get discarded. Some people say, like, okay, well, you know, yeah, you're claiming that, but nobody's going to believe that anymore. This is, for instance. For instance, this went for the. The Neoplatonic conception of homoeroticism in Italy in the 16th century, for instance, people were. Poet, poets were claiming that they were only interested in boys for their. As a spiritual object, et cetera. But. But at some point, nobody believed that anymore. They were like, there. This is really just carnal desire, plain and simple. So we see that some of these justifications, at some point, they don't work anymore. But one justification that we see rising and rising way of justifying that we see rising and rising through this period was consequentialism, looking at the ethical and moral and legal dilemmas by their outcomes, judging them by their outcomes, rather than by saying that something was inherently good or evil, saying that you should look at the outcome. And we see this already with Hafiz, and we also see it rising in the Latin world. We see this becoming more and more important, this way of reasoning. And this is what I want to develop in my next project. I'm actually even thinking of. Well, I'm starting with articles, but I'm even thinking of making a sort of a global history of consequentialism, because there are some scholars of European history who claim that it's a European invention of the 17th or 18th century. Of course, it depends if you see consequentialism as a doctrine or just a mode of reasoning. You can make a distinction between that, maybe. But if you see it as a mode of reasoning, I think it goes way back to millennia before Christ. Maybe we can even find it in the ancient Indian Rig Veda. So I want to write a global history of that just to show how broadly this was shared, but also to show that it was something that has become more important towards the closer we come to modernity. And it was also, I think, the divine law of the Western tradition of Islam, Christendom and Judaism did sort of, sort of spur on this consequentialism because there was. Yeah, there was. There was so many. There's so many rules that one could argue against or about in this context. Yeah. So that's going to be my new project.
- [58:57]
Imani Antar
Well, thank you, Ghais. Well, I look forward to hearing more about that and seeing the fruition of that work. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and talking about this, this wonderful book. And we appreciate it so much.
- [59:12]
Dr. Gijs Kruuser
Thank you. Great. Thank you for having me. And I would like to ask you some more about your poetry and your Ahuna work on the early modern periods.
- [59:20]
Imani Antar
Yeah, we'll leave that for another.