Sufi Deleuze (eBook)

"e;There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion,"e; Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity "e;secretes"e; atheism "e;more than any other religion,"e; however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze's atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam s historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze s model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable lines of flight. A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal Islamic theology that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of orthodoxy. The discussions in Sufi Deleuze thus highlight Islam s extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular mainstream interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze s vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome.