The Semiotics of Pious Reform and Insurgent Historiographies in Early Islam

Early Islamic narratives of the emergence and growth of the Muslim umma or “community” understood those events as the consequences of a reform of Arab society initiated by the Prophet Muhammad’s revelation, and manifested in the character of individual members of the Prophet’s community. The purified souls of these early Muslims were recalled to have announced themselves in the modes of piety adopted by these reformed Arabs, which included such familiar late ancient expressions of devotion as fasting, weeping, and seeking martyrdom. In many ways, then, the early Muslim umma understood its early history as that of a “reform movement.” In contrast to many other medieval “reform movements,” however, this movement was an imagined project of communal self-fashioning cast into the past, rather than one projected into the future, and the moment from which normative Muslim texts of the first centuries after the hijra imagined this process of reform was understood as an ideal telos to which reform had led, rather than a fallen present from which reform represented an ideal road forward. As is true of many normativizing texts, however, these second/eighth- and third/ninth-century Muslim narrations of the reforming past seem to have carried within them traces of counter discourses and insurgent narratives. These narratives haunt the texts of early Muslim histories, and legal texts, in the guise of the Kharijites, sub-communities of violently dissident and flamboyantly ascetic Muslim men and women. In these texts, Kharijite figures are invoked to articulate counter-narratives of the past and present, and the place of reform in both of these. In these texts, a ecumenical late ancient semiotic of pious reform worked to counter and upend normativizing projects of the late Umayyad and early Abbasid ‘ulama’, and lent its power to counter narratives and insurgent discourses.