Reprising Islamic Political Theology: Genre and the Time of Tribulation

Contemporary Islam has long been presented as the object of modern crises (from colonialism to globalization). But the secular idiom of crisis reproduces the logic of norm and exception, continuity or closure. This essay instead briefly traces the Quranic figure of tribulation in selected Islamic genres (ethics, theology, and historiography) in order to animate another tradition of thinking the difficulty of the present. Because it resists the secular periodization of Islam even while retaining a productive relationship to history, tribulation reprises the rupture conventionally narrated in and of Islamic political theology. More generally, developing “tribulation” as an analytic term may allow for a more adequate conceptualization of the temporal architecture of Islamic forms of life. Finally, foregrounding genre in attending the temporalities of tribulation and tradition allows for methodological resonances between anthropology, psychoanalysis, and poetics.