Modern Sufis and the State, edited by Katherine Pratt Ewing and Rosemary R. Corbett (introduction)

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Introduction Sufis and the State: The Politics of Islam in South Asia and Beyond

Katherine Pratt Ewing

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hen we, as a public living at this particular historical moment, ask, “What is Sufism? Is Sufism part of Islam? What is the relationship between Sufism and the modern state?” our concerns have been largely shaped by a pervasive, globalized media-­and policy-­driven discourse about how Sufis might save the world from intolerant forms of Islam.

Sufism, usually understood today to mean the mystical side of Islam, has been swept up into globalized debates that are increasingly framed as an opposition between “Sufis” and “Salafis.”1 Policy makers within the American government and in many countries with large Muslim populations have promoted Sufism and popular traditions associated with local shrines in an effort to discourage the spread of Islamists who may be prone to violence. A rhetorical chasm has developed between something that has come to be called Salafi, or “fundamentalist,” Islam and Sufism, and this chasm has come to shape the understandings and practices of Muslims themselves. Sufism has undergone a reification in recent years that has transformed local practices into a new kind of cultural, religious, and political object, understood as a vestige of local culture and tradition that can be preserved and revived, much as the colonialism and Orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth century turned Sufism into something quite different from what it had been during the time of the great Muslim empires.

Within the world of South Asian Sufism today, perhaps the most dramatic phenomenon we have seen in recent years is a series of violent attacks against the shrines of Sufi saints, especially in Pakistan, but also in India. While the destruction of shrines certainly has precedent in other parts of the Muslim

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world, especially in connection with the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia beginning in the eighteenth century, this is something new in South Asia.

There is a sense among many Muslims that Sufism, however imagined, is beyond the pale of true Islam—­a kind of “Sufiphobia” among Muslims themselves. In some circles this discursive process has gone so far as to split Sufism from Islam, a split that has led various reformist thinkers to recast earlier Islamic reformers as anti-­Sufi, reshaping the past to create historically deep intellectual lineages for their own reformist projects. As Itzchak Weismann has noted, “the fundamentalists’ critique of Sufism as backward, superstitious, and apolitical involved the collective forgetting of the leading role that Sufi reformist brotherhoods had filled in premodern Islam.”2 We explore in this volume how and why this polarization has happened, how this dynamic is playing out in South Asia, and what the consequences of current public representations and their politics are for both Sufis and the shape and direction of Islam today.

The contributors to this volume were brought together for the workshop “Rethinking Islam, Democracy, and Identity in South Asia: The Role of Sufism,” held under the auspices of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University in September 2015 and funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The workshop was part of a research project, “Sufi Islam in 21st Century Politics,” itself part of a larger project, “Religious Toleration and Plural Democracies.”3 The broader Luce project aimed to better understand the political theologies of secular and religious leaders, asking what forces promote a discourse of democracy, inclusion, and toleration and foregrounding localized practices of accommodation and coexistence that could be found at shared sacred sites. The overall plan for the Sufi component of the project was to ask what has made Sufism successful and effective at managing religious pluralism and ethnic diversity in various parts of the world, a question that is consistent with the goals of a number of foundations and granting agencies over the years to promote democracy and modernize Islamic societies.

Though springing from this rather problematically conceptualized agenda, the present volume and the workshop out of which it emerged have had a different aim. Instead of contributing to an ongoing effort to spread the good news about what practices seem to work to promote democracy and toleration, workshop participants were asked to consider what might be the effects and unintended consequences of policy-­driven efforts to link Sufism with the propagation of peace, democracy, and toleration and to consider what role scholars and governments have played in shaping what Sufism has become in the twenty-­first century. The chapters challenge three common assumptions

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that are made about Sufism in public discourse today: (1) that Sufism is peaceful and apolitical; (2) that Islamic reform and Sufism are antithetical; and (3) that shrines are sites of harmony and toleration. They consider the effects of these assumptions on what “Sufism” is becoming in India and Pakistan and offer specific analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements. The volume also foregrounds differences in the political environments of Pakistan and India and the effects of these environments on Sufi political action and self-­representations, connecting Islamic rituals, sacred spaces, and theological debates to national and global issues of power, profit, and violence.

The Emergence of “Sufism” in the Colonial Period “Sufism” is an aspect of Islam that has been particularly subject to the effects of a European gaze and government policies involving the close intertwining of scholarship and public discourse since the beginning of the colonial era.

This history has played an important role in shaping how Sufism is imagined and practiced today. As a category, “Sufism” was first coined by British Orientalist scholars working primarily in colonial India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was one of an array of “isms” taxonomically subsumed under the category of “religions.”4 The term “Sufi” emerged as early as the eighth century to designate a fringe group of ascetics, and much of what is now designated as Sufism, or taṣawwuf, had become an important aspect of Islamic practice and education by the tenth century.5 Nevertheless, these Arabic terms were part of a conceptual map very different from the Orientalist classification scheme associated with “Sufism,” and there was no single label that was consistently used to refer to ascetics, mystics, “friends” of God, and those who belonged to the ṭarīqahs, or Sufi orders. In his commentary on part 1 of the present volume, Carl Ernst traces the Orientalist process of category formation and its implications for current scholarship.

In the South Asian colonial landscape, the concept of “Sufism” in Orientalist sources was founded on at least two conceptual splits that helped shape Sufism’s boundaries and its relationship to Islam. Though most Muslims, including the ulama, were also Sufis or followers of Sufis, Sufism was imagined by colonial observers as having origins separate from Islam, as having roots elsewhere—­such as Aryan Persia—­apart from the Semitic environment that produced the Prophet Muḥammad, the Quran, and the institutional beginnings of Islam. Reflecting Protestant Christian understandings of

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religion, the concept of Sufism as a form of mysticism stemming from the individual’s relationship with God was split off from legalistic Islam in the writings of late eighteenth-­century and early nineteenth-­century scholars associated with the East India Company,6 a distinction that continued to appear in the work of twentieth-­century scholars of South Asia and Islam who played an influential role in shaping scholarship on Sufism in the American academy.7 A second split was the bifurcation in nineteenth-­century writings between, on the one hand, the Sufi as mystic and producer of poetry and other literature to be deciphered and translated by the Orientalist scholar and, on the other hand, the pīr as the living holy man who was studied by colonial anthropologists/administrators and monitored as either a dangerous wanderer, a corrupt hereditary descendant of a Sufi ensconced at a shrine, or a charlatan purveyor of talismans and superstition, described in publications like colonial government-­produced gazetteers and the late nineteenth-­century periodical Panjab Notes and Queries, which focused on popular religion and folklore.8 Within colonial settings, “the Oriental was either common in spirit but distant in time or of a common era but distant in space and culture, in either case denied the status of “modern.”9 Regardless of the vicissitudes of how differences between Sufism and Islam or between Sufism and popular practice were characterized by various nineteenth-­century writers—­whether Sufism was “good” in its sophisticated mystical inspiration and Islam was “bad” because of its legalism, or the inverse, in which Sufism was “bad” because of its ties to superstitious rituals and Islam was “good” because of its rationality and strict monotheism—­it was the split itself and its political and rhetorical force in the colonial environment that was to be crucially significant for the subsequent evolution of Sufism/taṣawwuf.

Echoes of this split can be heard in postcolonial Islamic reformist writings that distance themselves from Sufism. Muhammad Iqbal, for example, drew inspiration from Sufi poets such as Jalāl al-­Dīn Rūmī (1207–­73), yet he also denounced “Persian mysticism” based on a spiritual aristocracy of saints that was manifest in the institution of pīrī-­murīdī, which he felt contributed to the thralldom of the people.10 Echoes of the split of Sufism as mystical philosophy from local practices associated with shrine networks are still readily visible in the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship even today. Thus, Rex O’Fahey and Bernd Radtke have pointed out that though “Sufism” is “a term used indiscriminately to describe both the complex thought of Ibn ʿArabī and the variegations of popular Islam,” there is still a disciplinary divide between scholars of medieval Islam who study Sufism as mystical philosophy and anthropologists and

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historians of modern Islam, who assume that postclassical Sufism “can be dealt with simply as a set of symbols, litanies, prayers, miracles, tomb visitations and the like, the paraphernalia of maraboutic credulity.”11 In everyday conversations about Sufis/pīrs that I participated in during the 1970s and 1980s in Pakistan, many people did not recognize pīrs or shrines as having any connection to Sufism, which they associated with well-­k nown local Sufi poets such as Shāh ʿAbd al-­Laṭīf Bhittāʾī and Bulle Shāh. The conceptual splits between Sufism and Islam that were pervasive in colonial discourse have facilitated the imagining of Sufism, even in its philosophical and literary forms, as something apart from and even antithetical to Islam, a position that has been taken up by some Islamic reformers in subsequent eras. It is not a great leap from this location of Sufism outside of the discursive tradition of Islam by Orientalists in the colonial era to the sense among many modern Muslims that Sufism, however imagined, is beyond the pale of true Islam and to the sense of urgency among certain radical Muslims that Sufism is bidʿah (innovation) and must be wiped out.

Though the silsilahs (genealogical linkages) based on chains of pīr-­disciple relationships that organize the Sufi orders continue to be important for South Asian Sufis, new forms of organization and religious identity emerged in the nineteenth century in the colonial environment and have continued to evolve in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. During the colonial period, Sufi practices and organizations were affected not only by Orientalist understandings of Sufism but also by organizational forms introduced by the British as they imposed a new administrative structure on the subcontinent and by Christian missionizing efforts, which partially inspired the Hindu and Islamic reform movements that were transforming the religious landscape of India.

Thus, within Hinduism, the colonial period saw the emergence of the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, new sampradāyas (devotional systems), and even the new idea of Bhakti as a broad movement that was said to have swept across India over the course of a thousand years.12 Among Muslims, multiple reform movements also emerged at this time, including the reformist Ahl-­e Hadith (often called “Wahhabi” by critics);13 the controversial Ahmadiyyah, whose founder claimed to be the promised messiah at the end of time; the Deobandis; and the Tablīghī Jamāʿat, an offshoot of the Deobandis, in the early twentieth century.

The Deobandis established a new madrasa system modeled partly on British bureaucratic and educational forms such as classrooms and a fixed curriculum, creating an institution that replaced an earlier madrasa model based on the metaphor of kinship ties. This organizational shift enabled the creation a transnational network of educational institutions, the Dār al-­ʿUlūm , that now goes well beyond South Asia.14

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Though the Deobandis did not reject Sufism, they did reject popular practices associated with local shrine culture. In reaction to this perceived threat to local shrine culture, many South Asian Sufis and their followers organized under the new identity of “Ahl-­e Sunnat wa-­l-­Jamāʿat” (the people of the Sunna and the community), often called “Barelwi” (especially by opponents), in order to resist the modernizing and purifying efforts of Deobandis and other Islamic groups such as the Ahl-­e Hadith while simultaneously organizing madrasas with a structure and curriculum similar to the Deobandi madrasas.15 “Deobandi” and “Barelwi” came to be seen as competing identities. These new forms of organization have continued to develop and evolve in the twenty-­first century. Although both Barelwis and Deobandis each emerged under the leadership of Sufis, Barelwi and Deobandi networks have evolved in different directions, with Barelwis particularly concerned with preserving Sufi practices associated with shrine culture and rituals focused on respect and love for the Prophet Muḥammad. In the present volume, chapters by Hermansen, Ingram, Sanyal, and Philippon address various aspects of this Barelwi-­Deobandi split.

Sufism and Its Modern Engagements with a Global Order A key subject in the “Rethinking Islam” workshop was how Sufism has been understood by scholars and outside observers and what implications such understandings continue to have for government policy and the politics of Sufi practice. In an earlier essay,16 Rosemary Corbett traced perceptions of Sufism as a liberal Islamic mysticism to roots in American Transcendentalist and Protestant interest in Eastern mysticisms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She described how this idea of Sufism became established in both popular culture and American scholarship through the efforts of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and his colleagues. These colleagues included Sayyid Hossein Nasr, H. A. R. Gibb, Annemarie Schimmel, and Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman. These scholars debated the nature of mysticism at the new Islamic studies programs at McGill and Harvard, which had been established with extensive funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in the post–­World War II period. The funding for the current Luce project can in many respects be viewed as a descendant of the efforts of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in the 1950s to reshape Islamic societies into liberal democracies through the work of scholars.

For this volume, Rosemary Corbett extends her argument further in chapter 1 to examine the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in shaping U.S. policy

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makers’ impressions of Sufism as the peaceful Islam that could counter dangerous extremism. She explores how, despite some efforts to engage French Orientalists, who were more aware of the Sufi-­led, highly politicized anti-­ colonial efforts in North Africa than were the Rockefeller-­f unded scholars who shaped early Islamic studies departments and influenced U.S. policy makers, these latter scholars relied heavily on ideas about Sufism that had been drawn from South Asian contexts and were shaped by Orientalist racializing stereotypes about passive South Asians and aggressive Arabs. Such assumptions about the peacefulness of Sufism continue to be widespread today. Essays in the present volume question such preconceptions in order to examine the effects of such representations on the complex political dynamics of Sufism today.

An important figure in the close interconnection between scholars and policy makers in the modern development of Sufism is Fazlur Rahman, who was hired by W. C. Smith at McGill, as a sort of diversity hire during Smith’s efforts to develop an Islamic Studies Department at McGill.17 After teaching in Canada, he was invited by Pakistani president Ayub Khan in 1963 to head the Central Institute of Islamic Research in Karachi. Under Ayub, he promoted a form of Islamic modernism that was based on ijtihād (independent reason) and was sympathetic to certain forms of Sufism. Inspired by the thought of Muhammad Iqbal, Rahman rejected popular Sufism as ignorant superstition but felt that a form of dynamic Sufism combined with modern education could form the basis for reforming sharia in Pakistan. He tried to weave Islam into the workings of government but was forced to leave Pakistan in 1968 when conservative ulama denounced him as an apostate. He moved to the United States and resumed his teaching career, ultimately taking a position in the Islamic Studies Department at the University of Chicago, where he played a role in shaping a generation of scholars, including some of the workshop participants.

In chapter 2, Verena Meyer focuses on Fazlur Rahman’s Indonesian PhD student Nurcholish Madjid, who studied with Rahman at the University of Chicago between 1978 and 1984 and went on to become a major figure in Indonesian religious and political life. Meyer’s goal is to complicate the assumption that Madjid simply transmitted Rahman’s program of ijtihād from Pakistan to Indonesia via Islamic studies in the Western academy. Rather, she argues, Madjid was reframing Sufism in ways that addressed specific conditions in Indonesia, countering the authoritarian regime with ideas of secular democracy by strategically drawing on and altering Rahman’s concept of “Neo-­ Sufism” while dissociating it from colonial images of paganism. He was nonetheless a part of what became a transnational project to recast Sufism in the

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service of modernization and the secular state, thereby reinforcing the idea of Sufism as the “good” Islam.

Rahman introduced the concept of “Neo-­Sufism” to refer to various Sufi-­ related movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that were concerned with renewal and reform.18 He used the term in his general introduction to Islam to refer to “Sufism reformed on orthodox lines and interpreted in an activist sense.”19 He was foregrounding reformist efforts to bring Sufi practices in line with Islamic “orthodoxy” by rejecting many of the popular practices associated with the old Sufi orders. Rahman identified orders in both South Asia and Northwest Africa that could be characterized in these reformist terms as Neo-­Sufi.

The term has provoked controversy among scholars of Sufism about whether the specific features that one scholar or another has identified with Neo-­ Sufism are really new practices and doctrines. While O’Fahey and Radtke argued that these features were not actually new,20 Islamic historian John Voll stressed that, in terms of organizational structure, Sufi orders that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were, in fact, new.21 According to Nehemia Levtzion, there was a change in the eighteenth century, when brotherhoods became larger-­scale, self-­supporting, and more centralized organizations: “In the eighteenth century, brotherhoods transformed from old patterns of decentralized diffusive affiliation into larger-­scale organizations, more coherent and centralized.”22 Even the formation of the supposedly traditionalist Ahl-­e Sunnat wa-­l-­Jamāʿat (Barelwis) in South Asia was a move toward a new form of organization in response to the political forces of the late nineteenth century. This trend has developed even further in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, as some Sufi organizations have begun to operate on a global scale.

Marcia Hermansen explores new modes of recruitment and mobilization in chapter 3. She asks how the idea of the “Barelwi” itself is changing by examining the organizational structure that has emerged with the rise to prominence of religious leader and politician Tahir-­ul-­Qadri, founder of the transnational Minhaj-­ul-­Quran movement. As she notes, Qadri also founded a political party, won a seat in the Pakistani national assembly, and rose to political prominence for a short time in 2014 by drawing on Sufi tropes and the idea of Sufism as the peaceful Islam to mobilize a large following to pressure government reform.

Qadri also operates on a global scale, using the media in new ways to capitalize on the image of the Sufi as a peaceful alternative to violent Islam. Hermansen argues that Qadri is an example of how there has been a shift from ṭarīqah-­ based Sufism to Sufism as a globally based “traditional Islam” that challenges

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several features of Barelwism, such as the pīr-­disciple relationship: Qadri rejects the title of pīr and preaches that one can become a member of the Qādirī Sufi order by filling out a Minhaj-­ul-­Quran membership form.23 Qadri’s political activities as a Sufi leader on a very public Twitter-­ and YouTube-­f ueled stage exposes tensions between Sufi sources of authority and the expectations of a disenchanted, secular public sphere and raises questions about the effects of his form of populism on democratic order.24 An assumption commonly made in public discourse is that in contrast to the political threat posed by orthodox Islam, Sufism’s adherents are apolitical and should be supported as a way of fending off extremism. This is a form of the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” split that, according to Mahmood Mamdani, has driven U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. Mamdani critiques the distinction between the secular, Westernized Muslim and the fanatical, premodern/antimodern Muslim made by scholars such as Bernard Lewis, who provided an intellectual justification for his conceptualization by arguing that the idea of freedom and a nonreligious society are totally alien to traditional Islam.25 Though Mamdani emphasizes how the good Muslim is thought to be secular and modern, this public discourse that he is critiquing also constitutes the Sufi as a good Muslim, with the help of scholarship such as that funded by the Luce Foundation, which aims to draw close connections between various aspects of Sufism and the values of secular democracy. Part of this perceived compatibility stems from the Protestant Christian lens through which Sufism continues to be seen. Thus, even Ernst, in his Shambhala Guide to Sufism, which aims to disrupt Orientalist assumptions that have shaped the study of Sufism and is focused on Sufism as a fundamentally social and historical phenomenon, offers a definition of “Sufi” in terms of an individual’s orientation toward ethical and spiritual goals.26 This definition focuses on the individual, just as talk of democracy rests on the individual as a bearer of rights and freedoms founded on the idea of the individual’s autonomous will. This definition of the Sufi also separates the individual from the social and political, making this form of religion apolitical: Sufi experience is fundamentally private and thus compatible with the place of religion in a secular society when framed in terms of individual spirituality.

The chapters in this volume disrupt the assumption that Sufism is apolitical by focusing on the political engagement of Sufis in South Asia. In some respects this inquiry is more in line with a definition of Sufism offered by Nile Green in his 2012 global history of Sufism, which, like Ernst’s guide to Sufism, attempts to recast our understanding of Sufism away from the grand narrative of decline associated with the development of the Sufi orders and their institutional

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forms. Green prioritizes Sufism’s social dimensions in his definition of Sufism as “a tradition of powerful knowledge, practices and persons.”27 Sufism, like all religions, is a social and political practice, despite modern efforts to relegate religion to the private sphere.

Sufis, Sharia, and Reform Another assumption that dominates public discourse about Sufism is that Islamic reformism stands in opposition to Sufism, which is associated with traditionalism and shrine visitation and continues to bear the shadow of the colonial label that linked popular Sufism with superstition. The chapters in part 2 focus on the issue of Sufis and Islamic reform. Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s commentary calls attention to how the very term “reform” and its deployment are politically fraught. Each chapter questions the idea that Islamic reform is necessarily anti-­Sufi or that Sufis themselves are unconcerned with reform.

They also disrupt any neat categorization of Deobandis as pro-­reform and Barelwis as anti-­reform.

One of the ways that the past is rewritten is through the misrecognition of earlier distinctions, judgments, and practices that are taken to be the same as what is happening today. Thus, for example, an earlier criticism of shrine visitation is taken to be a rejection of Sufi practices. Before the modern era, most Muslim scholars and teachers were also Sufis, and the Sufi ṭarīqahs (orders) were a central element of Muslim social worlds. Thus, the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah of Damascus, who in the modern era has been claimed as a predecessor by anti-­Sufi reformists such as the eighteenth-­century Arabian reformist Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-­Wahhāb and the Indian/Pakistani reformer Abū al-­Aʿlā Mawdūdī, was himself a Sufi shaykh of the Qādirī order.28 Ibn Taymiyyah had been critical of the of the growing use of elaborate tombs erected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to enhance the legitimacy of local rulers such as the Mamluks and was also concerned about reforming the popular practice of worshipping the dead and petitioning them as intermediaries with God. But this to him was not the same as Sufi practice, and he had considerable praise for contemporary shaykhs. Similarly, though Deobandis today are assumed by many to be anti-­Sufi, especially by their critics, they have always retained a tie to the Sufi orders, even as they have sought reform and condemned popular practices associated with the shrines.

Focusing on Deobandi discourse as manifest in the writings of major Deobandi scholars whose madrasas in Northwest Pakistan have trained members

Modern Sufis and the State brings together a range of scholars, including anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies specialists, to challenge common assumptions that are made about Sufism today. Focusing on India and Pakistan within a broader global context, this book provides locally grounded accounts of how Sufis in South Asia have engaged in politics from the colonial period to the present.

“Discussions of Islam and politics typically focus on Islamic states and Islamists, leaving Sufis to appear transcendently above the political realm. These twelve compelling case studies show how Sufi leaders and organizations are entangled in local, national, and transnational politics among the world’s largest Muslim communities in India and Pakistan.”

—NILE GREEN, AUTHOR OF SUFISM: A GLOBAL HISTORY “A crucial resource for understanding the limits and legacies of ‘Sufism’—a category invented by nineteenth-century Orientalism—in shaping patterns of religious and political conflict, affinity, and indifference across South Asian societies. This superb collection offers a powerful rebuttal to the reigning orthodoxy of Sufi contra Salafi within studies of contemporary Islam.”

—CHARLES HIRSCHKIND, AUTHOR OF THE ETHICAL SOUNDSCAPE: CASSETTE SERMONS AND ISLAMIC COUNTERPUBLICS “0RGHUQ 6XÀV DQG WKH 6WDWH shows the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements. Its emphasis on complexity and local rootedness is a welcome contribution. The editors and the contributors bridge several different fields and combine expertise to offer new and important perspectives on the Barelwi and Deobandi movements.”

—SCOTT KUGLE, AUTHOR OF SUFIS AND SAINTS’ BODIES: MYSTICISM, CORPOREALITY, AND SACRED POWER IN ISLAM “This welcome book explores the roles of those figures widely identified as Sufis—an important subject given the ignorance about Sufis and much else that often fuels anti-Muslim violence and Islamophobia. The work should be of interest to policy makers involved with Muslim populations as well as to academics and others interested in Islam in the contemporary world.”

—BARBARA METCALF, AUTHOR OF ISLAMIC CONTESTATIONS: ESSAYS ON MUSLIMS IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

KATHERINE PRATT EWING is professor of religion at Columbia University and professor emerita of cultural anthropology at Duke University. Her books include Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (1997) and Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (2008).

ROSEMARY R. CORBETT is the author of Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy (2017). She is a faculty fellow for the Bard Prison Initiative and holds a PhD in religion from Columbia University.

RELIGION, CULTURE, AND PUBLIC LIFE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK c u p .c o l u m b i a .e d u Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Sam Panthaky/Getty Images

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