07/27/2026
INTELLECTUAL DIVISIVENESS AND THE IDOLATRY OF INTERPRETATION
Dr. M. Mehdi Kazmi
Scholarly Narcissism, Sectarian Power, and the Manufacture of the Religious “Other”
An expanded and revised argument
The central claim: whenever a human interpretation is treated as if it were revelation itself, scholarship can become an instrument of domination rather than a path to God.
“Intellectual narcissism” is used here as a moral and sociological description, not as a clinical diagnosis. The essay examines selected Sunni polemical traditions because that is its immediate subject, while insisting that the underlying temptation is human and can arise in Sunni, Shia, Sufi, secular, academic, or political communities.
THE PROBLEM: WHEN INTERPRETATION BECOMES AN IDOL
A religious scholar may begin with a genuine act of study: reading scripture, weighing reports, comparing arguments, and attempting to guide a community. The danger begins when the scholar’s conclusion is no longer presented as a fallible human interpretation but as the final, spiritually guaranteed voice of God. At that moment, reverence for knowledge can quietly mutate into reverence for the knower. A humanly produced system acquires a sacred aura; disagreement becomes disobedience; criticism becomes impiety; and the scholar’s intellectual prestige becomes a form of power over the conscience of others.
This is the phenomenon that may be called intellectual divisive narcissism: the tendency of a learned person, school, or community to glorify its own thought, to experience its interpretation as uniquely pure, and to preserve that superiority by constructing an inferior “Other.” The term does not mean that every scholar is narcissistic or that Sunni thought is inherently divisive. It identifies a recurrent pathology within polemical religious culture: human judgment is absolutized, the interpreter is sacralized, and group power is accumulated through exclusion.
The contradiction is profound. Islam came to liberate the human being from servitude to created powers, yet religious institutions can recreate servitude by placing a class of interpreters between the believer and God. The language remains Islamic, but the structure becomes idolatrous: obedience is transferred from God to a human authority whose decisions are treated as immune from moral and rational scrutiny.
2. THE ARCHITECTURE OF INTELLECTUAL OTHERING
The manufacture of the religious Other usually follows a recognizable sequence. It is not merely an unfortunate by-product of disagreement; it can become the mechanism by which a school consolidates identity, loyalty, and authority.
1. A scholar or school develops an interpretation and presents it as more than one legitimate reading among others.
2. The interpretation becomes fused with the identity of the group: to question the idea is to question the community itself.
3. The scholar is elevated through honorifics, lineage, visions, spiritual claims, or institutional repetition until criticism feels almost sacrilegious.
4. The rival is reduced to a label—Rafidi, Nasibi, Wahhabi, Barelvi, Deobandi, philosopher, innovator, heretic, or unbeliever—so that the person disappears behind the category.
5. Moral disgust replaces evidence. Social distance is encouraged through rules concerning prayer, marriage, food, greeting, burial, and companionship.
6. The boundary becomes self-reinforcing: loyalty is proved by condemning the Other, and hesitation itself is treated as disloyalty or disbelief.
This process rewards both leaders and followers. The leader gains authority, disciples, institutions, and control over the boundaries of belonging. The follower receives borrowed certainty, a heroic identity, and relief from the anxiety of thinking. “We possess the truth” becomes psychologically easier than “we are responsible before God for the way we seek truth.”
Modern social psychology calls one related pattern collective narcissism: an inflated belief in the greatness of one’s group combined with a conviction that outsiders fail to recognize that greatness. Such groups become unusually sensitive to insult and more willing to answer perceived disrespect with hostility. In religious settings, this tendency becomes especially potent because group pride is fused with divine approval. The ego no longer says merely, “I am right”; it says, “God has chosen us, and therefore opposition to us is opposition to God.”
3. THE QUR’ANIC WARNING AGAINST THE SACRALIZATION OF HUMAN AUTHORITY
The Qur’an does not use the modern phrase “intellectual narcissism,” but it repeatedly warns against giving human authorities, personal desire, inherited convention, or self-righteousness the place that belongs to God alone. These passages should not be weaponized to declare named scholars polytheists. Their force is ethical and diagnostic: they expose the danger of functional idolatry, in which human judgment is obeyed with a submission that properly belongs only to the Divine.
“They took their rabbis and monks as lords beside God, and also the Messiah, son of Mary, although they had been commanded to worship only one God.”
— Qur’an 9:31, rendered from the Arabic
This verse is not an attack on learning or religious leadership. It is an attack on surrendered moral agency. In the famous explanation associated with ʿAdi ibn Hatim, the “worship” of clergy consisted not in prostrating before them but in allowing them to redefine the lawful and unlawful and then obeying them unquestioningly. The warning therefore reaches every tradition: when a scholar’s decree is treated as intrinsically sacred, rather than tested against revelation, justice, reason, and conscience, religious obedience can become a disguised form of lord-making.
“Have you considered the one who takes his own desire as his god, and whom God allows to stray despite knowledge?”
— Qur’an 45:23, rendered from the Arabic
The verse explicitly joins desire and knowledge. Intellectual brilliance does not purify the ego; it can equip the ego with better weapons. A scholar may rationalize resentment, ambition, fear, or rivalry and then baptize those impulses as doctrine. Learning can become the servant of desire while preserving the appearance of piety.
“Do not declare yourselves pure; He knows best who is truly mindful of Him.”
— Qur’an 53:32, rendered from the Arabic
Sectarian systems often begin by declaring the purity of the self: our creed is uncorrupted, our chain is superior, our saints are uniquely protected, our jurists alone represent orthodoxy. The Qur’an withdraws that authority from human beings. Final moral ranking belongs to God, not to schools competing for prestige.
“Do not say to one who offers you peace, “You are not a believer.””
— Qur’an 4:94, rendered from the Arabic
The verse places a barrier before the appetite for exclusion. It instructs believers to resist the impulse to erase another person’s faith for worldly advantage. The principle is especially important when labels become connected to property, office, marriage, burial, safety, or political power. Takfir is never merely a word; historically it has often functioned as a transfer of rights from the accused to the accuser.
“Do not falsely declare, “This is lawful and this is forbidden,” inventing a lie against God.”
— Qur’an 16:116, rendered from the Arabic
To speak in God’s name is an act of immense moral danger. The scholar’s first duty is therefore not confidence but restraint. A fatwa may be necessary, but it remains a human attempt to understand divine guidance. The sentence “God has said” must never become a costume worn by the sentence “I have concluded.”
Other passages complete the picture. Qur’an 49:11–13 forbids ridicule, degrading labels, suspicion, and tribal superiority; 3:64 calls communities to a common word in which none takes another as a lord beside God; and 28:83 promises the final home to those who do not seek exaltation or corruption on earth. Together they establish a theology of intellectual humility: truth is sacred, but the human possessor of an opinion is not.
4. POLEMICAL PRECEDENTS: HOW LANGUAGE CREATES THE ENEMY
Historical texts must be read in context, and no major thinker should be reduced to a single sentence. Yet polemical sentences matter because they outlive their settings. They are memorized, quoted, institutionalized, and used to define millions of people who never participated in the original debate. The following examples illustrate a recurring rhetorical technology: an entire community is compressed into a moral defect, and the scholar’s judgment becomes a template for inherited contempt.
1 IBN TAYMIYYA AND THE ESSENTIALIZING LABEL
“The Rafidah are the most mendacious of the sects of passion.”
— Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-Sunna al-Nabawiyya; translation of “al-Rāfiḍa akdhab ṭawāʾif ahl al-ahwāʾ”
The sentence does more than reject particular Shia arguments. It attributes a defining moral vice—lying—to an entire tradition. Once a community has been declared essentially mendacious, its testimony need not be heard, its evidence need not be examined, and its grievances can be dismissed in advance. The label performs the argument before the argument begins.
Ibn Taymiyya wrote in a medieval world of intense confessional rivalry and in direct rebuttal to the Shia theologian al-ʿAllama al-Hilli. That context explains the polemical form but does not neutralize its afterlife. The phrase has been repeatedly detached from its textual dispute and used as a civilizational judgment on Shias as such. This is precisely how scholarly rhetoric becomes social power: a sentence written in controversy becomes a permission structure for everyday contempt.
2 AL-GHAZALI: THE TENSION BETWEEN EXCLUSION AND RESTRAINT
“We must, therefore, reckon as unbelievers both these philosophers themselves and their followers …”
— Al-Ghazali, Tahāfut al-Falāsifa, conclusion; trans. S. A. Kamali
Al-Ghazali’s conclusion concerns three metaphysical doctrines associated with al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. The important point here is not whether his theological judgment was defensible within his system. It is the expansionary power of the category: a philosophical conclusion becomes a boundary of communal existence, and intellectual error becomes unbelief.
Yet al-Ghazali also complicates the story. In Fayṣal al-Tafriqa he warns against reckless takfir and argues for interpretive breadth. This internal tension is instructive. A scholar may be capable of both generosity and exclusion; a tradition may preserve both tendencies. The danger arises when later institutions canonize the harsh verdict and forget the caution. Polemical certainty is easier to mobilize than theological restraint.
3 SOUTH ASIAN SUNNI POLEMICS: FEAR, DESTRUCTION, AND RECURSIVE TAKFIR
The Indian Muslim intellectual tradition produced extraordinary poetry, spirituality, law, philosophy, and anticolonial thought. It also produced powerful cultures of sectarian classification. The following examples are not presented as the essence of Indian Sunnism; they show how rival Sunni formations and anti-Shia polemics repeatedly used exclusion to build authority.
“In the region where we live, the Twelver faith has become so widespread that one or two members of every family is a Shia.”
— Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, Tuḥfa Ithnā ʿAshariyya, as cited by S. A. A. Rizvi
This is a classic language of demographic anxiety. The rival is not merely mistaken; it is spreading through the household. The statement constructs a threatened majority and an infiltrating minority. Elsewhere, legal discouragement of greeting, marriage, and food-sharing hardened theological disagreement into social separation. Once ordinary intimacy is portrayed as contamination, the neighbor is transformed into a civilizational danger.
“A true believer should regard the breaking of a taʿziya by force as virtuous as destroying idols.”
— Shah Ismaʿil Dihlawi, as translated and cited by Barbara D. Metcalf
Here the movement from idea to destruction is explicit. A ritual object cherished by another Muslim community is redescribed as an idol, and its physical destruction becomes a virtue. The rival’s sacred symbol is stripped of meaning and placed outside the sphere of Muslim protection. This is how othering releases destructive force: first a symbol is de-Islamized, then aggression against it is moralized.
“Whoever doubts the unbelief of the Deobandis is himself an unbeliever.”
— Ahmad Raza Khan, Fatāwā Riḍawiyya, vol. 6, p. 82; translation
This formula creates recursive takfir. It is no longer sufficient to avoid the condemned belief; one must also reproduce the scholar’s condemnation. Doubt, caution, friendship, or refusal to excommunicate becomes evidence of excommunication. Such a structure is extraordinarily effective at accumulating power because it prevents neutral ground. Every believer is forced to choose between submission to the verdict and expulsion with its targets.
The symmetry is important. Anti-Shia polemic, Deobandi-Barelvi conflict, anti-Sufi reformism, and counter-takfir by devotional schools often mirror one another. Each side condemns the other’s hero worship while creating its own protected heroes; each attacks the other’s exaggeration while exaggerating the authority of its own canon. The names differ, but the mechanism remains recognizable.
5. HOW SCHOLARSHIP BECOMES A SYSTEM OF POWER
Ideas do not become socially dominant merely because they are persuasive. They become dominant when they are attached to institutions: seminaries, pulpits, publishing houses, patronage networks, courts, political parties, charitable systems, marriage markets, burial practices, and chains of authorization. The scholar who controls the definition of orthodoxy can influence who is trusted, who may lead prayer, whose marriage is valid, whose food is eaten, whose books are burned, and whose grief is considered legitimate.
The glorification of scholarly thought therefore has material consequences. It can produce a religious economy in which access to divine legitimacy is mediated by a recognized class. Honorifics such as “Shaykh al-Islam,” “Hujjat al-Islam,” “Aʿla Hazrat,” “Quds sirruh,” or “Damat barakatuhum” are not inherently wrong. Respect, prayer, and gratitude toward teachers are natural. The problem begins when titles function as shields against evidence, when charisma replaces accountability, and when the follower fears questioning the scholar more than misrepresenting God.
The scholar’s ego then becomes the group’s ego. Criticism of the founder is experienced as humiliation of the community. The community responds by intensifying praise, suppressing ambiguity, and punishing dissent. This produces several dark social forces:
• Deindividuation: the rival is no longer a person but a specimen of a condemned category.
• Moral disengagement: harm is justified as defense of truth, honor, or purity.
• Scapegoating: social anxiety and political failure are projected onto a doctrinal minority.
• Epistemic closure: counter-evidence is dismissed because the source has already been declared corrupt.
• Purity escalation: followers compete to demonstrate loyalty through harsher denunciations.
• Authority dependence: believers lose confidence in conscience and become unable to distinguish revelation from the institution’s interpretation.
This is why intellectual narcissism is not merely vanity. When joined to religious authority, it becomes a technology of rule. It establishes who may speak, who must remain silent, and who may be excluded without guilt.
6. THE SHIA IDEAL OF THE MAʿṢŪM AND THE DANGER OF BORROWED INFALLIBILITY
The Shia doctrine of the Prophet and the Ahl al-Bayt as the Maʿṣūmīn offers a powerful moral counter-image: authority is inseparable from purity, justice, truthfulness, mercy, and freedom from ego. The tragedy of Karbala, in particular, presents sacred authority not as domination but as self-sacrifice in resistance to domination. Imam Husayn does not secure obedience by controlling institutions; he exposes the moral bankruptcy of power through fidelity and sacrifice.
Yet this doctrine should humble later scholars, not transfer infallibility to them. A jurist, preacher, sayyid, pir, or intellectual who speaks about the Maʿṣūm does not thereby become maʿṣūm. Shia communities can also fall into hero worship, clerical absolutism, inherited contempt, or the dehumanization of Sunnis. To condemn Sunni intellectual narcissism while exempting one’s own institutions would reproduce the very structure under criticism.
The genuine Shia response to divisive scholarship is therefore not a competing idolatry of interpretation. It is a discipline of proximity to the Ahl al-Bayt: the closer a scholar claims to be to them, the more that scholar should display humility, courage, justice, tenderness toward the vulnerable, and refusal to exploit religious emotion for personal or institutional power.
7. QUR’ANIC ETHICS OF INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY
A community does not overcome divisive narcissism by abandoning scholarship. It overcomes it by restoring scholarship to its proper station: a noble but fallible service beneath revelation, never a rival to revelation. The following disciplines can prevent learning from becoming domination:
1. Distinguish revelation from interpretation. A scholar should say, “This is my reading,” rather than disguising inference as the voice of God.
2. Treat takfir as an extreme boundary question, not a rhetorical weapon. School labels should never substitute for examination of a person’s actual beliefs and conduct.
3. Require scholars to represent rival positions in terms their adherents would recognize. Refuting a caricature is a form of intellectual dishonesty.
4. Make uncertainty visible. Words such as “possibly,” “in my judgment,” and “God knows best” are not weakness; they are safeguards against spiritual tyranny.
5. Judge interpretations by their ethical fruits. A doctrine that predictably produces cruelty, humiliation, and social hatred demands renewed scrutiny, even when supported by inherited authority.
6. Protect the rights and dignity of minorities before debating their theology. Justice is not a reward for doctrinal agreement.
7. Separate honor from immunity. A revered scholar may be thanked, loved, and criticized at the same time.
8. Build plural institutions in which no single school controls all credentials, pulpits, funds, and definitions of belonging.
9. Teach believers that conscience is a trust. Consultation with scholars does not cancel personal accountability before God.
10. Measure greatness by service rather than submission. The true teacher produces morally responsible human beings, not dependent admirers.
Intellectual humility does not mean relativism. One may believe that an argument is false, dangerous, or incompatible with Islam. Humility concerns the moral posture of the knower: awareness of fallibility, refusal to dehumanize, willingness to revise, and recognition that God’s judgment is not identical with one’s emotional need to prevail.
8. CONCLUSION: DO NOT TURN THE PATH TO GOD INTO A THRONE
The deepest form of intellectual shirk is not the existence of scholarship but the absolutization of scholarship: taking a humanly constructed body of thought, giving it the emotional force of revelation, and demanding that others submit to it as the price of belonging. The idol may not be made of stone. It may be made of books, titles, chains of authorization, visions, institutions, and inherited fear.
Scholars are human beings. They possess insight and blindness, courage and ambition, devotion and ego. Their learning can illuminate the world, but it can also magnify the darkness within them. When thought becomes a means of accumulating authority, it generates an Other whose inferiority confirms the scholar’s greatness. When that Other is declared impure, deceptive, heretical, or outside Islam, ordinary restraints weaken and destructive energies are released.
The answer is not anti-intellectualism. It is a more demanding intellectualism: scholarship purified by humility, historical self-awareness, justice, and love. Islam is diminished whenever a scholar’s prestige becomes more sacred than a human life, whenever a school’s victory matters more than truth, or whenever the unity of God is invoked to justify the fragmentation of God’s creation.
The task of the Muslim intellectual is not to build a throne from which to judge humanity. It is to clear a path toward God without standing in the path. Knowledge should make the scholar more conscious of limitation, more careful with the faith of others, and more resistant to the seductions of power. The light of God does not require the darkness of a manufactured enemy.
1 NOTES AND SOURCES
Qur’anic passages cited or discussed: 3:64; 4:94; 9:31; 10:59; 16:116; 28:83; 45:23; 49:11–13; 53:32. The English renderings in this essay are fresh, close translations from the Arabic prepared for this text.
1. Ibn Taymiyya. Minhāj al-Sunna al-Nabawiyya fī Naqḍ Kalām al-Shīʿa al-Qadariyya. Edited by Muḥammad Rashād Sālim. 9 vols. Riyadh: Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University, 1986. Pagination varies by edition; the quoted phrase occurs in the early general characterization of the Rāfiḍa.
2. Al-Ghazali. Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). Translated by Sabih Ahmad Kamali. Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1958. See the concluding classification of the three doctrines judged to constitute unbelief.
3. Al-Ghazali. On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Fayṣal al-Tafriqa. Translated by Sherman A. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
4. Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. Tuḥfa Ithnā ʿAshariyya. For the quoted demographic statement and discussion of his anti-Shia polemics, see S. A. A. Rizvi, Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAziz: Puritanism, Sectarian Polemics and Jihad. Canberra: Maʿrifat Publishing House, 1982, pp. 207–208.
5. Metcalf, Barbara D. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 58. The quoted passage attributes the statement on forcibly breaking taʿziyas to Muhammad Ismaʿil (Shah Ismaʿil Dihlawi).
6. Ahmad Raza Khan. Fatāwā Riḍawiyya, vol. 6, p. 82. The English sentence in this essay is a translation of the widely cited ruling concerning doubt about the takfir of Deobandi scholars. Readers should consult a critical Urdu edition for the full legal context.
7. Golec de Zavala, Agnieszka, Aleksandra Cichocka, Roy Eidelson, and Nuwan Jayawickreme. “Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 6 (2009): 1074–1096.
8. Leary, Mark R. “Intellectual Humility as a Route to More Accurate Knowledge, Better Decisions, and Less Conflict.” American Journal of Health Promotion 36, no. 4 (2022): 757–760.
9. Adang, Camilla, Hassan Ansari, Maribel Fierro, and Sabine Schmidtke, eds. Accusations of Unbelief in Islam: A Diachronic Perspective on Takfīr. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Dr. M. Mehdi Kazmi
Executive Director: ACNA
Phone: +1 (914) 525-1945
E-Mail: [email protected]
