This talk takes as its starting point Muhammad Asad’s observation in The Message of the Quran that human sense-perception is limited and that there must therefore be more-than-human worlds “beyond our ken.” Drawing together contemporary ethological work on animals’ sensory worlds and a 10th-century Islamic epistle on animals’ capacities to worship the divine, Fernando imagines possible worlds that nonhumans—dogs and ghosts, pigs and gods, cats and jinn—may be worlding without and unbeknownst to humans. Such not-knowing decenters the secular fantasy of human mastery that underpins the Anthropocene. Riffing on the concept of negative theology, Fernando argues for a kind of negative zoology, where the human is an onto-epistemological limit and the difference of the other—divine, animal—is unbridgeable, and offers limit as an ethical and political opportunity for a more-than-secular orientation to living and acting as humans.

Mayanthi Fernando is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include secularity; Islam; more-than-multispecies ecologies; histories of the body and consciousness; liberalism and law; and gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke, 2014) and co-editor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader (Duke, 2021). She is currently working on a second monograph on secularity and the Anthropocene and how to think in more-than-secular ways about more-than-human worlds.

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