Examples of the rhythmic nature of Islam can be seen in all aspects of Muslims' everyday lives. Muslims break their Ramadan fast upon the sun setting, and they receive Ramadan by sighting the new moon.
Prayer for their dead is by noon and burial is before sunset. This is space and time in Islam - moon, sun, dawn and sunset are all part of a unique and unified rhythm, interweaving the sacred and the ordinary, nature and culture in a pattern that is characteristically Islamic.
Book Summary: Ethnographers have observed Muslims nearly everywhere Islam is practiced. This study analyzes four seminal texts that have been read widely outside anthropology.
Varisco argues that each of these four authors approaches Islam as an essentialized organic unity rather than letting 'Islams' found in the field speak to the diversity of practice.
The textual truths engendered, and far too often engineered, in these idealized representations of Islam have found their way unscrutinized into an endless stream of scholarly works and textbooks. Varisco's analysis goes beyond the rhetoric over what Islam is to the information from ethnographic research about what Muslims say they do and actually are observed to do.
The issues covered include Islam as a cultural phenomenon, representation of 'the other', Muslim gender roles, politics of ethnographic authority, and Orientalist discourse. Book Summary: He argues that "religionis a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes—for Westerners and non-Westerners alike—particular forms of "history making.
Challenges current and past approaches to the study of Islamand Muslim politics in anthropology Offers a critical comprehensive review of past and currentliterature on the subject Presents innovative ethnographic description and analysis ofeveryday Muslim politics in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, andNorth America Proposes new analytical approaches to the study of Islam andMuslim politics.
Book Summary: ". Drawing on 12 years of fieldwork in Pakistan and Great Britain, she elucidates the complex organization of Sufi orders as regional and transnational cults, and examines how such cults are manifested through ritual action and embodied in sacred mythology and global diasporas.
A focus of the study is the key event in the order's annual ritual cycle, a celebration in which tens of thousands of people gather at the saint's lodge in Pakistan and in the streets of Britain. Werbner challenges accepted anthropological and sociological truths about Islam and modernity, and reflects on her own role as ethnographic observer. Pilgrims of Love is a major contribution to our understanding of disaporic Islamic practices, highlighting the vitality of Sufi orders in the postcolonial world.
Book Summary: A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East presents a comprehensive overview of current trends and future directions in anthropological research and activism in the modern Middle East. Named as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles of Offers critical perspectives on the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical goals of anthropology in the Middle East Analyzes the conditions of cultural and social transformation in the Middle Eastern region and its relations with other areas of the world Features contributions by top experts in various Middle East anthropological specialties Features in-depth coverage of issues drawn from religion, the arts, language, politics, political economy, the law, human rights, multiculturalism, and globalization.
Visit www. The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria are exceptional for the copresence among them of three religious traditions: Islam, Christianity, and the indigenous orisa religion. In this comparative study, at once historical and anthropological, Peel explores the intertwined character of the three religions and the dense imbrication of religion in all aspects of Yoruba history up to the present.
For over years, the Yoruba have straddled two geocultural spheres: one reaching north over the Sahara to the world of Islam, the other linking them to the Euro-American world via the Atlantic.
These two external spheres were the source of contrasting cultural influences, notably those emanating from the world religions. However, the Yoruba not only imported Islam and Christianity but also exported their own orisa religion to the New World. Before the voluntary modern diaspora that has brought many Yoruba to Europe and the Americas, tens of thousands were sold as slaves in the New World, bringing with them the worship of the orisa.
Peel offers deep insight into important contemporary themes such as religious conversion, new religious movements, relations between world religions, the conditions of religious violence, the transnational flows of contemporary religion, and the interplay between tradition and the demands of an ever-changing present. In the process, he makes a major theoretical contribution to the anthropology of world religions. Book Summary: This volume combines ethnographic accounts of fieldwork with overviews of recent anthropological literature about the region on topics such as Islam, gender, youth, and new media.
It addresses contemporary debates about modernity, nation building, and the link between the ideology of power and the production of knowledge. Contributors include established and emerging scholars known for the depth and quality of their ethnographic writing and for their interventions in current theory.
Book Summary: In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam.
While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater social and economic privilege. Giriama are frustrated to find their ethnic identity disparaged and their versions of Islam sometimes rejected by Swahili. The Edge of Islam explores themes as wide-ranging as spirit possession, divination, healing rituals, madness, symbolic pollution, ideologies of money, linguistic code-switching, and syncretism and its alternatives.
McIntosh shows how the differing versions of Islam practiced by Swahili and Giriama, and their differing understandings of personhood, have figured in the growing divisions between the two groups.
Her ethnographic analysis helps to explain why Giriama view Islam, a supposedly universal religion, as belonging more deeply to certain ethnic groups than to others; why Giriama use Islam in their rituals despite the fact that so many do not consider the religion their own; and how Giriama appropriations of Islam subtly reinforce a distance between the religion and themselves. On the contrary, existing similarities between the two might be attributed to Egyptian secularism: just as the State does in Turkey, the role of the national Egyptian education system in propagating a state-legiti- mated version of Islam is critical.
It is true that there is no ulema in the received sense of the word in Turkey: the institution of the Reli- gious Affairs Ministry Diyanet in spelled out the end of the relative auto- nomy of Islamic education.
One important consideration is whether the Diyanet and its scholars in Turkey work according to principles and procedures established in classical Islamic jurisprudence, such as ijma consensus and ijtihad independent interpretation. A second question is the extent to which the Diyanet experts on Islamic law act to extend and enrich, like ulema everywhere, Islamic tradition, espe- cially in their interpretation of the Koran and hadith.
A third issue is how the crea- tion of a State-approved and nationalised version of Islam in Turkey has established a causal relationship between secularism and authoritarianism.
A similar production of Islamic orthodoxy by nationalist governments in every other Middle-Eastern country has made for a crisis of democracy in them as well see Antoun for Jordan. Although the religious experts of the Diyanet work within dictates laid down by the Turkish State, on many issues these dictates are not clear.
What power do the recommendations of the Diyanet possess? Do they influence legislation? If they do, why is this not perceived as a creeping Islamisation of the law in Turkey, as it would be in Egypt? A sixth consideration is the issue of the relevance of Turkish theologians to broader society, the same issue that pertains to the ulema in all other Middle Eastern socie- ties. Who listens to them? All these partial similarities demonstrate how the absolute distinction posited between Turkey and the Rest of the Arab world by many scholars needs to be subjected to empirical testing.
White argues for the necessity of studying Islamist political ideology through its grounding in the cultural codes and norms of the urban community. In a way we might say that successful Islamist political movements do anthropology: their political practice and discourse grows out of a nuanced understanding of local practices and cultural norms, even as they attempt to re-represent those cultural values for mobilisation through an Islamic idiom.
Vernacular politics, or the harnessing of selected cultural principles to garner popular support, is available to other political parties as well, if their own modus operandi does not preclude it. For White, secular activists organised their activities with the assumption that local values and traditions, posited as patriarchal, Islamic and backwards, needed to be revolutionised.
Their mission was to enlighten people. White argues that working-class people possess a set of values that act as an important resource for families and individuals beset by financial difficulties. They articulate with cultural practices that include relations of reciprocity, notions of good neighbourliness imece , and intense circuits of mutual obligations himaye.
In brief, the success of the Islamist parties in Turkey is seen by White to be a result of their personalisation of political relations, and their situating of their ideological message within a local context of shared communal values and interests. Cultural and family resources both supported and restricted the choices of individuals, while economic realities were often more influential in stopping the activism of young Islamist women than religious ide- ology. To work, to marry, where to work, who to marry, were decisions negoti- ated by individuals in the circumscribed fields within which they pursued their goals, just as those goals too were affirmed or rejected over time.
Yet it is apparent that Islamist politics, as pursued by educated Muslim women, leads to clear differences of expectation and practice between themselves and many Islamist men, who have their own reasons for pursuing politics through an Islamic prism.
The same, of course, can be said for secular feminists and male Kemalists. In sum, White too makes no pretence of presenting a grand theory of Muslim society. The closest she comes to a comparative claim is her recommendation to pursue the process of vernacular politics in other places, most particularly in the study of protestant mega-churches in North America.
The best way to answer this question is to distil from them a number of tenets that I think should inform how contemporary anthropology construes Islam. Anthropology as a discipline cannot evade a new engagement with Islam. What should constitute the Islam of anthropology today, if these three stud- ies are any guide? First, it is clear that there is no singular Islam or archetypical Islamic society that the discipline seeks to identify, represent and account for.
Rather, it is concerned to analyse the multiplicity of sources generating a pleth- ora of ways of being Muslim. Fourth and following on from this, it politicises the epistemological processes through which these fragile or well-embedded orthodoxies and practises are made, sustained and transformed in any particular context. And fifthly, the Islam of anthropology should also be an anthropology of Muslim experience, attentive to the evolving meanings that individuals or collectives attribute to their own religious practices, while relating that experience to this disputed pro- duction of knowledge and orthodoxy about Islam produced by Islamic and other institutions.
In what ways is the discourse on Islam produced by other more amplified voices in Australia different to these anthropological convictions about the lives of Mus- lims? There is no simple answer, given the varied sites of production of talk about Islam, from multiple Muslim groups, the universities, different Government depart- ments, mosque spokesmen and women and even the publicity sections of the con- sulates of Muslim-majority nation-states.
The Gallipoli Mosque in Auburn, for example, staffed by representatives of the Turkish Diyanet, organises a well-attended Open Day every year to inform visitors about Islam, as well as hosting a citizenship ceremony in its grounds on Anzac Day. Houston Nevertheless, one influential source of discourse about Islam and Muslim move- ments in the mass media is that originating from certain leftists and feminists.
Should certain left discourses, too, be classified as Islamophobic? The question demands a serious study. To give some sense of the issues involved, I want to look at just two recent examples from the media.
Grayling, who positions himself on the left. Evidently, in the Islam of Grayling, Westerners cannot be Muslim, nor can the two ever possess shared sensitivities. Further, without considering the contrasting meanings that the burqa might hold for its wearers, what liberal respect is Grayling practising?
And how reasonable is it to take offence at its sight? We should not impose our values on them. She goes on to say that: The problem with this mindset is that, with all its faults, Western culture is clearly, objectively better.
Unlike the women I met in the refugee camps on the Chad-Sudan border, who cannot leave the camps to get firewood without the fear of being raped, I could, after the Austen conference, walk home in the twilight through safe streets. Grayling and Bone are both respect- able self-proclaimed leftists and atheists.
Yet what are the political implications of their rhetoric about Muslims? For them, Islam is intrinsically false, and veiled women adhering to this dogma should be appraised and understood in this light. Islam is also intrinsically oppressive of women, and thus to ensure the freedom of those wearing the head-scarf they have to be protected from their religious fathers or brothers.
The burqa is a symbol of the misogyny of Islam and its presence should be discouraged in Western public space because its wearing offends, poten- tially threatening the social peace of non-Muslim society and the rights of women. What is to be done? The political project is the authoritarian secularisation of Islam. And these institutions have an even more important role: the safeguarding of the Enlightenment from Muslims, an enlightenment which is both indigenous to the West and eternally true and emancipating, and thus to be ceaselessly protected and reiterated.
In England alone there are 15 honour killings a year when male relatives have killed their daughters or sisters for supposedly transgressing Islamic teaching. In both rightist and leftist discourse there is a refusal to take as equally significant the variety of stories Muslims tell about their own lives and their own political practices, particularly if they contradict the narrative the commentator wants to assert.
The testimonies of ex-Muslims are especially prized i. In much discourse in the media there is also a fetish of origins, so that many leftists such as Phillip Adams impute that Middle Eastern, Arab or Saudi Islam is real Islam, and that those origins determine Muslim practice in the present and not the other way around.
The recent response to the partial Saudi funding of an Islamic research unit at Griffith University, led by so-called national security experts, is a good example, with its paranoid demand for the stamping out of what it presented as an outbreak of Islamist infection, as if the mass inoculation against Islam that Australian history constitutes was on the verge of exhaustion.
Works by living Muslims obviously did not qualify as Islamic, given that the exhibition stopped at the Middle Ages. Even art curators, not known for their leftist leanings, assume in their selection of mate- rial that modernity is antithetical to genuine or true Islam, presumably because modern times usher in works by contemporary Muslims that lack a characteristic aesthetic style represented as a master blueprint informing all individual or local variations.
There is an analogy here with an Islamophobic leftist position on Islam, which questions whether liberal or feminist Muslims are properly and equally Islamic, just as curators do for the art of modern Muslims.
In the process, both art curators and leftists maintain with surgical precision a distinction between Muslims and modernity. Is it the work of the anthropologist to say which is right? Muslims do things—organise social actions and relationships—in the name of Islam. The differ- ence between the Islam of anthropology and Islamophobic discourse on Islam is not a refusal on the part of anthropologists to criticise dominant Islamic orthodoxies or practices in any specific social field.
It is a refusal to conflate this critical analysis with Islam in toto, as well as to reinforce other political projects that claim the incompatiab- lity of Islam with secularism for the assertion of their own interests or strategies of power. Here there is cri- tique without prior analytic due diligence, in the process deflecting attention from particular social relations through which the struggle for orthodoxy is carried out, by those very women as well.
If the best that Islamophobic feminism can offer Muslim women is, as Kate McCulloch from Camden suggests, the assimilation of their values so as to become like her, then it too is fated to irrelevancy. Houston 2 See the newspaper Radikal, 19 March, , reporting on a speech by the Head of the Ministry of Religious Affairs for the celebration of Mevlid Kandili, the birth of the prophet.
International Journal of Middle East Studies — Asad, T. Two European images of non-European rule. Asad ed. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, pp. New York: Humanities Press. Bone, P. Why we stay mute on Islamic sex apartheid.
The Australian, 7 December. Bunzil, M. Between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some thoughts on the new Europe. American Ethnologist — Button, J. Faithless defender. Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September. Cannell, F. The Christianity of Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute — Evans-Pritchard, E.
The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mahmood, S. Feminist theory, embodiment and the docile agent: Some reflections on the Egyptian Islamic revival. Cultural Anthropology — Makris, G. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Murphy, D.
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