Islam, Politics, Anthropology

249 Pages·2010·3.27 MB·English

by  Filippo Osella

Islam, Politics, Anthropology
Islam, Politics, Anthropology Edited by Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares
© 2010 Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland. ISBN: 978-1-444-33295-7
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ISLAM, POLITICS,
ANTHROPOLOGY
EDITED BY FILIPPO OSELLA AND
BENJAMIN SOARES
Royal Anthropological
Institute
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
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This edition fi rst published 2010
Originally published as Volume 15, Special Issue May 2009, of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Society
© 2010 Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Islam, politics, anthropology / edited by Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-3295-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political anthropology—Islamic countries. 2. Islam
and politics. 3. Islam and culture. 4. Politics and culture—Islamic countries. 5. Islamic countries—
Politics and government. I. Osella, Filippo. II. Soares, Benjamin F.
GN641.I75 2010
306.6'97—dc22
2009041491
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 10/12pt Minion by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed in Malaysia
01 2010
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Contents
Notes on contributors vii
1 Benjamin Soares & Filippo Osella Islam, politics,
anthropology 1
2 Samuli Schielke Being good in Ramadan: ambivalence,
fragmentation, and the moral self in the lives of
young Egyptians 23
3 Hatsuki Aishima & Armando Salvatore Doubt, faith,
and knowledge: the reconfi guration of the intellectual fi eld in
post-Nasserist Cairo 39
4 Magnus Marsden A tour not so grand: mobile Muslims in
northern Pakistan 54
5 Kai Kresse Muslim politics in postcolonial Kenya:
negotiating knowledge on the double-periphery 72
6 Rosa De Jorio Between dialogue and contestation: gender,
Islam, and the challenges of a Malian public sphere 91
7 Lara Deeb Piety politics and the role of a transnational
feminist analysis 107
8 Julie McBrien Mukadas’s struggle: veils and modernity
in Kyrgyzstan 121
9 Irfan Ahmad Genealogy of the Islamic state: refl ections
on Maududi’s political thought and Islamism 138
10 Maimuna Huq Talking jihad and piety: reformist exertions
among Islamist women in Bangladesh 156
11 Daromir Rudnyckyj Market Islam in Indonesia 175
12 Filippo Osella & Caroline Osella Muslim entrepreneurs
in public life between India and the Gulf: making good
and doing good 194
13 Gregory Starrett Islam and the politics of enchantment 213
Index 231
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Notes on contributors
Irfan Ahmad earned his Ph.D. degree in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
Currently, he is Lecturer in Politics at Monash University, Melbourne, where he is
involved in leading the Centre for the Study of Islam and the Modern World. He is
author of Islamism and Democracy in India: the transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami
(Princeton University Press, 2009).
Hatsuki Aishima is a social anthropologist reading Oriental Studies at the University
of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis project, which studies Islamic knowledge and intel-
lectuals in contemporary Egypt through the prism of ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud, was
awarded the Albert Hourani Graduate Studentship 2008-9 of St Antony’s College.
Lara Deeb is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Scripps
College and the author of An enchanted modern: gender and public piety in Shi’i
Lebanon (Princeton University Press, 2006).
Rosa De Jorio is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Florida
in Jacksonville. Her research focuses on gender, politics, the politics of culture, memory
and the historical imagination, Islam and social movements, in Mali. She has guest-
edited two special issues for Polar: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review (2003)
and Africa Today (2006). Her book Representing the nation: the politics of culture in Mali
(1960-2002) will appear in 2010 with the University of Illinois Press.
Maimuna Huq is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of
South Carolina. Her publications include ‘From piety to romance: Islam-oriented texts
in Bangladesh’, in New media in the Muslim world: the emerging public sphere (eds)
Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (Indiana University Press, 2003).
Kai Kresse is Vice-Director for Research at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in
Berlin. He was Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews
(2002-2009) and Evans-Pritchard Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2005. His
monograph Philosophising in Mombasa: knowledge, Islam and intellectual practice on
the Swahili coast (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) was a fi nalist for the African
Studies Association’s 2008 Melville J. Herskovits Award.
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viii Notes on Contributors
Magnus Marsden is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology with reference to South
and Central Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
His has conducted research on Muslim thought and identity in the Chitral region of
Pakistan, and, most recently, northern Afghanistan.
Julie McBrien is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
Her current research examines the dreams and disillusions of young women in
Kyrgyzstan.
Caroline Osella is Reader in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, UK. She has spent twenty years undertaking
research work in Kerala and with Malayali migrants in the Gulf states. Her interests
revolve around the broad question of how projects of identity crafting are brought
back to the body, while socially constructed bodies are differentiated to refl ect class,
ethnic, and gender differences and to forge social hierarchies.
Filippo Osella is Reader in the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Sussex, UK. He has conducted research in Kerala, South India for the last twenty years,
and lately in a number of West Asian Gulf countries. His current research focuses on
the emergence of Islamic reformist movements and the rise of a new Muslim middle
class in Kerala in the context of an intensifi cation of economic, cultural, and religious
links between South India and the Gulf region.
Daromir Rudnyckyj is Assistant Professor of Pacifi c and Asian Studies at the
University of Victoria. His research projects examine Islam and globalization in
contemporary Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. His forthcoming book is
entitled Spiritual economies: Islam and the after life of development.
Armando Salvatore is Associate Professor, Sociology of Culture and Communication,
University of Naples – L’Orientale, and Heisenberg Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences,
Humboldt University, Berlin, and Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities,
Essen. His latest book is The public sphere: liberal modernity, Catholicism, Islam
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Samuli Schielke received his MA in Islamic studies from the University of Bonn in
2000 and his Ph.D. in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam in 2006. He
is currently a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin.
Benjamin Soares is a Senior Research Fellow at the Afrika-Studiecentrum in Leiden,
The Netherlands. His publications include Islam and the prayer economy (Edinburgh
University Press/University of Michigan Press, 2005) and two co-edited volumes, Islam
and Muslim politics in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Islam, Etat et société en
Afrique (Karthala, 2009).
Gregory Starrett is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte. He is author of Putting Islam to work (University of California Press, 1998)
and co-editor of Teaching Islam: textbooks and religion in the Middle East (Lynne
Rienner, 2007).
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1
Islam, politics, anthropology
Benjamin Soares Afrika-Studiecentrum
Filippo Osella University of Sussex
Ourmainaiminthisbookistoreflectcriticallyonthestudyof Islamandpoliticsin
anthropology.Islamandpoliticsare,ofcourse,incrediblyfraughttopics.Anthropology
itself has a long and not unproblematic engagement with the study of Islam and
Muslimsocieties,andsofirstwewouldliketoreturntothathistorybeforeconsidering
ongoinganthropologicaldebatesandsuggestingnewtermsofanalysisoftherelation-
shipbetweenIslamandpolitics.1Ourunderstandingof politicsisdeliberatelybroad.
We pay attention to the state and formal politics,involving various social actors and
organizations. But we are also interested in everyday politics and various kinds of
micropolitics,arenaswhereanthropologyprovesespeciallyadept.Itisattheintersec-
tionofthesemultiplelevels–wherethefieldofpoliticsisconstitutedinpractice–that
wesituatetheanalyticalfocusof thisbook.
Whilesomemightclaimthattheeventsojrai_15f391..22September11,2001wereamongthemost
centraldefiningmomentsintherepresentationsofIslamandMuslimsocieties,stereo-
typesaboutIslamandMuslimshaveactuallybeenremarkablyresilient.Thefigureof
the ‘mad mullah’ who radicalizes the uneducated, naïve, but largely benign Muslim
massesinnineteenth-centuryBritishaccountsof Muslims’anti-colonialpolitics(see,
e.g.,Ansari2005;Edwards1989;Jalal2008)andtwentieth-centuryFrenchaccountsof
allegedlydangerous‘Sufis’and/or‘Wahhabis’whothreatentoleadordinaryMuslimsin
their West African colonies astray (see, e.g., Harrison 1988; Launay & Soares 1999;
Triaud 1992) are the genealogical antecedents of contemporary characterizations of
‘radical’IslamandIslamism2inmuchWesternmediaandpublicculture.Meanwhile,
imagesof(veiled)Muslimwomenhaveacquirediconicstatusinthewesternimaginary
as representations of the oppressed and subordinated Otherpar excellence.3After the
IranianRevolutioninthelate1970sandthewidespreadrecognitionofthelimitations
of thesecularizationthesis,manyquestionedthecompatibilityof IslamandMuslims
with modernity.In a countermove,others tried to prove that Islam could indeed be
‘modern’ and compatible with democracy. As Mahmood Mamdani (2002) has
Islam, Politics, Anthropology Edited by Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares
© 2010 Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland. ISBN: 978-1-444-33295-7
2 Benjamin Soares & Filippo Osella
remarked,sinceSeptember11,2001therehasbeenmuch‘culturetalk’aboutMuslims
andtheirpoliticswherevertheyhappentoliveintheworld.Weare,therefore,nolonger
surprisedbymanycommentators’essentializingimpulseswhentheobjectof studyis
Islam or Muslims. Like many other anthropologists, we are also cognizant of and
increasinglywaryofstepped-upattemptsbygovernments,theirmilitaries,andsecurity
apparatuses to appropriate anthropological methods and insights into Islam and
Muslimsocietiesforpossiblynefariousendsinongoingwars,includingtheso-called
‘waronterror’.4ManyofourMuslimresearchsubjectshavebecomewellinformedand
savvyabouttheimagesof Muslims(andMuslimwomeninparticular)thatcirculate,
andthekindsofMuslimsthoughttobe‘good’and‘bad’(seeHirschkind&Mahmood
2002;Mamdani2002).Butthisisnottoassert,assomeinterpretersof EdwardSaid’s
Orientalism (1978; cf. Varisco 2007) have seemed to suggest, any facile or inevitable
Orientalisttrap,whichwouldaprioripreventanycompellingrepresentationsofIslam
andMuslimsocieties.Thisisnotapositionwhichwe,orthecontributorstothisbook,
arewillingtoaccept.
Let us turn to some of the specific challenges associated with the anthropological
study of Islam and Muslim societies. While academic discourse and Western media
alikehaveproducedreifiedviewsofIslamandMuslimsinabundance,suchviewshave
alsoemergedfromwithinIslamitself,viaMuslims’interpretationsandrepresentations
of their own religion as unitary, timeless, and unchanging (see Launay 1992; Parkin
2000). Representations are never simply reflections on or descriptions of reality, of
social and religious processes necessarily already ‘out there’ in the world; they have
generativepower.Inreshapingconceptualcategories,theyareorientatedtowardspro-
ducingsomethingwhichisgivenconcreteground,therebyintensifyingarealityalready
alluded to in discourse itself (Callon, Méadel & Rabeharisoa 2002; Mitchell 2005;
Navaro-Yashin2002;Thrift2005).Itisimperativetopayattentiontothegenealogiesof
discourses(academic,state,‘official’,global,aswellasthoseofourresearchsubjectsand
interlocutors),whichmightbecomeauthoritativeandnormative,andthroughwhich
politics in Muslim societies is comprehended,experienced,legitimated,or contested.
Wemustalsorememberthatseeminglyauthoritativediscoursesanddisciplinaryprac-
ticesareneithertotalizing,noraretheiroutcomesnecessarilyeasilypredictable.Finally,
itisalsoimportanttoheedthewarningofthosewhohavearguedagainstautomatically
privileging religion as the principal – or perhaps unique – foundation for Muslim
identityandpoliticalpractice(seeAbu-Lughod1989;Al-Ali2000;Grillo2004;Silver-
stein2004).
Socialstructure,culture,andtheconundrumsofmodernity
Itisstrikingthatprofessionalanthropologistswhoconductedfieldworkinmanycolo-
nial settings in the twentieth century in Africa and Asia tended to ignore Islam and
Muslim societies or simply left the study of Islam and Muslims to historians and/or
thosetrainedasOrientalists(seeLaunay2006;Soares2000).Someanthropologistsdid,
however, write about Islam and Muslims at the height of European colonial rule,
notably E.E. Evans-Pritchard. His study of the Sanusiyya – a Sufi order – in Libya
(Evans-Pritchard 1949) was perhaps the first anthropological study focused on Islam
and Muslim society per se. At a time when anthropologists were almost exclusively
concernedwithsmall-scalesocietiesorthosedeemedtobesomehowmoreauthenti-
cally‘African’or‘Asian’,the originality of Evans-Pritchard’s book was to show how a
specificallyMusliminstitution–theSufiorder–couldbeestablishedalongextensive
Islam, politics, anthropology 3
trans-Saharan trade routes and subsequently used to mobilize‘tribal’groups against
the Italian occupation of Libya. Despite Evans-Pritchard’s attention to the role of
religion and of religious leadership in politics in this book,anthropological research
whichfollowedoftenfailedtodealseriouslywithIslamasanobjectofstudy,privileging
instead research on ‘tribal’ societies, particularly in the Middle East, where social
structureandkinshipwereamajorfocus(seeGilsenan1990foranoverview).5
It was Ernest Gellner who developed Evans-Pritchard’s social structural approach
furthest.6 Gellner’s work became a key reference-point for many studies of Muslim
societies.Although Gellner’s model of‘Muslim society’– purposely identified in the
singular(1981;seealsoGellner1963;1968)–positsIslamasresistanttosecularization,
itisnoteworthythatIslamandmodernityarenotdeemedincompatible.InGellner’s
neo-Weberianmodel(cf.Turner1974),modernitytakestheformofprogressiveratio-
nalization. Gellner argues that Muslim society will over time necessarily eschew the
‘traditional’and‘ecstatic’formsofreligionassociatedwiththerural(so-calledpopular
or‘low’ Islam) for the more modern, puritan, and‘rational’ forms of religion (read
reformism) associated with the urban and scriptural (‘high’ Islam). An important
elementtoGellner’sargumentisthatthiswillbeapermanentbreak,whichoccursas
aresultofcolonialmodernization(1981:56ff.;159ff.)when‘thependulumswingsmore
violentlyandbecomesunhinged’(1981:159).ForGellner,Islamicreformismisindeed
perfectly‘compatible’withmodernity(see,e.g.,Gellner1981:170ff.).
IncontrasttoGellner’sBritishsocial-structuralmodelof‘Muslimsociety’writlarge,
CliffordGeertzinIslamobserved(1968)proposedaculturalanthropologicalreadingof
‘meaning’and‘culture’,which vary according to context in the Muslim world.While
Islam here is not, as in Gellner’s words, the‘blueprint of a social order’ (1981: 1), it
neverthelessprovidespeoplewithenduring‘framesof perception’and‘blueprintsfor
conduct’(Geertz 1968: 98). Geertz contrasted the overall‘cultural styles’of Morocco
and Indonesia, in his view much more important than ‘social structure’. However,
Geertz’sattentionto‘meaning’wasaccompaniedbyanotionofsocial‘order’.Onecan
see, for example, that both Morocco and Indonesia have undergone what he calls a
‘scripturalist interlude’ before returning to the dominant – that is, seemingly hege-
monic – cultural styles of‘maraboutism’and‘illuminationism’,respectively.In other
words, Geertz deploys two different understandings of ‘religion’, firstly, as enduring
‘culture’, and, secondly, as a set of historically contingent sensibilities and practices.
WhilescripturalisminIndonesiaandMoroccoemergesasa‘counter-tradition’,setting
the basis for an engagement with colonial modernity and for the development of
nationalistpolitics,Geertzclaimsthatthelogicofaparticular‘culturalsystem’cannot
beentirelytranscended.Politicalprocesses,whichmightbeconstrainedby‘culture’,can
engender neither enduring transformations nor historical shifts.7 Moreover,Geertz’s
modernity,likeGellner’s,isaWesternprerogativethatspreadswithcolonialism.While
itmightbetakenuporcontested,itwillinvariablyleadtoproblematicoutcomes,such
as fledgeling states that have failed to transform themselves into fully modern func-
tioningpolities.
Shortcomingsnotwithstanding,GellnerandGeertzbothpointedtotheimportance
of religion in societies undergoing profound social transformations. It is significant
thatbothwerewritingintheheydayofmodernizationtheory,whenthesecularization
thesiswasnear-hegemonicinsocial-scientificthinkingabout‘modern’societies.They
helpedcounterthisbytracingtheemergenceundercolonialismofnovelreligiousand
politicalsensibilities.Theyunderstood‘modern’waysofbeingMuslim–oftenglossed
4 Benjamin Soares & Filippo Osella
as‘scripturalism’,‘reformism’,andsoforth–asthearticulationof nationalistpolitics
andsoughttolinkthesewithparticularsocialgroups’responsesandengagementswith
colonialism.ThisisofcourseafarcryfrommorerecentcharacterizationsofIslamas
basicallyhostiletomodernity(see,e.g.,Giddens1999:4-5;Huntington1996).
If theIranianRevolutionandthecritiqueof Orientalismspurredmanytograpple
with the challenges of studying Muslim societies, the post-Cold War era seemed to
herald the possibility of new ways of thinking about Islam and Muslim societies.
However, commitments to Weberian notions of the progressive rationalization of
religion under conditions of modernity have endured.Writing at the intersection of
anthropology and political science, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori (1996) have
analysed what they called‘Muslim politics’, in a broad synthesis of developments in
various settings. They have advanced the argument that, in recent years, Muslims
throughouttheworldhavecometo‘objectify’theirreligion.Inthisprocessof objec-
tification, which echoes the shift from religiousness to religious-mindedness that
Geertzhadoutlined,8Muslimshavedeveloped‘heightenedself-consciousness’ofIslam
asareligious‘system’(Eickelman&Piscatori1996:39;cf.Deeb2006onthe‘authenti-
cation’of Islam).Eickelman and Piscatori argue that with mass education,increased
literacy,and the spread of new media technologies (cf.Anderson 1991;Gellner 1983),
therehasbeenanincreasedfragmentationofauthorityinMuslimsocieties.Asaresult,
a greater diversity of people deign to speak about what Islam is. The ‘traditional’
interpretersofIslam–Muslimscholarsor‘ulama–havelosttheirmonopolyandnow
competewithotherMuslims(seealsoZaman2002).Thisshiftawayfromanassumed
dichotomy between ‘ulama and the so-called ‘popular Islam’ of ordinary Muslims
openednewpossibilitiesforunderstandingIslamandMuslimsocieties.
Focusing on the links between education,literacy,and media and changes in reli-
gious authority, Eickelman and Piscatori’s analytical turn placed contemporary
Muslim politics within epistemological shifts and social processes – reflexivity,
increasedrationalization,anddemocraticparticipation,forinstance–ordinarilyasso-
ciatedinmainstreamsocialtheorywithWesternmodernity(seealsoHefner2005;cf.
Soares&Otayek2007).Butforthosescholarswhohavesubsequentlyidentifiedhybrid
oralternativemodernitiesinvariousMuslimsocieties(e.g.Abu-Lughod1998;Brenner
1996; Göle 1996; 2002; White 2002; cf. Deeb 2006; Mahmood 2005; Navaro-Yashin
2002), modernity itself remains a specific Northern European or North American
intellectualtraditionspreadingtotherestof theworldinthewakeof colonialism.In
other words, positing the existence of domesticated or indigenized modernities
depends on a Eurocentric model implying a lack of authenticity to non-Western
modernities and simultaneously denying equal participation of the Muslim Other
(Clarence-Smith 2007; cooke & Lawrence 2005: 17ff.; Mitchell 2000; Navaro-Yashin
2002:9ff.).TheargumentsofmanyMuslimintellectuals,oftrepeatedbyourresearch
respondents,attributethisepistemologicaldenialtoarticulationsofcolonialandpost-
colonialpowerrelations(seeClarence-Smith2007;Washbrook1997).Theconsequence
ofthislopsidedmodelisthatMuslimsarepresentedashavingto‘engage’withmoder-
nity, an external force encroaching on and disrupting their lives. Nilüfer Göle, for
example, argues that for many Turkish women, Islamism‘permits a critique of cus-
tomaryIslamandawaytocopewithmodernity’,allowing‘Islamistwomentoreconcile
theirsocial-professionaldemandswiththeirIslamicidentities’(1996:104).Incontra-
distinctiontosuchperspectives,wewanttoinsistthatmodernityisnecessarilysingular
and global, always instantiated locally – in the West as elsewhere – within wider