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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 ffffiirrss..iinndddd ii 1100//2288//22000099 11::1100::5599 PPMM ISLAM, POLITICS, ANTHROPOLOGY EDITED BY FILIPPO OSELLA AND BENJAMIN SOARES Royal Anthropological Institute A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication ffffiirrss..iinndddd iiiiii 1100//2288//22000099 11::1100::5599 PPMM 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 Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientifi c, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Offi ce John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offi ces 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offi ces, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/ wiley-blackwell. The rights of Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares to be identifi ed as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. 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 ffffiirrss..iinndddd iivv 1100//2288//22000099 11::1100::5599 PPMM 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 ffttoocc..iinndddd vv 1100//2288//22000099 11::1155::4488 PPMM 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. ffllaasstt..iinndddd vviiii 1100//2288//22000099 11::1155::2288 PPMM 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). ffllaasstt..iinndddd vviiiiii 1100//2288//22000099 11::1155::2288 PPMM 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

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Part of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Special Issue Book Series, Islam, Politics, Anthropology offers critical reflections on past and current studies of Islam and politics in anthropology and charts new analytical approaches to examining Islam in the post-9/11 world.  Challeng
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.