Islam, Politics, Anthropology (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Special Issue Book Series)

253 Pages·2010·2.17 MB·English

by  Filippo Osella

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Islam, Politics, Anthropology
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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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