The Anthropology of Islam

Gabriele Marranci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190038
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An increasing number of people have questions about Islam and Muslims. But how can we approach and study Islam after September 11th? Which is the best methodology to understand an Islam that is changing in a globalized world? The Anthropology of Islam argues that Islam today needs to be studied as a living religion through the observation of everyday Muslim life. Drawing on extensive original fieldwork, Marranci provides provocative analyses of Islam and its relation to issues such as identities, politics, culture, power and gender. The Anthropology of Islam is unprecedented in its innovative and challenging discussion about fieldwork among Muslims, and its ethnographically based interpretations of contemporary aspects of Islam in a post-September 11th society. The book will appeal to those in anthropology and beyond who see and are interested in investigating the unsettled place of Islam in our multicultural society.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

ELENCHOS¹

STUDENT: What is Islam?

ANTHROPOLOGIST: Lots of things, of course.

STU: Yeah, but I mean, is Islam its holy books or what Muslims do?

ANT: Neither, I suppose.

STU: Well, it should be one or the other for sure!

ANT: Why should it be so?

STU: I think that the Qur’an and þadiths, and the other texts, tell Muslims how to be Muslims and this guides their actions.

ANT: OK, we can try an experiment. Get that copy of the Qur’an on my desk. So, tell me what this is.

STU: A book; a holy book, at least for Muslims.

ANT: What makes it holy?

STU: The fact that Muslims consider it so.

ANT: OK, but if you were a Muslim why would you have insisted that this particular book is the holiest?

STU: That’s simple Doc! Because, I would believe the book to be God’s words.

ANT: You see, Islam is not just what is written in its books.

STU: Why not? I don’t follow you.

ANT: Well, it’s very simple. You just said that this book, the Qur’an, is holy because at least one Muslim believes that God revealed it. Now you can agree with me that Muslims, each of them, have to perform cognitive operations to form a cognitive map of what for them is Islam. There is no Islam without mind.

STU: Certainly, you need Muslims to have Islam. Yet I still think that what is written in the sources of Islam shapes how Muslims are. Though there are some cultural differences, I am not sure about your point. I think that something called Islam actually exists.

ANT: OK, we will proceed point by point. Not only do we have different cultures among Muslims but also different interpretations. Which is the most basic element that you need to form interpretations?

STU: First, you need to know at least the language in which the text has been transmitted or trust a translation; but there are also other elements, like personal views and social conditions that surely influence one’s interpretation.

ANT: You are discussing a second order of elements. I asked about the basic element without which we cannot have interpretations, or any other mental process, since interpretations are complex mental processes.

STU: Well . . . the most basic is that you should be able to think. To have mental processes, like thoughts, we need a mind.

ANT: Yes, because for the ‘thing’ we call Islam to exist, we need a mind that can conceive of it, making it part of a mental process.

STU: Why refer to Islam as ‘the thing’ now?

ANT: You have just agreed that Islam exists because of the mental processes allowing some people to make sense of certain texts and practices. Are mental processes ‘real’ things?

STU: Well, I would say that they are exactly that, processes. We make sense of what is around us through mental processes.

ANT: Exactly, we, as human beings, through mental processes form what we can call maps.

STU: I can see that. So you are saying that Islam is just a map.

ANT: Well, more than one, for sure. It’s like one of those maps formed by many other different small maps, which, when put together, represent a vast territory.

STU: And, as you have reminded us many times, the map is not the territory.

ANT: But in this case, we can only know the map, since the territory consists of an endless ensemble of mental processes.

STU: At this point, I do not see the difference between a Muslim and non-Muslim forming mental processes about Islam. What makes them different?

ANT: Nothing, indeed, if we speak of the cognitive processes involved. You know, I have the impression that the most important thing that has been forgotten while studying Muslims is the otherwise obvious fact that they are human beings like me and you.

STU: But, I mean, doesn’t the fact that they believe in Islam make their mind different? Sometimes, in some articles, I come across the expression ‘Muslim mind’.

ANT: Some scholars, and unfortunately some anthropologists among them, have even suggested that a Muslim mind can exist. But how can a mind, which means cognitive processes allowed through neurological activities, be

Muslim? Think if we extend this reasoning to other adjectives: Christian minds, Conservative minds, Jewish minds, Scientology minds, Jedi minds and Flying Spaghetti Monster minds.²

STU: So, what makes a person a Muslim? I thought that the fact that a person believes in the Qur’an and the sunna and in the shahāda, the profession of faith, makes a person a Muslim.

ANT: You are suggesting that it is the person’s act of believing that makes him a Muslim. Let me see . . . do you believe that Juan Carlos I is the king of Spain?

STU: Yes, Doc.

ANT: Are you Spanish?

STU: Of course not. You know I’m Scottish!

ANT: Why are you Scottish and not Spanish, though you believe that Juan Carlos I is the king of Spain?

STU: First, I was not born in Spain, I do not have Spanish parents and, by the way, I do not feel Spanish at all. I am not emotionally attached to the idea of being Spanish. Like during the World Cup, if Scotland is not playing, I can support another team, but when Scotland is playing, I am excited and feel something . . . a particular attachment that tells me that I’m Scottish.

ANT: Indeed, what matters here is that you feel to be Scottish.

STU: Are you suggesting that Muslims are Muslims because they consider themselves Muslim?

ANT: Does it sound so strange?

STU: Well, if you are right it means that the most important aspect is neither what the Islamic texts read, nor what Muslims believe, nor how they act, but rather whether or not they believe themselves to be Muslims, and here emotions play a very important role, as in my case of feeling to be Scottish.

ANT: Yes, this is correct. We need to restart our research, as anthropologists, from that ‘feeling to be’, in this case, Muslim.

DE-TITLING THE TITLE

The Anthropology of Islam is a title that raises questions and certainly expectations. What is the anthropology of Islam? Why anthropology instead of theology or history? Why use the term Islam instead of Islams or Islam(s)? Why focus on Islam instead of Muslims? Is there only one anthropology of Islam or can we speak of anthropologies of Islam, or even anthropologies of Islams? How does the anthropology of Islam differ from, say, any other anthropology of religion? How does the anthropology of Islam differ from the sociology of Islam, or Islamic studies, or Islamic anthropology? Of course, I can add many other questions to those I have collected in the two years I worked on The Anthropology of Islam – some derived from genuine curiosity, others from healthy academic criticism and yet others from simple sceptical reactions. All these questions have shaped, transformed and re-transformed the book itself. Many of these questions will find answers in the chapters that will follow, in particular Chapter 3. Nonetheless, I want to introduce some relevant points behind the reason for this book. To do so, I need to explain the phylogeny of this project.

When I was a university student in anthropology, with an interest in Muslim cultures, I found myself disoriented by the enormous amount of research and references on the topic of Islam and Muslims produced in the last twenty-five years. Very soon, I discovered that these studies spread among different disciplines with different methodologies, aims, scopes and sometimes, indeed, political affiliations and agendas. My anthropological vocation brought me to focus on the social scientific side of these studies, though I also enthusiastically read and studied historical and traditional Islamic studies works. Although it was not difficult to find ethnographic studies of Muslim communities, in particular devoted to the Middle Eastern societies, I became aware that an epistemological discussion on what the anthropology of Islam might be never fully developed, despite some reflexive attempts such as those provided by el-Zein (1977) and Asad (1986a). Other scholars have offered critical reviews of the available anthropological approaches to Islam; yet these review articles, such as those written by Fernea and Malarkey (1975), Eickelman (1981b), Abu-Lughod (1989) and Gilsenan (1990), have focused mainly on the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA). It is not difficult to see how Said, though inexplicably appreciating Geertz’s work, suggested that anthropology, despite its ‘supposedly disinterested universality’ (1985: 95) had not overcome its connections with colonialism and Orientalist views. With Asad (1986a) and Abu-Lughod (1989), I consider Said’s observation unfair – without wishing to deny the historical collusions that anthropology as a discipline, and single anthropologists as scholars, had with colonial powers (see Chapter 3 in this book). Indeed, Said superficially ignored the contribution that anthropology has provided to the understanding of North African Muslims and the Middle East through anthropologists such as Eickelman.

Time has since passed, and I find myself on the other side of the desk, teaching students what the university course catalogue calls the anthropology of Islam. If in other anthropological fields, and in religious studies, we can find collections of articles, textbooks and the increasingly successful short introduction (see for instance Bowie 2000; Kunin 2002; Ney 2003; Segal 2006), this is not the case for anthropological approaches to Muslims and their religion. If then we turn to the most widely used anthologies and introductory books on religious studies or anthropology, we can observe a lack – with rare exceptions, such as Morris’s Anthropology and Religion: A Critical Introduction (2005) – of any reference to Islam or to anthropological research on Muslims. Why? Anthropologists researching topics related to Islam have been, with the notable exception of Geertz, unsuccessful in reaching a wide audience outside their own subdiscipline. Yet there are also other more complex, I would say structural, reasons. Sociological and anthropological research on Islam has developed through specific studies and ethnographies, but without real coherence or discussion among the scholars. During the 1970s, anthropological research on Islam was at its dawn, and el-Zein’s challenging article (1977) attempted to reopen a debate, but remained unexplored beyond the scholarly diatribe on one Islam versus many Islams (see Chapter 3, this book). While el-Zein’s efforts seemed to fail, the short essays of Geertz’s Islam Observed seemed to succeed. But it remained an isolated case and certainly did not aim to shape or clarify what the anthropology of Islam might have been. Geertz was just ‘observing Islam’, and could not forecast the impact that some lectures and a few pages would have produced years later. Finally, in 1986, Asad consciously, rather than by chance as in the case of Geertz’s extended essay, offered a challenging reflection on the anthropology of Islam in an attempt to continue the debate that el-Zein started nearly ten years before (Asad 1986b). Asad’s effort remained largely ignored, producing response and reflections only after decades had passed (see Lukens-Bull 1999). Hence, nearly thirty years on from el-Zein’s intellectual engagement on the definition of the anthropology, we can still say with Asad, ‘no coherent anthropology of Islam can be found on the notion of a determinate social blueprint’ (1986b: 16). But, do you need a blueprint? I will try to discuss this in the chapters that follow.

The lack of self-reflection on what the anthropology of Islam is or should be, and the lack of a phylogenesis of this anthropological field, can also explain more recent events. Varisco (2005) in his provocative title Islam Obscured, has rightly highlighted a certain fossilization of how the anthropology of Islam has been, and still is thought of within university,

Textual truths engendered and far too often engineered in representing Islam find their way unscrutinized and insufficiently digested into an endless stream of introductory and general texts, even solidly scholarly works. Seminal texts, once canonized as theoretically innovative or simply authoritative by default, have a library shelf life far beyond their usefulness and freshness in the disciplines that generate them. (2005: 3)

Today, after political and social events that have marked the beginning of the new millennium with an increased tension between the stereotyped representation of Islam and the no-less-stereotyped image of a civilizing West, we must reconsider how we have approached Islam from an anthropological perspective.

Anthropologists, as we shall observe in this book (Chapter 4), have preferred focusing their attention on the ‘Other’ in exotic contexts. Anthropologists researching Muslim societies have for a long time studied Muslim societies within Islamic countries, and often the Muslim was the Sufior the Bedouin (Eickelman 1981a; Abu-Lughod 1989; Varisco 2005). The west, understood often as a monolithic social and cultural expression, was considered the domain of sociology. The new flux of migrations from Muslim countries changed disinterest, blurring the boundaries between sociology and anthropology, particularly in the case of Europe. As I shall explain later in this book, I strongly believe that we need to observe the methodology employed instead of classical academic divisions. In fact, an increasing number of contemporary sociologists use fieldwork and participant observation as part of their studies. In these cases, I consider their studies as part of the social and anthropological approach to Islam. Nonetheless, even in recent publications, the anthropology of Islam seems still rooted in a nostalgic exoticism. Clearly, as also Varisco has recognized, the anthropology of Islam, today, cannot be other than global. We cannot study, for example, Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Morocco and Libya, without taking into consideration the transnational and global networks they are part of. Similarly, we cannot study Muslim communities in the west without paying attention to their connections with other Muslims in Islamic countries and other communities, both Muslim and non-Muslim. One clear example of the multisided interaction that Muslims living in the west partake in is the campaigns against the Afghan and Iraqi Wars, as well as the recent Israeli–Lebanese conflict. In all these occasions, Muslims have not only shared their activities with other fellow coreligionists, but also with non-Muslim organizations such as the Stop the War Coalition, the No-Global organization and traditional political parties (Yaqoob 2003).

Nonetheless, essentialism affects both academic and popular discourse on Muslims. I tend to call this essentialism the fallacy of the ‘Muslim mind theory’. As we shall see in the chapters of this book, surprisingly some sociologists and anthropologists have not been immune to it.³ This fallacy argues that religion induces Muslims to believe, behave, act, think, argue and develop their identity as Muslims despite their disparate heritages, ethnicities, nationalities, experiences, gender, sexual orientations and, last but not least, mind. In other words, their believing in Islam makes them a sort of cloned CPU: different styles, different colours, same process. Sometimes this fallacy is the result of generalizations, some of which are difficult to avoid. At other times, however, it is more ideological and the by-product of an extreme culturalist position. In all cases, the root of it is the, latent or manifest, unrecognized fact that a Muslim person is primarily a human being. In The Anthropology of Islam, I shall suggest that emotions and feelings should be at the centre of our studies of Islam. This means reconsidering the relationship between nature and culture – as we shall discuss in Chapter 6.

Participant observation, at least since Malinowski, has been the main methodology within anthropological studies. Fieldwork should have been the main antidote to essentialism. However, fieldwork in itself cannot protect the anthropologist from embracing essentialism. We need to understand that we cannot conduct anthropological fieldwork within Muslim societies and communities as, for example, Geertz (1968) or Rabinow (1977) did about thirty years ago. We have to face, for instance, new challenges, some of which are the product of new technologies. I encountered evidence recently of how the expanding easy accessibility of the Internet in all countries can modify the experience of fieldwork. My PhD supervisor used to tell me about her experience of fieldwork in Africa, and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Islam: Beliefs, History and Rituals
• 3 From Studying Islam to Studying Muslims
• 4 Studying Muslims in the West: Before and After September 11
• 5 From the Exotic to the Familiar: Anamneses of Fieldwork among Muslims
• 6 Beyond the Stereotype: Challenges in Understanding Muslim Identities
• 7 The Ummah Paradox
• 8 The Dynamics of Gender in Islam
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index