Muslim Diversity

Local Islam in Global Contexts

Leif Manger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415759953
• eBook ISBN: 9781136818646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

The term 'local Islam' has been coined to describe local responses to the effects of globalisation in the Islamic world. All contributions to this volume present cases of 'local Islam' as well as discussing the term itself. But what all of this group of anthropologists and historians convey is a feeling of dissatisfaction with the very term. Their uneasiness relates to the conceptual problems arising from seeing Islam as either local or global. Rather, the authors argue in favour of a focus not on Islam but on the lives of Muslims, putting their lives into the context of complex historical developments. Ranging across much of the vast extent of the Islamic world - from West Africa and the Near East to China and Southeast Asia - the contributions deal with the effects of migration on local Islamic traditions in Bangladesh; conflicts between Muslim sects in Pakistan; the development of jihad in West Africa; the problem of maintaining a Muslim identity in China; how Javanese Muslims combine their Islamic faith with belief in a local Javanese spirit world; the comparison between urban- and rural-based Islam in Syria; and (in two studies from western Sudan) issues of belief and broader aspects of identity management in a multi-ethnic situation.

1 Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts

Leif Manger

Introduction

The Orientalist perspective, according to Edward Said, has created the notion that ‘Islam does not develop, and neither do Muslims; they merely are’ (Said 1979: 317), and furthermore, that Islam is seen to be about texts rather than people. A couple of years earlier the anthropologist Abdel Hamid el-Zein raised a similar type of criticism (el-Zein 1977), in which he accused classical contributions on Islam within the particular field of anthropology for leaving out the ‘voice of Muslims’. He urges anthropologists to talk more about Muslims, and less about Islam; more about how Muslims speak, not only about how they act.

Of course, to describe Islam as a static entity and to see Muslims and the Middle East in essentializing and reifying terms did not start in the 1970s. From the time of the Crusades ‘The Islamic Threat’, ‘The Green Threat’ and ‘The Sword of Islam’ have been established concepts, portraying Muslims as fanatic zealots. But the notions are not only political. The underlying assumptions expressed through such terms are also found among researchers and were also part of the critique raised by Said and el-Zein. In many studies Islam and the Islamic world were portrayed as ‘lacking’ the institutions that had taken the Western world forward, particularly the civil society that mediates between the ruler and the individual subjects, exemplified by concepts like Wittfogel’s ‘Oriental Despotism’ (Wittfogel 1957). In the same vein Weber argued that Islamic societies lacked a ‘spirit of capitalism’ and an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’.

However, in a more specific sense Said and el-Zein also raised the problem of how to study Islam as historical reality; partly a text-based world religion, i.e. as a decontextualized global reality, and partly as localized, contextualized cases of so-called Islamic beliefs and practices, or as ‘practical religion’ to paraphrase Leach. Both authors are clear on what they do not like, and illustrate by criticizing classical contributions such as those of Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz.¹ Gellner describes Islam as a distinct historical totality, portraying a correlation of social structure, religious belief and political activity to an extent that makes Islam a blueprint of the social order (Gellner 1982). And Geertz argues for a perspective of ‘core symbols’ (Geertz 1968, 1983), in which we first analyse the meaning contained in the symbols, and second, relate such systems of meaning embodied in the symbols to socio-structural and psychological processes (Geertz 1973:125). Arguing against such attempts to reduce Islam and the lives of Muslims to idealized patterns, both Said and el-Zein are less clear on the alternatives. Said’s project is clearly to show that certain representations constitute a type of knowledge that also implies subordination of ‘the Other’. His field is the one of ‘politics of representation’, his project was not about conceptualizing alternative views.² And el-Zein concludes that in the final analysis there is no such theoretical object as Islam.

Looking at the contributions presented in this book, they clearly convey a picture of the Islamic world as dynamic. The authors are also looking for conceptual ways to deal with this dynamism, arguing that the perspectives we are seeking must open up and accommodate descriptions of a wide variety of beliefs and actions labelled Islamic by people themselves; indeed, Muslim diversity must be our starting point. However, the essays also make it clear that it might not be enough only to hear Muslims speak; we also need analyses about how their stories are constructed, how they become real to those who take them to be true, and how they sometimes change. Thus we need perspectives that, in order to be useful, help us focus on contradictory discourses without preconceived notions of cultural and social integration, and they must lead us towards the concerns of real people. The perspectives we seek must not operate as ‘straitjackets’, providing us with preconceived ideas about Muslim realities. These realities must be discovered and documented, and made sense of (Launay 1992).

Islam as a world system: the reality of dār al-islām

The contributions presented cover Muslim societies in several continents, from West Africa to Southeast Asia, from the Near East to China. The variety of cases, and the variety of beliefs and practices presented, certainly point beyond any simple Orientalist notion of an unchanging world of Islam. Similarly they point beyond a notion of any ‘culture core’ of Islam, defined by its place of origin, Arabia, and by Arabic language and culture only. Within Islamic studies such assumptions have led researchers studying Islam in Africa and in Asia to believe they were ‘on the margins’, that the religious beliefs they saw represented ‘peripheral Islam’ and that the religious practices they encountered were ‘syncretist’.³ Such assumptions are shaken by studies from within the Middle East itself, as is well illustrated by Annika Rabo’s essay in this volume, which focuses on Raqqa town in Syria. Being within what by most definitions would be considered the heartland of Muslim civilization, the local discourses on Islam look very much like the ones we encounter in the other essays, from different countries, different continents. Rather than unification we see internal pluralism, ethnic diversity and multiple discourses.

Indeed, in order to expand on the complexities they reflect, a necessary first step is to introduce a cultural historical approach and to see the Muslim world as a world system. Certainly, Islam is made up of specific texts, the Qurʾān, the Sunna, the Sharīʿa and so forth. But the Muslim religion is also one with a particular history of events, starting with the Prophet Muḥammad, followed by the four khalīfas. Muslims are part of an imperial history of political expansion, of waves of political rise and decline, but also processes of intellectual development and tides of reformism and of accommodation, not reflecting the sequences of political and economic developments. Rather, what has been termed a dark age of Muslim civilization, i.e. after the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate, represents an extraordinarily rich cultural and intellectual period. The history of the Islamic civilization fits into broader schemes of the rise and fall of civilizations, and should be understood in contexts of civilizations and social forms preceding it and those that have followed it, as well as in the context of the ones with which it has coexisted (see e.g. Hodgson 1974). The world system we are seeking is not Wallerstein’s capitalist system that led to homo economicus (Wallerstein 1974) but to a system of ideas, informal networks of scholars and saints, organized around the messages of the Qurʾān, building a righteous social order; in short, a system of symbolic interaction (Eaton 1990; Voll 1982).

It is within such a ‘global culture’ that Muslims around the world can experience themselves as members of the umma and it is, for instance, the culture that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa encountered on his travels. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa moved through a cultural universe in which he was very much at home, meeting merchants, scholars and princes, people with whom he could converse in Arabic about intellectual matters as well as about matters happening in distant parts of dār al-islām. And it is to this world that we can travel via the cases studied in this book, to see how that prophetic incident in Arabia in the seventh century helped shape individual lives in civilizations as different as the Irano-Semitic, Sanskritic, Malay-Javanese, Chinese and the Sudanic World of Africa.

In this general history lie hidden many foci that should inform our views of how Islam has developed in its many local forms. The emergence of the faith itself; political conquests as well as defeats; trade routes which provided contacts across culture areas; the confinement of Muslims within nation states; Muslims in control of that state; being discriminated against by the state or being victims of outright persecution; Muslim reaction to Western and Eastern domination, secularism and consumerism but also Muslim dependence on Western labour markets; modes of information and travelling – all these factors produced complexities that hardly can be explained away by sets of idealized processes. The above perspectives, of cultural history and world system, allow specific histories to come more clearly to the surface whereby the lives of Muslims can be portrayed in the context of that history, i.e. lives not only shaped by living in integrated localities organized according to Islamic principles, but as lives lived in arenas in which complex historical processes have taken place and indeed continue to take place.

It is beyond the scope of this introduction to detail this history, and the essays themselves deal with their relevant contexts; so here it will suffice to give some historical sketches of the early spread of Islam as part of a general global history. People and groups presented in the essays all came into contact with Islam at different points of this history and are affected by specific lines of development. Rabo’s Syrian case represents an area that was among the first to be Islamized, after the Muslims expanded outside Arabia itself. Syria also became the centre of the first Muslim empire, the Ummayads, Damascus being the imperial centre. In later centuries Syria and Palestine also represented the western starting point of a middle route of trade and communication towards the east, passing through the Abbasid capital of Baghdad before diverting in two directions. One route went over land through Persia, again splitting either towards Central Asia or towards India. The second diversion was southwards, down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf and eventually the Indian Ocean. Further north, another major overland route developed, linking Turkey, the Black Sea and Caspian Sea areas, Central Asia and China.

By 712 Arab armies had seized strategic towns of Central Asia like Balkh, Samarkand, Bukhara and Ferghana and were later invited by Turkish tribes to engage the Chinese armies. Although never dominating China, Muslims gained access to the Silk Route, which provided trade possibilities, but also intellectual contact and the spread of new ideas. All this represents a basic historical context for the cases of Aase and Gladney.

To the south Muslim navies sailed to India, starting Islam’s encounter with the Indic civilizations in Sind and Punjab in the west, the Bengal in the east, the Bengali Islam being the context for Gardner’s Bangladesh paper. The decline of the Mongol empire in Central and West Asia constrained developments and allowed the Indian Ocean to become an important arena for travelling, trade and learning. The western part of the Indian Ocean was dominated by Muslim merchants and shipowners operating from the Arabian coastal towns; a middle region connected the Indian coast with the ‘Hinduized’ southeast Asian regions of Sumatra and Malaya; and an eastern circuit, linking Java to China, thus bringing Muslims into the realm of Buddhism and Confucianism.

By the end of the thirteenth century, city-states appeared in Malayspeaking Southeast Asia, spreading Islam and at the same time providing Europe with spices. Two centuries later Islam started to penetrate the interior of Java, encountering not European traders as competitors as they did in the coastal towns, but a Hindu-Buddhist civilization, a historical development that Bråten’s chapter reflects.

Similar processes brought Islam to Africa, via the trans-Saharan trade between North and West Africa, via the trade across the Red Sea to the Sudan and across the Indian Ocean to the Zwahili coast, and up the Nile Valley, from Cairo, which after the fall of Baghdad took over as the main Muslim city and the seat of the Mamluk dynasty. The process began in the tenth century, and affected the regions and communities dealt with by Vikør, Harir and Manger.

If we focus on more recent history, our story would have to include the spread of the Western-dominated systems of capitalism and technology, of the colonial experience and the emergence of nation states. The essays all bring up examples of this recent history, showing the ways in which it provides basic contexts in the everyday life of Muslims.

The history of the Muslim world is also a history of economic and cultural diffusion, a history in which Muslims played a central role. Paper-making, which resulted from contact with China, helped to spread the Holy Word, as well as to consolidate bureaucracies. The spread of agricultural products within the Muslim world provides a similar example. The Arab conquest of Sind in 711 brought them knowledge about hard wheat, rice, sugarcane, new varieties of sorghum and various fruits. Such crops spread around the Muslim territories and contributed to changes in agriculture, land tenure and modes of taxation (Watson 1983). Similar stories could be told about the diffusion of scientific knowledge and technology (Al-Hassan and Hill 1986), and seafaring and navigation, particularly in dealing with Indian Ocean monsoons (Tibbetts 1981, Hourani 1951).

The dissemination of religious knowledge that is discussed in several contributions in this volume, through the activities of Sufi saints and scholars is thus paralleled in several other fields. It all points in one direction: rather than lacking in ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, the Islamic civilization was a dynamic one, spearheading developments as well as learning from other civilizations (Goody 1996). This is not the place to present that history in detail, but to argue that an awareness of it is basic to the perspective here adopted, because the various points of contact represented meeting places which allowed for new types of development. The trade and the organization of caravans activated not only capital, but organizational patterns handling credit, legal patterns creating security around contracts, and so on. In such situations Islam was not only a religion, but the Sharīʿa provided a legal code for handling business and for dealing with conflicts. People well versed in the Sharīʿa therefore also acted as judges, arbitrators and so on, drawing on knowledge about earlier cases from elsewhere as well as their interpretation of the text itself. But the same processes also provided arenas in which Muslims met, and in which Muslims met with non-Muslims, thereby experiencing themselves as Muslims in their particular world. The factors at play are summarized by Eaton (1990: 17) in the following way:

The emergence of state institutions and urban centers that provided foci for the growth of Islamic civilisation; the conversion of subject populations to Islam; the ability of Muslim culture to absorb, adapt, and transmit culture from neighbouring civilisations; and the elaboration of socio-religious institutions that enabled Islamic civilisation to survive, and even flourish, following the decline of centralized political authority (Eaton 1990: 17).

Putting this in the perspective of a world system allows us to see the Muslim world as it interacts with other civilizations. Before 1500 none of the various civilizations was dominant, they were competing in particular places, but none held a hegemonic position over technological or social inventiveness, as the West came to do in later centuries. Pagans and followers of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism and Zoroastrianism all interacted with Muslims. Different types of economic systems coexisted – agrarian-based systems, city-based commercial systems, state-based systems – and knowledge about their various organizations facilitated the developments hinted at above. The weakening of these systems through the Black Death, the collapse of the empire of the Mongols, the erosion of trading enterprises in the Indian Ocean, and so on, paved the way for post-1500 Western dominance. The collapse of the East thus facilitated the rise of the West, not overnight but as the accumulated effects over several centuries (Abu-Lughod 1989: 361). And the processes we are living through now, at the end of the twentieth century, might well mark the end of the hegemonic position of the West, perhaps towards a situation of several core centres, in a way similar to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts
• 2 Global Migrants and Local Shrines: The Shifting Geography of Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh
• 3 The Theological Construction of Conflict: Gilgit, Northern Pakistan
• 4 Jihād in West Africa: A Global Theme in a Regional Setting
• 5 The Salafiyya Movement in Northwest China: Islamic Fundamentalism among the Muslim Chinese?
• 6 To Colour, Not Oppose: Spreading Islam in Rural Java
• 7 Faith and Identity in Northeast Syria
• 8 The Mosque and the Sacred Mountain: Duality of Religious Beliefs among the Zaghawa of Northwestern Sudan
• 9 On Becoming Muslim: The Construction of Identities among the Lafofa of the Sudan
• 10 Afterword: The Comparative Study of Muslim Societies
• Index