By Noon Prayer

The Rhythm of Islam

Fadwa El Guindi

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189834
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Antropología

A groundbreaking anthropological analysis of Islam as experienced by Muslims, By Noon Prayer builds a conceptual model of Islam as a whole, while travelling along a comparative path of biblical, Egyptological, ethnographic, poetic, scriptural and visual materials. Grounded in long-term observation of Arabo-Islamic culture and society, the study captures the rhythm of Islam weaving through the lives of Muslim women and men.Examples of the rhythmic nature of Islam can be seen in all aspects of Muslims' everyday lives. Muslims break their Ramadan fast upon the sun setting, and they receive Ramadan by sighting the new moon. Prayer for their dead is by noon and burial is before sunset. This is space and time in Islam - moon, sun, dawn and sunset are all part of a unique and unified rhythm, interweaving the sacred and the ordinary, nature and culture in a pattern that is characteristically Islamic.

Part I
Spatiality and Temporality

1
Conceptual Overview

Time is sheer succession of epochal durations: it goes on and on.

Alfred North Whitehead (1927: 158)

The Idea of Time

Time, after all, is an idea. It gets reified as fact. It gets spent, wasted, saved, killed, kept, and lost. There is leisure time, quality time, bad time, good time, no time, much time, etc. The phrase tempus fugit (time flies) is attributed to the Romans who equated time with weather. Time is divided into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Classical archaeology takes time back in time, giving it chronological depth. Marshak (1972) argues that early “calendars” dated back more than 20,000 years to the last ice age. While his evidence and interpretation remain controversial, one can accept an interpretation of engraved marks on bones and rocks found in Africa and Europe as rudimentary forms of time-reckoning.

Aveni (1989) asks if these marks represent notations used to mark the counting of days of a periodic cycle. The fact, according to Marshak, that these notations were arranged in groupings corresponding to the interval between the first sighting of the waxing crescent moon in the west after sunset and the full moon, or between full moon and the last sighting of the waning crescent in the west, points to how old bones and stones may be time’s earliest concrete evidence of the “ingenious attempts of early humans to keep track of celestial rhythmicity through a written medium” (Aveni 1989: 67).

Time is about regularity and order. As it is, the world in which we live is in fact a very chaotic place. Humans are always trying to make sense of it. Nature, on the other hand, is regulated. Physical laws regulate the movement of physical bodies and biological laws regulate the functioning of organisms. This natural order cannot easily be perceived in its totality by individual persons even though they recognize recurrent patterns of moon rising and moon waning, sun rising and sun setting. But the human mind can put all the elements, domains, and spaces together coherently and transmit it as visions that remain alive for generations and millennia. A structuring is imposed on the apparent chaos to create a coherent order that relates various elements from the natural, the social, and the animal worlds into a meaningful whole. Structuration, whether by cosmologies, calendars, mythical narratives, or formal systems, imposes order on disparate elements giving them coherence and unity. Rhythmicity is imposed on nature and society, and people experience their world as if inherently structured.

When people consider their world structured and orderly they are already filtering their view through overarching doctrines or systems of meaning. Overarching “systems,”¹ such as secular constitutions, religious commandments, cosmologies, calendars, green or red books, descent structures, or Protestant ethic, function to provide ordinary folk with perceived coherence and unity. In some situations and for the same people and within one culture several such doctrines may compete or alternatively coexist by design or coercion in new hybrid form. Time can also be deified. As Whitrow points out, “[w]hen, in 1916, Summer Time was first introduced in the United Kingdom by advancing the clock one hour, there were many who objected to interfering with what the popular novelist Marie Corelli called ‘God’s own time’” (1989: 3).

Time is a fundamental quality of human experience; it has not suddenly appeared with modernity. We can safely assert that, outside fictional narratives, there are no humans without time. We do not know how humans would manage without time. An extraordinarily rich literature has been written on the notion of time,² approaching it from rather divergent theoretical backgrounds using different sources and analyzing them differently. Two fundamental questions preoccupy and puzzle humans in general and scholars and scientists in particular. They are: What is time? and What Time Is It? The first asks about the nature of time and the second refers to its intervalization. Neither question is simple or has easy answers. Does time go on and on as mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) stated in 1927 in the above quote? Do people living their daily lives experience time as sheer succession? Or do people of different cultural backgrounds experience time differently? Is “time” fixed, linear, cyclical, incremental, or universal?

The second question was the context of a recent encounter surrounding the interval called “noon,” which most Americans would take for granted as being at 12.00 midday. At a conference in Jordan recently some colleagues were arranging to meet and it was suggested that all should gather at the hotel lobby at noon. But then a Muslim colleague asked “whose noon”? A precise hour was then established. This intervention made me reflect. Is the American noon not a universal “noon”?

At that time I had already conceptualized this book, and called it By Noon Prayer, and was intensely immersed in working on it. Whose noon? is an insightful intervention. One might locate cross-linguistic equivalents for noon, but cross-cultural knowledge already casts doubt on its universality as it has on time’s universal linearity. What is noon in Muslim life and how is it tied to Muslim prayer? What is time and how is it tied to space in Arabo-Islamic life? As a way to answer these questions we first think about how to think about time. This necessitates putting temporality in a comparative framework, by providing cross-cultural background, by addressing the variability in the language of time and time’s linguistic and gestural referents, and by placing the notion of temporality within a conceptual framework. Anthropologists use diverse bodies of data. They are not bound by primary data production of an ethnographic nature. True, they do make valuable contributions from cross-cultural field-based ethnographic knowledge about any subject. But they also contribute a particular way of analyzing familiar materials from any field or discipline. The key to a distinct kind of analysis is how such materials are approached, how such bodies of data are incorporated and analyzed. We begin in the next section with a discussion of cross-cultural temporalities, followed by the language of time.

Cross-Cultural Temporalities

Time for Difference

Long before the Western notion of academic disciplines shaped academic curricular plans, and before anthropology had become a discipline in Europe and North America, Arab scholars during the golden years of Islam in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Andalusia had already contributed foundational thoughts on the notion of culture (al-’umran) with a developmental theory of human community based on conceptual formulations of society and culture (Ibn Khaldun), basic formulations about visual technology (ibn al-Haytham), contributions of cross-cultural ethnographies (see al-Biruni and others), and fundamentals that led to the Renaissance (Ibn Rushd). During the nineteenth century, accounts of different worlds and customs kindled the fire of imagination among the elite publics of the West. Some imageries were interpreted as noble, others as barbaric – rarely as real, sophisticated, and complex people and systems. Naïve and elitist at first, anthropologists were “cocking horn-rimmed spectacles at … [local customs] … before they saw much of its real nature” (Howells 1948 [1962]: 1) and the significance of discovering and properly communicating worlds beyond Europe and Western Christianity.

Scientists have come to see different cross-cultural social and religious practices not as disorderly, inferior, or simply superstitious customs, but rather as different models shaping worlds, a framework of developmentally connected institutions, held on to for reasons of comfort and feelings of security. The same applies to Americans in suburbia of the United States or Europeans in rural provinces as elsewhere in the world. No difference. This observation was considered early on in anthropology to be “profoundly true of religion as it is of government and law; religious ideas help in the struggle for existence as verily as a bow and arrow, or a fish trap” (Howells 1948 [1962]: 1). These simple sociological observations from the 1940s sound almost naïve in this day of postmodern polemics and public diplomacy publications on the US political agenda. Underlying public diplomacy are tools to manufacture a supportive public discourse and a consensus.³

All along, anthropologists recognized the value of the perspective acquired from cross-cultural knowledge. The cross-cultural perspective is not simply about diversity. It is about both commonality and difference. Stressing difference alone ultimately leads to hierarchy. Combining the commonality of the human species and the difference of uniqueness maintains the balance. Difference is not an alternative to universality. There is a single humankind, sharing capacity for creativity, production and reproduction, cognition and intelligence. Difference in cultural manifestations is about uniqueness. Uniqueness and universality make up two sides of a rich humanity. It is interesting to note that the qur’anic Sura al-An’am, 60:21,⁴ states that “among God’s signs for the learned are: the creation of the heavens, the earth, and the diversity of human languages and colors” (my translation and paraphrasing). Ironically, globalism and dominant globalist politics find difference inconvenient for commercial corporate consumerist behaviors. They are engaged in a dangerous process of homogenization. One ideological model coercively imposed requires radical changes at the cultural, religious, social, and political levels of other peoples’ systems. There are ideological impositions against family, society, and culture; missionary coercion to change religion; and feminist intervention to force American-style middle-class constructions on other womanhoods. There is a coercive drive for uniformity (using hegemonic means of pacification). Civilizational nations show strong resistance to such coercions, as they have thousands of years of civilizational heritage and contribution to knowledge, including the religions of the region.

Language of Time

al-Jazeera mobile – because time does not wait (in Arabic: li’anna 1-waqt la yantathir) Ongoing Commercial in Al-Jazeera Arabic Satellite TV since 2006

(my translation from Arabic)

Can time, as the al-Jazeera commercial says in its effective advertising campaign for its mobile news-carrying telephone, wait or not wait, or stop, or go, or run? Metaphoric and anthropomorphized expressions using time are plentiful. But some people in fact do perceive time in those terms. Rosen describes two ways of looking at time that he considers to be persistent dichotomies, perhaps the most persistent across many pre-modern societies: cyclical time and teleological time. He sums them up this way: “[O]ne considers the inevitable progression of a human life from birth to death and concludes that time marches inexorably forward toward a telos, or goal. At the same time, this apparently linear progression of a human life span is situated within the temporal markers of nature that seem repetitive, cyclical, and fundamentally stable through time.” (2004: 6)

The late anthropologist Edmund Leach, in two classic short essays⁵ on the symbolic representation of time (1961b: 124–32, 132–6),⁶ observes that the notion of time implied in the earlier quote by Whitehead represents time only in Western culture. People from other cultures do not necessarily experience time in linear mode as “a succession of epochal durations” with a sense of “going on and on in the same direction … a coordinate straight line stretching from an infinite past to an infinite future” (126). Nor, according to Leach, would they see it in “the other English way,” the cyclical, as “round and round the same wheel” (126), which he considers to be tied too much to “the formulations of the astronomers” (126). Envisioning repetition in time as a circle or a cycle, Leach observes, is a “purely geometrical metaphor which only mathematicians” (126) are ordinarily inclined to think of in that way – an aspect of motion in a circle. When sequences of agricultural activities or ritual exchanges of a series of interlinked marriages are described as “cyclic,” Leach remarks, we impose a geometrical notation that may be entirely absent in the thinking of the people concerned.

Anthropological field studies produced many ethnographic accounts showing different ways across cultures by which populations experienced time. The phrase “time-reckoning” was widely used to describe activities by different groups used to mark time or associated with marking time. In his study of the Trobrianders, Malinowski (see Malinowski 1927) describes in remarkable detail their gardening activities (on this, see Munn 1992). Another phrase introduced in cross-cultural studies of time was “oecological time.” Evans-Pritchard (1939) used it in describing the Nuer concept of time. He derived this notion through his examination of Nuer time-reckoning activities. Munn, in a critical overview of cross-cultural notions of time, sees “oecological time” as different from that in which time is “experienced through immersion in the activities” (1992: 96).

The classic example that has often been cited is that of the Hopi of Arizona, whose language was studied in great detail by Benjamin Lee Whorf, who concluded that the Hopi language contains no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer to time or any of its aspects. Yet Whitrow (1989: 9) considers the contention by Whorf that the Hopi language “contains no reference to ‘time,’ either explicit or implicit” to be too sweeping. The Hopi have a sense of time, although it seems to be different from the one that has evolved in Europe. Whitrow (1989), citing McCluskey (1977), points out that the Hopi “have successfully developed in agricultural and ceremonial calendar, based on astronomical lore, that is sufficiently precise for particular festivals” (9).

It is common to begin one’s investigation with a familiar notion from one’s culture. Leach began his inquiry with English time and ritual then proceeded to discover that the Kachin of Highland Burma did not have one single referent in their language that could be considered by itself equivalent to the English word “time.” Evans-Pritchard in his study in the Sudan of both the Azande (1937: 347) and the Nuer (1940: 103), found no equivalent of our word time. “Though I have spoken of time and units of time,” Evans-Pritchard notes, “it must be pointed out that, strictly speaking, the Nuer have no concept of time and, consequently, no developed abstract system of time-reckoning” (1939: 208). Having no concept of time is questionable, I think. Theirs has to be different, however. He goes on to distinguish between structural time and ecological time, emphasizing that genealogical time is in fact structural not historical time (213).

The Nuer, he claimed, have no units of time such as hours or minutes, for they do not measure time but think only in terms of successions of activities – many of which concern cattle. Evans-Pritchard called it “cattle-clock.” He distinguishes different times and different levels of time-reckoning. “Time is not always the same to Nuer at different seasons, the dry season appearing to represent “slow” time, the wet season “fast” time; and, second, there appear to be different “levels” of time-reckoning among the Nuer, physical, ecological, and social, each of which has its own “rhythm” (1939: 192).

Whitrow considers this approach to investigating cross-cultural linguistic equivalents to be ethnocentric and erroneous since it presents the Nuer perception of time as no more than the movement of groups through the social structure and therefore does not yield true temporal distances like that produced by our...