Being bad during Ramadan: Temporality, historicity and the refusal of coevalness in the anthropology of Islam

ABSTRACT

Wary of the ‘denial of coevalness’ associated with earlier anthropology, anthropologists at the turn of the millennium increasingly emphasized how sharing not just space but also time is constitutive of the ethnographic encounter. However, drawing on online and offline fieldwork conducted in Jordan, I use the tensions between a blood feud and the holy month of Ramadan to illustrate how humans often refuse to inhabit each others’ histories and temporal schemes regardless of the presence of anthropologists. I argue that discomfort with acknowledging such refusals of coevalness has increasingly hobbled anthropological description, especially at a time when new communications technologies are re-shaping human experiences of sharing (and not sharing) space and time. I suggest that anthropologists would benefit from following many of the Jordanian Muslims I encountered in attending to how one does not ‘share time’ with various others – as well as the ways in which one does.

KEYWORDS:

• Coevalness
• ethnographic refusal
• Jordan
• primitivism
• Ramadan
• temporality
• tribalism

Acknowledgments

This research would have been impossible without the generous assistance of the many anonymous Jordanians from Sarih and elsewhere who shared their thoughts and experiences with me. Financial support for this research was provided by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Academy. Barbara Porter and the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman proved to be excellent hosts during my stay in 2017. I am especially grateful to Stuart Strange, Douglas Farrer, Kawa Murad, Andrew Shryock, James Meador, Matan Kaminer, Blaire Andres, Christine Sargent, the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jordanian police only enforce the fast in public spaces (Tobin 2016, 51–56) and there are plenty of legitimate reasons why Muslims might not be fasting and no expectation that a non-Muslim like myself should fast, but I try to share the experience of fasting during fieldwork anyway – especially when I have been invited to an ifṭār.

2 https://tinyurl.com/mwn99mr6

3 https://tinyurl.com/ywxzf5rh

4 https://tinyurl.com/2px39znv

5 https://tinyurl.com/53za8dcs

6 https://tinyurl.com/mwpe9nzc

7 https://tinyurl.com/mr46h2pp

8 Asad offers an incisive critique of how earlier anthropological conceptualizations of ‘tribe’ often masked a diverse range of social systems (Asad [1986] 2009, 9–19) and even of the ‘pseudoscientific notion of ‘fieldwork’’ (2003, 17).

9 In contrast, Yazan Doughan (2019, 63) has recently noted a revisionist trend in contemporary Arabic-language historiography seeking a usable past in Jordan’s tribal uprisings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting a wider reevaluation of tribalism is afoot. See also Frederick Wojnarowski’s Unsettling Times (2021).

10 Of course, for ibn Khaldun, the movement in time was not only linear but also cyclical, with decline inevitably following rise – though I would also hasten to note that such civilizational discourses never fully went out of fashion. Indeed, the enduring popularity of ibn Khaldun since the nineteenth century ([1377] 2015: xxvii-xxxv) itself seems indicative of this and also suggests (contra Fabian 2014, 201) that anthropologists cannot necessarily ‘assume’ that ‘when our predecessors spoke of primitives, preliterate peoples without history … that they did this without guile.’

11 Despite stereotypes to the contrary (widespread in the region as well), there are Palestinian as well as Jordanian tribes (Assi 2018; Watkins 2014, 33–43).

12 Allah’s 99 names also include The First (Al-Awal), The Last (Al-Akhir), The Everlasting (Al-Baqi), and The Ever-Living (Al-Hayy)

13 Ieva Jusionyte (2016) reports a similar phenomenon of using comments to follow developments rather than to communicate in South America as a response to state censorship, misinformation campaigns, and the widespread intimidation of journalists.

14 Shahzad Bashir offers a brief overview of some of the multiple temporalities that characterized history-writing in pre-modern Islam and an incisive critique of the tendency in modern historiography to reduce Islamic history to a ‘single timeline’ (2014, 519) privileging the Arabian peninsula and a declensionist periodization.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy: [Grant Number Council for British Research in the Levant ]; National Endowment for the Humanities: [Grant Number American Center of Oriental Research Residential F].