Islam(s) in context: Orientalism and the anthropology of Muslim societies and cultures

Abstract

This article begins to fill a gap in recent discussions of the future of Islamic studies with an account of the nature and significance of Anthropological and Ethnographic contributions to the study of Islam and Muslims. Drawing attention to both the problem of essence in Orientalism and the dissolution of Islam’s significance for Muslims in Said’s (1978) anti‐Orientalism, the article examines how shifts between essence and silence have been played out in the short history of Anthropology, from colonial ethnography through functionalism to the relationship between so‐called Great and Little Traditions, the fresh impetus of Geertz’s (1968) Islam Observed and subsequent debates about Islam and plural islams. My account culminates with discussion of an increasingly specialised and interdisciplinary body of work on the reproduction and transmission of Islamic discursive traditions published mainly in American Anthropology since the 1970s and 1980s. I contend that such literature suggests a theoretical starting point for ‘Muslim studies’ which allows for the configuring power of social structure and the efficacy of history/tradition as Muslim habitus, as well as the contextual improvisations of human agents with diverse social positions and cultural capitals. Ultimately, my argument is that although this concern for structure, tradition and agency can be combined and emphasised in different ways, attentiveness to both similarity and difference, continuity and change, suggests one way forward beyond the essence/silence impasse in Orientalist/anti‐Orientalist thinking about Muslim cultures and societies.

Notes

1. The review was commissioned by the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education, Bill Rammell MP, who had expressed fears about ‘extremism’ on campus including exposure to radical ideas in the lecture hall. Responding to such suggestions, leading scholars in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies released a statement affirming the importance of full and free scholarly debate for intellectual development, thus resisting any attempt at government interference or censorship of the curriculum (Times Higher Education Supplement, 2007).

2. See, for example, his discussion of the Reay Committee Report of 1909, the Scarborough Committee Report of 1948 and the Hayter Committtee Report of 1961.

3. The utility of literature, film, drama and other forms of cultural production for the study of Muslim cultures and societies should not be underestimated. See, for example, Mahfouz’s (1990) accounts of modern Egyptian life.

4. Like Eickelman’s The Middle East and Central Asia: an anthropological appraoch, which is the best and perhaps only truly introductory account for the last quarter of a century and now in its fourth edition (1981; 1989; 1998; 2002), two fairly recent reviewers are also American (Starrett, 1997; Lindholm, 2002). So too is the author of a new text critical of the rhetoric of anthropological representations of Islam (Varisco, 2005). Starrett notes that during the 1980s the US Social Science Research Council established an interdisciplinary Committee for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies (1997, p. 283). Many of the best studies have been published in a University of California Press series, Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies.

5. Until the early modern period the study of Islamic languages and texts in Western Europe was motivated mainly by Christian apology and polemic in the context of an expanding Muslim military threat (Daniel, 1993). However, as Maxime Rodinson (1988) explains, by the sixteenth century, the desire for knowledge about the East was growing, driven by the changing economic and political interests of Western states as navigation, trade and diplomacy increasingly extended beyond the Mediterranean. Once it became possible to print works in Arabic, scholars with access to one another’s work were offered posts at Paris, Leiden, Cambridge and Oxford where the grammars and dictionaries essential to philological scholarship were developed. Moreover, as the rationalist and secular philosophy of Enlightenment universalism eventually took hold, Western scholars of the Orient were no longer bound to defend Christian theology (Rodinson, 1988, pp. 45ff.), though the linkages between scholarship and mission continued.

6. By the 1820s, the institutional foundations of a coherent academic project for the study of the Orient were being established as scholarly societies, many with their own journals, were established across Europe and in the United States (Rodinson, 1988, p. 56).

7. While the idea of Orientalism emphasised a commitment to scholarly specialisation, the huge task of translating and producing critical editions of manuscripts left Orientalists isolated from developments in other fields (Rodinson, 1988, p. 62). Yet, it was widely accepted that civilisations were unique cultural wholes whose underlying characteristics could properly be revealed only through the textual study of their origins. Moreover, a romanticised bourgeois fascination with literary and artistic representations of the exotic non‐West had emerged in parallel with scholarly developments (Rodinson, 1988, p. 85).

8. For example, Said (1993, pp. xi–xiv, xxvii–xxxii) accounts for the success of resistance to colonialism, offers a critique of the chauvinism of some liberation movements, acknowledges ‘a new political conscience and intellectual conscience’ in feminist studies of Islam and the Middle East, as well as identifying the intertwined histories of East and West.

9. The other main influence that Said cites is Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937), the Italian intellectual and activist. His notion of hegemony emphasises the way in which cultural domination operates through the ideological apparatus of consent rather than coercion, especially when the institutions of civil society, including the academy, are highly developed. According to Said, this accounts for the saturating durability and persistence of Orientalism (1978, pp. 11, 14). However, Gramsci is also clear that hegemonic relations are never final but always open to contestation, something that Said does not stress consistently.

10. Elsewhere, Asad (1993, p. 188) argues that the contestability of ethnographic texts by their subjects should be an important ethical and political consideration. For a review of nativist Islamic Anthropology, see Tapper (1995).

11. Werbner (2003, p. 301) maintains that such assertions are naive because fieldwork is inevitably a combination of positive and more conflictual experiences. Books are driven and judged by scholarly criteria which are at odds with most ordinary people’s concerns.

12. Lane (d. 1876) wrote his famous (1836) account of urban Cairo as an accessory to his translation of A Thousand and One Nights, while among Burton’s works is his account of pilgrimage to the Holy Places (1893).

13. Given Anthropology’s relative lack of interest in Islam and Muslim societies until the 1960s, this legacy has proven especially significant.

14. Of course a number of native‐speaking anthropologists have contributed to the Anthropology of Muslim societies. For example, Asad (1970), Abu Lughod (1986), Antoun (1989) and El Guindi (1999).

15. Notably, as one alternative to the Orientalist emphasis on difference, Turner (1991, p. 37) suggests an exploration of sameness, a common Jewish‐Christian‐Muslim history of shared frameworks and mutual colonisation.

16. Writing at the time of the collapse of Muslim Spain, Ibn Khaldun tracked the growth, maturity and decay of Maghrebian dynasties. See Dawood (2004) for a recent translation.

17. Gellner was notoriously outspoken and publicly and personally attacked Said in a review of Culture and Imperialism (1993) in the Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1993).

18. Asad argues: ‘I find it impossible to accept that Christian practice and discourse throughout history have been less intimately concerned with the uses of political power for religious purposes than the practice and discourse of Muslims’ (1986, p. 3).

19. Notably, both Gellner and Geertz worked on Morocco, as have Geertz’s students (for example, Eickelman and Rosen) and others since. This may be because of the tradition of detailed work going back to French colonial ethnography.

20. The following citation gives a good sense of Geertz’s approach and style: ‘They are an odd pair…But…they are in some enlarged sense of the word Islamic—they make an instructive comparison. At once very alike and very different, they form a kind of commentary on one another’s character. Their most obvious likeness is, as I say, their religious affiliation; but it is also, culturally speaking at least, their most obvious unlikeness. They stand at the eastern and western extremities of the narrow bend of classical Islamic civilisation…they have participated in the history of that civilisation in quite different ways, to quite different degrees, and with quite different results. They both incline toward Mecca, but, the antipodes of the Muslim world, they bow in opposite directions’ (Geertz, 1968, p. 4).

21. Elsewhere Asad challenges Geertz for imagining that symbols possess a religious truth of their own independent of social conditions: ‘How does (religious) power create (religious) truth?’ (1993, p. 33). Geertz also emphasises the significance of meaning and religion as ‘a general order of existence’ which Asad sees as an especially modern, marginalised and privatised, Christian prioritising of individual belief as the only space allowed to Christianity by post‐Enlightenment society.

22. El‐Zein reviews the work of Geertz including (Geertz, 1968) as well as Gilsenan (1973), Eickelman (1976) and others.

23. In so doing, Asad challenges Eickelman (1981, p. 204) who approves the idea that Islam is perhaps best understood in terms of orthopraxy, an idea with roots in Smith (1957). For a defence, see Antoun (1989, p. 10).

24. Chapter 6 of Genealogies of Religion (Asad, 1993) on the orthodox tradition as an (albeit waning) basis for religious reasoning and criticism in contemporary Saudi Arabia is a rare example of such a contribution since 1986.

25. Bourdieu’s (1977) work represents a Marxist concern for the determining effects of the social structure but also the situationality of cultural practices. It offers a corrective to the idea that social agents routinely make maximising choices regardless of the situation. However, while Bourdieu is insightful regarding why things stay the same, he does not account sufficiently for how things change.

26. On South East Asia, see also the work of Hefner (2000) on democratisation, pluralism and civil society.

27. To be fair to Lapidus (1988, p. 237) he does stress ‘endlessly rich … possibilities’ and ‘an abiding ambiguity as to what constituted an Islamic society’ as well as underlining the imprint of Middle Eastern origins. For an historical anthropology, see Lindholm (1996).

28. While Martin’s (2001) volume on Islam and Religious studies evidences scholars moving beyond their traditional boundaries, even in their interest in Muslim lives, they remain focused on normative aspects of Islam.

29. For anthropological accounts of gender in Muslim societies see, for example, Abu Lughod (1986), Boddy (1989), Delaney (1991) and El Guindi (1999).

30. Anthropologists were amongst the first to study South Asian Muslim migrants in Britain though early studies, concerned mainly with Pakistani ethnicity, rarely discussed Islam at any length. Some studied women’s domestic religious rituals and the sectarianism of mosque politics (e.g. Shaw, 1988), but multidisciplinary interest in Muslims as Muslims mushroomed after the Rushdie Affair of 1989. Nevertheless, anthropologists remain amongst the most sophisticated commentators (see Werbner, 2002).