Paper short abstract:

We explore how experiences of divine presence in Islam provide new insights on the relationship between immanence and transcendence and help address the question of the “other” in encounters with the unseen opening up new horizons of being and knowing that destabilize secular views of the self.

Paper long abstract:

Based on our respective ethnographies in Russia and Turkey, we explore how experiences of divine presence in Islam provide new insights on the relationship between immanence and transcendence and address the question of the “other” in encounters with the unseen. Recently, the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology has suggested to “take seriously” indigenous ontologies as they highlight alternative modes of knowing. At the same time, these modes of knowing continue to be defined as “other”, precluding to some extent the anthropologist’s involvement with them. Even recent calls to explore the unseen and unknown beyond a human horizon remain partially bound to the categories of “beyond”, “elsewhere” and “other”. What if we resist the impulse to categorize experiences of transcendence as “other” and consider that knowledge of the divine is also self-knowledge? The Islamic tradition opens up new horizons of being and knowing, pointing to the human ability to experience what has been called ‘heart-knowledge’. It not only interrogates what we perceive as ‘human’ but also what we understand as the scope of knowledge. For instance, the dimension of “nature” (fitra) in Islam reminds us of a God-human relationship that is not defined in terms of the ineluctable separation between immanence and transcendence. With their practices, our interlocutors aim to these other horizons of being and knowing destabilizing secular views that place the sovereign self at the center. Opening up to these practices brings us to ask what imaginaries of the present, past, and future are unveiled through these different horizons.

Paper short abstract:

Based on long-term fieldwork with Shiʿi Muslims in Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus this paper argues for a relational understanding of Islam which pays due attention to the ways individuals and communities live alongside, and cultivate relations with, supernatural beings.

Paper long abstract:

Muslim lives exist in "networks of relationships" (Orsi 2013). This comprises both horizontal human-human relations and vertical ones, which include not only a powerful monotheistic God (Schielke 2019) but other supernatural beings who are taken to be really, literally present in the everyday circumstances of their lives. Based on long-term fieldwork with Shiʿi Muslims in Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus, in this paper, I argue for a relational understanding of Islam that pays due attention to the ways individuals and communities live alongside, and cultivate relations with, supernatural beings.

The cultivation of intimacy-relations of closeness, familiarity, and love—with the Family of the Prophet is central to Shiʿi Muslim religiosity, sociality, and subject formation. As immaterial yet immanent beings imbued with agency and the ability to witness and intercede in this life, Shiʿi Muslims see the Family of the Prophet, collectively known as the Ahl al-Bayt in Arabic, as actors in their lives with whom they seek to forge relations. Engaging ethnographically with human relations with such immaterial beings is not only essential to understanding diverse modes of Muslim religiosity but further "destabilizes the distinction between the material and immaterial, natural and supernatural" (Bubandt 2018, 7-8) which underlies much anthropological scholarship. Doing so pushes the study of human-nonhuman entanglements beyond its materialist biases (Fernando 2017) to consider the possibilities of extra-secular 'becomings' (Haraway 2008), ways of becoming attuned, encountering, and living in a relational context with immaterial as well as material beings.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses a specific cosmology among Sufi Muslims in Russia that differs considerably from a secular outlook and to which one can adjust only in time; an adjustment that brings about not just a change in perspective but a transformation of the environment.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with matters of belief (iman) within the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi brotherhood (tariqa) in the Russian Federation. Just as Muslims constitute a minority in Russia, this particular Sufi perspective would again have to be recognised as a minority position among Muslims from the Russian Islamic community. According to their cosmology, we inhabit not one but several worlds and only one of them, the "99 names of God" or the divine kingdom, is real, whereas the other worlds are emanations of that one world. Sharply contrasting with a secular outlook, the material world that we live in is considered to be only an illusion or a matrix that keeps us engaged, while we should be focussed on God. To overcome the state of illusion, one must begin to process the truth, which is a difficult undertaking, as it requires thinking with the heart instead of the mind. Another precondition for seeing the world in its true shape would be a process of purification that one needs to undergo. If a success, these measures will bring about a transformation of our environment. The new perception that the Sufi aspirant (murid) gains is also described as "waking from slumber" or "opening one's eyes". Rather than considering this to be a switch from one epistemology to the other, it seems to be the case that the murids enter another ontological realm, where miracles (karamat) may manifest in everyday life in almost a routine fashion.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on long-term fieldwork, this paper examines the intersections of gender, class, and religious ethics in shaping Sufi moral selfhood through an ethnographic analysis of moral exemplarity and mystical ethical reflections exercised in the Turkish Rifai Sufi order led by Shaykha Cemalnur.

Paper long abstract:

Rifaiyye is an upper-class Turkish Sufi order led by an unveiled female Sufi master named Cemalnur Sargut. The Rifai tradition requires cultivating a certain kind of Muslim selfhood through “spiritual exercises” (Hadot 1995; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006). However, the forms of practices and the means of self-formation differ from most mainstream Islamic traditions. One of the differences is the centrality of, not the text, but moral exemplars as the main authoritative source of piety. However, moral exemplarity entails more than being a role model of ideal piety. Rather, it is an intimate, interactive, affective, reflective, and potentially transformative relationship.

Shaykha Cemalnur imagines Sufism as a totalizing lifestyle aimed at developing greater capacities to see, hear, and love God in daily life through the exercise of mystical ethical reflections (Vicini 2020). These reflections are not only historically situated, but also entangled in the web of gendered social relations within the upper-middle-class habitus. Drawing on long-term fieldwork research, this paper demonstrates the intersections of gender, class, and religious ethics in shaping Sufi moral selfhood through one of the unique ways in which Cemalnur trains her students as a female religious authority: namely, by decorating their luxury houses. I will analyze the content of their “mystical ethical reflections” to shed light on the ethical implications of Cemalnur’s aesthetic interventions into their private spheres as part of their spiritual training. I aim to highlight the relational nature of pious self-formation that unfolds through mundane master-disciple interactions.

Paper short abstract:

This paper comparatively examines the formation of Islamic canon and its critiques in Turkey, particularly focusing on the the AKP's religious policies within and beyond its borders. It also examines the critiques of Anti-Capitalist Muslims and Kurdish mosques of liberation in Turkey and Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 2000s, the notion of shared religion and Islamic fraternity has been utilised by the Islamist government of Turkey to govern its Kurdish subjects and incorporate them into an ethnically blind supranational identity of the imagined Muslim ummah. As a result, religious politics has become an integral part of the century-long Turkish-Kurdish conflict. On one hand, the AKP government's consolidation of power and mobilisation of massive resources consolidated its power over pious Muslim subjects and created complicit entities via Islamic civil society organisations in the Kurdish region of Turkey. On the other hand, critical Muslim voices, within and beyond Turkish borders, started to transform prayers and religious spaces/practices into platforms of resistance to imagine non-canonical alternative ways of religiosity free from oppression and assimilation. This paper examines these emerging sites of resistance through examples of Civil Friday prayers, protests, and critiques of Anti-capitalist Muslims in Turkey and the emergence of Kurdish mosques of liberation in Europe. By relying on multi-sited ethnographic research in Turkey, France, Germany, and the UK, I argue that the omnipresence of religious references in the Turkish political discourses and activities has deepened and accelerated further divides among its critical religious Kurdish and Turkish citizens. Although these divides and critiques are constantly suppressed by the AKP government in Turkey, a new proliferation of Kurdish mosques across Europe in the past decade is indicative of a radical transformation that undoes and deconstructs the binary of prayer and protest or sacred and profane.