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- Convenors:
-
Lili Di Puppo
(University of Helsinki)
Fabio Vicini (University of Verona)
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- Chair:
-
Fabio Vicini
(University of Verona)
- Discussants:
-
Kim Shively
(Kutztown University of Pennsylvania)
Heiko Henkel (Copenhagen University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 02/009
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel calls for papers illustrating how Muslim worlds, as they embrace a transcendental reality, generate new imaginaries of the present, past, and future that are ingrained in views of radical hope/transformation that diverge from those proposed by capitalist modernity.
Long Abstract:
This panel investigates how the divine and the spiritual become present in Muslim life by opening spaces for individual or collective reflection, transformation, and imagination of alternative views of human life, hope, and future. In the last few decades, the anthropology of religion has dedicated particular attention to processes of human mediation in the articulation of the relationship between immanence and transcendence. While these studies have been fundamental in renewing the field, by upholding mediation they have underplayed religiously specific ways of conceiving and experiencing transcendence. On the other hand, whereas the ontological turn has paved the way for the discipline to engage with non-Western ontologies, religious traditions with a strong theological background have been only tangential in these debates. Religious ontologies, with their theological and epistemological underpinnings (i.e. specific views of the human self, the senses, and other organs that allow for connecting with transcendence) have remained largely under-explored.
In this light, the panel embraces the ontological turn's spirit of re-establishing anthropology as "a theory-practice of permanent thought decolonialisation" (de Castro 2014) by inviting papers that will take these Muslim worlds, including their metaphysical and philosophical traditions, as offering not simply anthropological data but alternative insights into the nature of the divine and its relationship with human life. The panel calls for papers illustrating how Muslim worlds, as they embrace a transcendental reality, generate new imaginaries of the present, past, and future that are ingrained in views of radical hope/transformation that diverge from those proposed by capitalist modernity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Kim Shively (Kutztown University of Pennsylvania)
Paper short abstract:
Turkish migrants who cannot return home for burial reorient their understanding of their place in sacred time. They see themselves as re-enacting an Islamic sacred past in which the first Muslims readily died in foreign lands, and they draw on the Sufi idea that future death offers reunion with God.
Paper long abstract:
Muslims who have migrated to a foreign land often express a desire to be returned to their homeland for death and burial. But what happens when repatriation is not possible? This paper examines this quandary as experienced by Muslim Turkish immigrants in the U.S., who cannot return to the homeland for fear of abuse from the Turkish government as a consequence of the 2016 attempted coup. Based on ethnographic research, the paper discusses how the experience of the spatial dislocation of exile - life and death in "gurbet" (homesickness from living in foreign place) - has led some immigrants to reimagine their positions and trajectory in a sacred timescape. Some see themselves as having a renewed relationship with major figures of the Muslim past since they, like the Prophet Mohammad, will be buried not in their homeland but in the land of hijrah (migration). Many immigrants also look to Sufi concepts for valorization of the suffering of gurbet, embracing the idea that human existence in the physical world is itself a form of gurbet, since separation from and longing for the divine is an endemic aspect of life. The gurbet of living and dying in a foreign country is a pale reflection of the gurbet experienced due to separation from God. Such a view allows immigrants to reorient their thinking about death and burial: rather than longing for return to the homeland, the pain of gurbet can be soothed through meditating on the eschatological promise of reunion with God in death.
Müge Akpinar (FU Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey on a holistic health network that observes Islamic medicine, I inquire into my interlocutors' truth claims about therapeutic fasting in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology and a teleological understanding of history.
Paper long abstract:
Building on Holbraad's (2012) ontologically informed concept of "truth beyond doubt", I will demonstrate that the intersection of my interlocutors' truth claims about the health benefits of fasting ingrained in Islamic-Sufi discursive traditions and the findings of the 2016 Nobel Prize-winning study on the physiological effects of autophagy caused by cellular starvation instantiates a "truth event". I will show that this intersection resembles the coincidental overlap of "the mythical paths of diviners" and "the paths of consultants" (ibid). I will proceed to discuss that my research participants' interpretations of the sunnah and Sufi healing practices about therapeutic fasting are also reflective of a certain kind of engagement with history, which attends to the divine time as "pure duration" beyond the world (Bergson 1910, Iqbal 1930), where the past, the present, and the future were foretold in the Quran and the hadith, rendering history a teleological reading of time. While a teleological understanding of history is not necessarily "linear" (Bryant and Knight 2019, 141), my informants' resorting to the notion of "the end times" to describe the lived present retains the successive perception and actualization of time in the world. By keeping my interlocutors' faith and hope alive with the motivation of reviving the sunnah in the end times, the intersection of their truth claims and the results of the autophagy study becomes affirmative of this teleological understanding of history, where the truth about the health benefits of fasting is perceived to have eventually been revealed in the course of history.
Safwan Amir (Ahmedabad University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper introduces a field method (vestigiality) and turns it into a concept that takes the margins as the very spirit and spirituality of Islam with the goal of revisiting the dichotomy between invented and discursive tradition in the anthropology of Islam.
Paper long abstract:
Why have Islamic history and anthropology been caught in grand schemes and narratives? Why is it that a Golden Age or exceptional piety (and impiety) make for the subject of these disciplines? The thin line between an invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and a discursive tradition (MacIntyre 1984; Asad 2015) often disallows any serious engagement with Islam at epistemological and ontological levels. Rather than a binary between major and minor, the margins are privileged spaces of spirituality in the Islamic tradition. Humility, value given to consistent small acts, the position of the vulnerable, etc. are domains through which Islam pushes itself forward.
As part of my historical anthropological research on the Muslim barbers of South India, I developed a method from the field to trace ordinary Muslims' pasts. Inadvertently, the method began as an analytical tool, but then it transformed into a concept that I call vestigiality. This concept helps rethink teleological time, unearth ethical benchmarks that stand contradictory to capitalist modernity, and speak simultaneously to the past, present, and future. Inspired by the Prophetic trace that manifests as a relic, a lineage, or a dream, vestigiality is an attempt to go beyond major dichotomies within the anthropology of Islam. This paper will introduce vestigiality and place it in conversation with history, Islamic studies, and anthropology. It will end with a discussion on the metaphysics of dua' to demonstrate the possibilities that the margin holds for the anthropology of Islam.
Muhammad Osama Imran (University of Minnesota)
Paper short abstract:
Based on the zikr practitioners of the silsila Naqshbandia Awaisia in Pakistan, this paper asks: What kind of ethics of the self does the Sufi practice of zikr generate? What does political Islam look like if the spirit rather than religious authorities is considered the source of (self)knowledge?
Paper long abstract:
Through ethnographic research among the Sufi silsila (community) of the Naqshbandia Awaisia in Pakistan, this paper is interested in practitioners' formulation of the unconscious as Divine Consciousness. Specifically, it focuses on the Sufi practice of zikr which infuses a realization of constant Divine Presence and shapes the desires and everyday material (dis)engagements of devotees. In its performance, practitioners synchronize the repetition of their breath and head movement with the inner recitation of Allah's name. This is presumed to enable the self's recognition of its own spirit as well as the experience of its transcendence from the temporal and spatial boundedness of the body, thereby providing partial access to the realm of the ghayb (hidden) which informs their everyday ethics and allows glimpses of their own futures.
When individuals themselves become the source of knowledge production and ethical action, what will be the stakes for an anthropology of Islam that associates ethics of submission with certain forms of external authority? What does political Islam look like if the spirit rather than religious authorities is considered the source of (self)knowledge? At stake in this paper is an attempt to bring to the fore a conceptual frame where submission in Islamic iterative practices is infused with creativity and involves an agency that appears to be different from the agency involved in capitalist or liberal modernity. These questions are important to ask because they challenge Western assumptions and contemporary polemics about an Islamic ethics of submission that is presumed to be devoid of freedom.
Bruno Bartel (Federal University of Piauí - UFPI)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to understand the role of reflexivity associated with mystical experience in Moroccan Sufism. The transformations of the selves over the members of Hamdouchiya's brotherhood are produced, experienced, and negotiated based on the religious state acquired in ritual sessions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to understand the role of reflexivity associated with mystical experience in contemporary Moroccan Sufism. The transformations of the selves over the members of Hamdouchiya's brotherhood are produced, experienced, and negotiated based on the religious state (hal) acquired in ritual sessions (hadra). Based on ethnographic research (2016-2017), the way pedagogical knowledge is used in decision-making, how it is learned, and how it is developed into expertise from mystical experiences are highlighted. In such cases, the interlocutors' daily experience connected with other spheres of social life (work, family, and leisure) are described and analyzed. Acquiring the religious state was related to an apprenticeship through the esoteric dimension (batini). According to the metaphysical and theological tradition informed by the ethnographic context, the disciples (murid) interpreted those experiences as closer to the divine reality/truth (haqiqa / haqq) and not just reduced to an exoteric perspective (zahiri), conceived as a derivation of the sensory perception of the material world. To achieve this, the local disciples needed to recognize two distinctly experienced movements among the places of worship (Sufi lodges or the tombs of the saints) to manifest the religious state: the perception that the acquisition of knowledge ('ilm) is distinct from its practice (amal al-'ilm). The comparison of three ritual centers (zawiya) in Morocco (Safi, Essaouira, and Fez) indicates the scope of the transformation of the subjects for conducting a personal narrative guided by ethical principles shared in the community.