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Accepted Paper:
What does it mean to follow a rule? The dilemmas of the observance of sharia norms for Shi‘i Muslims in the UK
Morgan Clarke
(University of Oxford)
This paper describes how British Shi‘i Muslims try to reconcile the rules of Islam with the competing demands of life in a non-Muslim society. Anthropological attention has largely focused on how rules are often bent or broken. I discuss instead how people go to great lengths to observe them.
Paper long abstract:
The Islamic sharia is a notable example of a ‘ruly’ approach to living well. The religious rules of Islam form an important part of many Muslims’ understanding of good religious practice and projects of virtuous self-fashioning. Religious norms such as those of modest dress and dietary restrictions also form a key element of Muslim identity, especially in minority contexts. In this paper, I draw on current fieldwork in the UK to provide ethnographic insight into how Shi‘i Muslims from a South Asian diaspora community conceive of the obligations of the sharia and how they reconcile them with the competing demands of life in a non-Muslim society. While much anthropological attention has been devoted to the ways in which rules are often bent or broken, I discuss how people go to great lengths to observe them, as well as justify those occasions when they cannot, focusing on two key sources of dilemma: whether to shake hands or otherwise have physical contact with the opposite sex; and when one can and cannot eat food offered by non-Muslims. Building on this ethnographic foundation, placed alongside my previous work on Islam in Lebanon, I argue that anthropology’s theoretical resources for discussing the complexities of rules and the nuances of their observance need expanding. I present a number of such resources drawn from philosophy and moral theology, as an illustration of my longer-term project to develop a new and distinctive approach to the anthropology of rules.