Paper short abstract:

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.