Data, Methods and Analysis

the most obscurantist elements within the tradition of anthropological studies of Islam: illusory exoticism of fieldwork. Actually, through his examples and the titles mentioned in the Epilogue, he has reinforced (probably unintentionally) the idea that the anthropology of Islam means exotic fieldwork (see in particular Varisco 2005: 138, 144–5). As we shall see in the next chapter, since the end of the 1990s, an increasing number of anthropologists have conducted ethnography ‘by living in an Islamic context’ (Varisco 2005: 138) but, this time, within the geographical west. Although probably none of these anthropologists had to enjoy the experience of soiling themselves (see the case of Daniel Bradburd reported by Varisco 2005:

144) or fight against exotic intestinal ‘flora’, as Varisco himself had to face in his Yemenite fieldwork in 1978.¹⁵ Indeed, anthropologists of Islam working in western locations, or trans-regional fieldwork, are providing, in particular after September 11, vital studies to understand Muslim communities and their Islams.

ANTHROPOLOGY OF ISLAM OR ISLAMIC ANTHROPOLOGY?

We have seen that during the 1980s anthropologists researching Islam and Muslims tried to define the anthropology of Islam. Much of the debate focused on the different role that anthropology should have from theology. Some Muslim anthropologists found unacceptable the suggestion that many Islams, rather than one, could exist.

Ahmed is a stalwart defender of the ‘one Islam’ position. In his controversial Toward Islamic Anthropology (1986: 58) he has stated, ‘there has been a suggestion by Muslim anthropologists that there is not one Islam but many Islams, a suggestion taken up by Western anthropologists. I disagree with this position. There is only one Islam, and there can be only one Islam’. The anthropology of Islam, as we have seen, has developed from disparate ethnographic studies focusing on Muslims;

hence it has lacked a definite paradigm, definition or a theoretical blueprint. In other words, anthropology of Islam is still a debate, an open-ended project and a polyphonic discourse. By contrast, Islamic anthropology has been theorized, provided with a clear paradigm and blueprint: Islam. At the beginning of the 1980s, the project for an Islamic anthropology was not a novelty (Mahroof 1981). In 1984, Ahmed published a short article announcing his book (1986) which would have represented the road map for an Islamic anthropology. Ahmed’s Toward Islamic Anthropology has received much attention through extended reviews and discusstions.¹⁸ Anthropologists have shown an overall scepticism towards Ahmed’s argument, with some vehemently rejecting it (cf. Tapper 1988).

Other Muslim scholars have attempted to Islamicize social scientific disciplines (see Ba-Yunus and Ahmad 1985, Wyn 1988). Nonetheless, Ahmed’s polemic attitude toward non-Islamic anthropology and his British anthropological training

made his work particularly visible to the western audience. Ahmed defines Islamic anthropology ‘loosely’ as,

The study of Muslim groups by scholars committed to the universalistic principles of Islam – humanity, knowledge, tolerance, – relating micro village tribal studies in particular to the larger historical and ideological frames of Islam. Islam is here understood not as theology but sociology, the definition thus does not preclude non-Muslims. (1986: 56)

We can appreciate, as other reviewers have also noticed, Ahmed’s emphasis on the inclusiveness of Islamic anthropology. Yet a strong contradiction in terms falsifies all the universalistic framework of Islamic anthropology. Ahmed has stated that Islam, in Islamic anthropology, is not theology but rather sociology. Hence, he has concluded, Islamic anthropology does not exclude non-Muslim anthropologists.

Now, I wonder how a non-Muslim, who may not recognize Muhammad as a prophet and be agnostic about God, could apply Islamic anthropological methodology.

Islamic anthropology, however explained or sold, is nothing else than anthropology based on a theological determinism. Any anthropology programmatically based on ideology would face challenging crises of moral and ethical values, which would ultimately prevent the study of certain topics or impose, even before fieldwork, a pre-dictated framework of analysis. To illustrate this point, we can use very simple examples. How can Islamic anthropologists conduct fieldwork, without bias, with Muslim gays and lesbians? How can Islamic anthropologists, such as Ahmed, conduct fieldwork with apostates and study the dynamics of apostasy without compromising the foundation of their own discipline? At this point, it is worth asking if, as Ahmed seemed to imply, Islamic anthropologists must find refuge from contemporary aspects of life studying only the tribal Muslim village.

Ahmed (1986), and Wyn (1988) after him, have not been unsuccessful in their attempt to shape an Islamic anthropology, since, as Eickelman has observed,

‘Islamic anthropology . . . sounds very much like other anthropologies, except for the efforts to justify it in terms of perceived Qur’anic principles and to encourage Muslim scholars to use anthropological approaches’ (1990: 241).

CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter, we have observed the debate stemming from the question ‘what is the anthropology of Islam?’ In conclusion, much has been debated, heatedly criticized, sometimes even acrimoniously, but no agreement has been reached. By contrast, Islamic anthropology did not suffer such a lack of identity since its identity was divinely assumed: Muslims could not contradict the Qur’an. Yet this inevitably purges Islamic anthropology from social science and roots it in something akin to theology. Finally, we have observed that the discussion surrounding the idea of an anthropology of Islam is quite recent, since it started during the 1980s.

Before that, anthropologists conducted fieldwork in the Middle East and Northern

Africa searching for the ‘tribesman’ as their colleagues in Africa searched for the

‘primitive’. Indeed, we must recognize, as Said has pointed out,

As primitively, as the age-old antitype of Europe, as a fecund night out of which European rationality developed, the Orient’s actuality receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. The origins of European anthropology and ethnography were constituted out of these radical differences, and, to my knowledge, as discipline, anthropology has not yet dealt with this inherent political limitation upon its supposedly disinterested universality. (1985: 95) Today, we are more aware of the political influences of colonialism and the impact that it had on the discipline. Yet as Abu-Lughod has discussed in her article (1989), some ‘zones of theorizing’, affected by Orientalist attitudes, are still present in the anthropology of Islam. What Abu-Lughod has called the ‘harem’ is probably the most prominent today,¹⁶ together with a new one, ‘terrorism’.

The idea of the anthropology of Islam, even recently (see Varisco 2005), is still inevitably linked to ‘exotic’ fieldwork, often located in the Middle East and Northern Africa, and always in the village. During my bibliographic research for this book, I have tried to find any review or article which, discussing the topic of the anthropology of Islam, mentions fieldwork among Muslims living in the west, or even studying contemporary problems facing Muslims, such as drugs, HIV, secularism, the war on terror and so on. I found none. However, since the 1990s a growing number of anthropologists of Islam have precisely offered glimpses into the lives, and difficulties, of western Muslims; so, why is their work being left aside?

I have found the answer to this question in two main factors. Firstly, anthro-pologists still seem nostalgic for times of dangerous, challenging, adventurous explorations which, through the rite of passage (often symbolized by general sickness, diarrhoea and lack of toilet paper) of leaving the civilized world for the hardship and pain of the ‘primitive’ one, could project over themselves a Nietz-schean aura of the fascinating superhuman. Secondly, the belief that, despite the methodology used and the training of the researcher, studies conducted within the west are the domain of sociology rather than the anthropology of Islam.

If the first reason may be pathetic, the second is certainly illogical. If western anthropologists studying Muslims within western countries are to be considered sociologists (because of the autochthonous location of their fieldwork), why are ‘native’ anthropologists (e.g. M. N. Srinivas) studying their own ‘primitive’

societies still recognized as anthropologists? I believe that methodology, rather than location, discriminates between anthropology and sociology. When a study is founded on fieldwork and participant observation, and the respondents’ voices are made audible, the distinction between the anthropology of Islam and the sociology of Islam blurs.

In conclusion, though we still cannot define (and probably do not need to do so) what the anthropology of Islam may be (or even should be), we can surely affirm what is not. The anthropology of Islam is not theology. This means going

beyond the question of Islam or Islams, and observing the dynamics of Muslim lives expressed through their ideological and rhetorical understanding of their surrounding (social, natural, virtual) environment.¹⁷ Yet many events have changed the relationship between the Muslim and non-Muslim world since Geertz wrote his seminal book Islam Observed, and Asad (1986b) reopened the debate on the idea of an anthropology of Islam which el-Zein (1977) had started. September 11 and the resulting ‘war on terror’ is certainly the most unprecedented and traumatic of these events; an event pregnant with horrible consequences. Six years after the crumbling of the Twin Towers and the loss of thousands of lives around the world, Muslim and non-Muslim anthropologists have still not reflected adequately upon what it means to study Islam from an anthropological perspective in this new era.

I shall use the next chapter to begin a debate and (what I strongly believe to be) a much needed discussion.

NOTES

1. I recommend Morrison 1987, Bowie 2000 and Kunin 2002.

2. See for instance, Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Harem in 1834, and Fanatics of Tangier, painted in 1836.

3. Although the Christian polemicists’ representation of Islam as a morally depraved and libidinous religion could still be perceived though the eroticizing artworks.

4. For critical reviews of some important works focusing on Islamic regions, some of which, such as those of Bourdieu 1960, Geertz 1968 and Gellner 1981, could be considered as the first attempts to develop an anthropology of Islam, I recommend el-Zein 1977, Eickelman 1981b, Asad 1986a, Abu-Lughod 1989, Gilsenan 1990, Street 1990, Lukens-Bull 1999 and Varisco 2005.

5. To mention just a few, Crapazano 1973, el-Zein 1977, Marranci 2006a, but in particular the superb, (sometimes sarcastically goliardic) Varisco 2005, Chapter 1.

6. ‘Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic’ (Geertz 1993: 90).

7. See, for instance, Anderson 1984; Asad 1986a, 1986b; Munson 1993, 1995;

Roberts 2002; Rosen 2002; Marranci 2006a.

8. Yet Gellner has suggested a more complex view in which the two traditions maintain strong links and interrelationships.

9. For a better and more detailed description see Eickelman 1981a, Chapter 6, from which the following examples have been taken.

10. By contrast, he mentioned unrelated European philosophers (in primis Hume), writers and historical personages, (see Varisco 2005).

11. For a theological one see Ahmed 1986, which I will discuss below.

12. See Marranci 2006a. Also we may wonder to which kind of þadiths Asad is referring: strong, weak or false?

13. But also Islam in general, as the inclusion of works such as those of Geertz 1968 and Asad 1986 and Eickelman 1982 demonstrates.

14. For discussion concerning fieldwork in the anthropology of Islam see Chapter 5 in this book.

15. This does not mean that anthropologists of Islam conducting fieldwork in the west do not encounter cultural shocks, and in particular health hazards, as my experiences of food poisoning may demonstrate.

16. See Chapter 8 in this book.

17. It is important to emphasize that the term ideology here has no negative or political connotation, rather ideology is understood in its primary meaning as a set of beliefs structuring a personal discourse shared through what Mafessoli (1996) has defined as a ‘community of emotions’. See Chapter 4 in this book.

18. See for example, Boase 1986, Elkholy 1984, Hart 1988, Tahir 1987, Tapper 1988, Young 1988, Edwards 1991, Varisco 2005, Chapter 4.

Studying Muslims in the West: Before and