Hidden Populations: The Nature of Complex Change in the General Population,

We can trace introductions to ethnographic works and anecdotes that mention some aspects of conducting fieldwork in a Muslim space back to the end of the 1960s. Nonetheless, we may consider Peneff’s article (1985) one of the earliest examples of a reflection on fieldwork in an Islamic country. Based on his freelance fieldwork in 1960s’ post-revolutionary Algeria, Peneff has reflected on the effects that political scenes and economical circumstances have on fieldwork. However, the main topic in the article centred on his ethical dilemma between conducting overt or undercover fieldwork. It was the 1960s, so, after some attempts to resist the temptation, and little danger of criticism from contemporaries, he finally gave in to undercover fieldwork. Peneff, the anthropologist, became Peneff, the French businessperson looking for deals with Algerian entrepreneurs. The article offers some interesting insights, from a reflection on the impact of undercover research to the ethical implications of academic funds and sponsorship for ethnographic research. Yet as other reflections on fieldwork among Muslims written during the 1980s and 1990s, Peneff seems more interested in experiencing the experience of fieldwork than in seeing fieldwork as a medium through which to make sense of his informants’ realities. Indeed, Peneff was conducting fieldwork in a recently decolonized Muslim society. At that time, post-revolutionary tensions shook Algeria, which, among other things, was trying to redefine the role that Islam had to play within the new post-colonial social order. The voices of these Muslims and the anthropologist’s experience of living among them during such social turmoil would have been relevant. However, one cannot find a single example of Peneff’s personal experience of Muslims. They are just good or bad businessmen.

As we have seen in Chapter 2, scholars used to see the study of Islam and Muslim societies, in particular within urban contexts as opposed to rural, less intriguing and

‘exotic’ than adventuring into traditional African or Polynesian societies. I am therefore not surprised that in authoritative works such as Geertz’s classic, Religion of Java (1960) or his most quoted Islam Observed (1968), the informants’ voices, as well as the anthropologist’s experience of living with them, have been silenced, overpowered by the anthropologist seen mainly as author rather than fieldworker.

Nonetheless, even when the anthropologist as author wished to offer a keyhole through which to view the mysterious alchemy of practising fieldwork among Muslims, this ended in making the anthropologist not only the author but also the Prima Donna. An excellent example of this genre remains the only monograph still available that combines, at least in the title, the words ‘reflection’, ‘fieldwork’ and a Muslim country, Morocco (i.e. Rabinow 1977). In this book, Rabinow has narrated his first experience of fieldwork in Sefrou. Chapter after chapter we are introduced to his experience of everyday fieldwork, from a frustrating attempt at learning local Arabic through the locals, to the frustration of dealing with local informants; from the successful access to a hostile village, to the informants’ manipulations that successfully transformed the anthropologist into the village chauffeur. Rabinow’s book is fascinating and easy to read cover to cover during a warm summer evening, as I did. We surely cannot criticize Rabinow for a lack of honesty. In his fieldwork account, he has revealed what Malinowski tried to hide in the violated secrecy of his diaries: sexual relationships during fieldwork,

After tea and another set of exchanges in Arabic, it was clearly time for bed. Ali took me into the next room and asked me if I wanted to sleep with one of the girls. Yes, I would go with the third woman who had joined us for dinner. She had her own room next door, so we could have our privacy . . . Aside from the few pillows and charcoal burner for tea, there was only the bed. The warmth and non-verbal communication of the afternoon were fast disappearing. This woman was not impersonal, but she was not that affectionate or open either. The afternoon had left a much deeper impression on me. (1977: 68–9)

What has surprised me the most about this paragraph is neither the anecdote, with its chauvinist final comment (probably socially excusable at that time), nor the lack of discussion on the ethical implications and the informant–anthropologist power relationship (we would need another decade to find such self-critical views). Rather, it is the detachment from the informant’s reality. Rabinow was experiencing the experience of being an anthropologist more than observing through participation the different experiences of his informants’ Islam. Indeed, Newton (1993: 7) has observed,

Most of Rabinow’s description is disingenuously offhanded and is made to seem – despite the unexplored admission that this was “the best single day I was to spend in Morocco” – primarily about validating his manhood to male Moroccans while fending off “haunting super-ego images of my anthropologist persona” [Rabinow 1977: 63–9 quoted in Newton 1993].

Rabinow was surely an observer, yet too defensive to become a participant (beyond the sexual indulgences of youth). For instance, as in his narration of the sexual encounter with a ‘not impersonal’, but ‘not that affectionate’ Berber prostitute, and also in his account of a healing Sufi ritual, he remained an outsider ‘negotiating a delicate balance of power across the gulf of the anthropological project’ (Ewing

1994: 573). So much an outsider was Rabinow that he perceived Islam as an obstacle, which finally forced him out of the field and towards his national identity,

Yet, there was one further question to ask; Are we all equal, ben Mohammed?

Or are Muslims superior? He becomes flustered. Here there was not possibility of reformist interpretation or compromise. The answer was no, we are not equal.

All Muslims, even the most unworthy and reprehensible . . . are superior to all non-Muslims. That was Allah’s will. The division of the world into Muslim and non-Muslim was the fundamental cultural distinction, the Archimedean point from which all else turned. This was ultimately what separated us . . . The lesson of tolerance and self-acceptance which ben Mohammed had been teaching me during the past months held sway. I had a strong sense of being American. I knew it was time to leave Morocco. (1977: 147–8)

He left Morocco for good, at least as an anthropologist, since Rabinow’s main research today focuses, among other non-Moroccan things, on molecular biology and genomics. Rabinow’s book does not tell us very much about the relationship between the respondents’ Islam(s) and the fieldworker’s experience of it. Yet, if read carefully, this book shows the difficulties and challenges that fieldworkers working on Muslim societies can face when they have inadequate or absent knowledge of theological rhetoric and the discourses existing within it.

After the Facts. Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Geertz 1995) demonstrates greater reflexive spirit and intentions. Published in 1995, the book represents an anamnesis of being an anthropologist back in the 1950s.

Notwithstanding Geertz’s famous storytelling and writing style, which is surely fascinating, this book is reminiscent of a hero’s memoir: half narcissistic satisfaction, including nostalgic disillusionment in a changing world, and half inspirational guide for future generations (of ethnographers). I cannot dismiss the power that this Geertzian inspirational guide had on me: I became an anthropologist.

Nonetheless, though writing in the middle of the 1990s, the nostalgia left Geertz in the 1950s. Despite the fact that the two countries are again Morocco and Indonesia, twenty-seven years on from his Islam Observed, Muslims, as believers in Islam, remain reflexively unobserved; or better, Islam itself becomes the Muslim, so much that even the entry Muslims in the index redirects the reader to Islam! As we have discussed in the beginning of this book, Muslims cannot be reduced to their religion, since Islam exists only through interpretations. Another, and probably the most questionable aspect of After the Facts, is that after two Muslim former colonies, four decades between colonialism and post-colonialism, one anthropologist in 1995 has still missed a good occasion to offer a reflection on the impact that colonialism had and has on Muslims and their interpretation of Islam.

Missing is also a recognition of the influence, positive or negative,⁹ of Said’s Orientalism on the study of Islam. One can agree or disagree with Said’s idea of Orientalism, but one cannot ignore it, not even the anthropologist. Therefore, when the reader turns the final page of After the Facts, what remains in his or her mind are neither the two Muslim countries, nor the four decades dedicated to the study

of Muslim societies, but rather the anthropologist: the undoubtedly unique way of being Geertz; Clifford Geertz.

Although we need to recognize the limitation of these first reflections on fieldwork among Muslims, these authors at least offered a glimpse of their experi-ences. Others, such as Gellner who worked on Muslim societies during the same years, remained very quiet, if not secretive, about their fieldwork and relationship with their Muslim respondents. This, as we have seen in the previous chapter, brought Said (1985) to include ethnographic studies of Muslim societies within the domain of Orientalism. What Geertz in his counterargument to Said’s Orientalism (1982) has missed is that ‘interpretation’ gives the anthropologist the power to

‘create’ his or her object of study, which in this case are human beings and soc-ieties. The lack of informants’ voices or the essentialization of a people, in this case Muslims, to their religion or cultural system, can produce the same effect that traditionally oriental studies of Islamic texts, and artistic representation, did. The power of fieldwork, meant as sharing experiences and emotions, is lost in favour of the super-power of the anthropologist as trans-cultural hero, who can explain and make sense of the web of symbols and meanings hidden to his or her ‘people’.

At the end of the 1980s, however, authors such as Clifford and Marcus (1986, and Clifford 1988), Fisher (Marcus and Fisher 1986) and Rosaldo (1989) shocked the traditional way of interpreting fieldwork and anthropology. This, of course, also had an impact on the anthropology of Islam, where the voices of the researched started to be represented, and the complex human relationships between the fieldworker and his or her ‘people’ were not only acknowledged but also made into an integral part of their ethnographies. To this, I would like to add in the next section the role that emotions have in an effective fieldwork and in preventing those Orientalist temptations that still haunt anthropologists studying Muslim societies.