I have hitherto never come across such a notion of an “anthropology of Islam”. It was only when I was introduced to the pioneering works of Clifford Geertz’s Islam Observed (1971) and a provocative critique of his work by Daniel Martin Varisco, Islam Obscured (2005), that I realized the various nuances of Islamic studies and really took an interest in the anthropological approach.

Since I work at the university library and thus have to go there on an almost daily basis, I have discovered and am very much accustomed to the niche book shelves that house studies on my favorite subjects (for the time being) - Africana, Islamic and Oriental studies. And whenever I visit the main Islamic studies shelf, there is often this overwhelming feeling of seeing too many titles with the two-word phrase containing Islam (such as the aforementioned Islam Observed and Islam Obscured, but also Islam Embedded, Rethinking Islam, Islam and Terrorism, Political Islam, Islam and Democracy… you get the picture).

As I’m sure some of you agree with, after one passes a certain threshold one simply bypasses all these generic books with these cliched titles. My early academic exposure is on textual and historical approaches to Islamic studies, and it never occurred to me that there is such a thing as an anthropology/sociology of Islam. Of course I had already heard of research methods like participant observation but, naively, I didn’t really relate it to ethnography and cultural anthropology, not seriously at least.

So going back to Geertz and co., I eventually got to know of later anthropological studies on Islam, namely the comprehensive books Gilsenan’s Recognizing Islam and Makris’ Islam in the Middle East, as well as more specific ones like E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments and various others. It was only now that I took note of the nuances in the seemingly identical “Islam & XYZ, ABCing Islam, Islam XYZed” book titles.

Apart from noting down different approaches to Islam/Oriental studies, I discovered through Daniel Martin Varisco’s Islam Obscured the significance of Edward Said’s seminal text Orientalism in ushering a paradigm shift. Furthering this shift is Talal Asad’s conception of a discursive tradition. Google directed me to an interesting summary of this by a person whom I had the good fortune of crossing paths recently, Ovamir Anjum. I am quoting his abstract from a website on a past conference specifically addressing post-Saidian Orientalism as follows:

“Amidst the continuing debates between orientalists and anti-orientalists about how to conceptualize Islam as an object of scholarly enquiry, one proposal that stands out is Talal Asad idea of interpreting Islam as a ‘discursive tradition.’ Rather than tradition understood in opposition to modernity, Asad has argued that it is more accurately construed as a “historically extended argument.” In a fateful inversion, then, modernity itself becomes a tradition rather than a universal condition brought on by the ultimate triumph of reason. Some emerging scholars have enthusiastically greeted this idea and are beginning to pay close attention to the Islamic discourses in attempting to understand Muslim societies and their encounter with modernity.”

Having said all of this, I’m sure many of my conservative friends I know will start pointing out my overly fascinated attachment to academic views. I guiltily agree that this claim is true, but I also want to make clear that taking an academic approach does not necessarily imply pushing aside apologetic/sympathetic/insider opinions. So crucial it is to avoid being a katak bawah tempurung and syok sendiri.

With that cleared, I return to my initial attempt at describing this anthropology of Islam. As a theologian would scrutinize sacred texts while a historian would employ higher criticism by contextualizing sacred texts into a timeframe; an anthropologist, in turn, observes first-hand practice of how these texts and its history plays out in real contemporary life.

Pre-Said, meaning before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, there was this cultural and colonialist baggage of deliberately choosing “exotic” local traditions, and interpreting it on the basis of European experience towards democratic ideals as an overarching meta-narrative. Thus you see in the abovementioned Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, as its title seems to suggest, the notion of a tribe called “Sanusi” located in some exotic unknown place called “Cyrenaica”. And then there was Clifford Geertz with his similarly exotic title The Religion of Java.

Post-Said, the new vanguard such as Talal Asad, Varisco and others are reconstructing the fallacies and misconceptions of past orientalist works. Interestingly, there is no such thing as an “anthropology of Christianity”, or an “anthropology of Secularism” (which Talal Asad proposes).

I want to cut it short as we’ve reached the juncture that I’ve arrived at in this inspection of anthropology — the point where I’m starting to read Talal Asad.

It’s a good thing to reach this juncture too since it’s the summer break and I can take a closer look at Asad and his school. Perhaps I’ll also try finishing up listening to several great lecture series by one of my favorite American Muslim scholar, Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. So with that, I beg my fellow KakiBlog co-authors to write more frequently so as to let me take time out catching up with my other blogs, hobbies and reading lists.