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The perils of joy: Contesting mulid festivals in contemporary Egypt
Abstract
Mulids, festivals in honor of Muslim "friends of God," have been part of Muslim religious and cultural life for close to a thousand years. While many Egyptians see mulids as an expression of joy and love for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, many others see them as opposed to Islam, an expression of a backward mentality, a piece of folklore at best. What is it about a mulid that makes it a threat to Islam and modernity in the eyes of some, and an expression of pious devotion in the eyes of others? What makes the celebration of a saint's festival appear in such dramatically different contours? The Perils of Joy offers a rich investigation, both historical and ethnographic, of conflicting and transforming attitudes towards festivals in contemporary Egypt. Schielke argues that mulids are characterized by a utopian momentum of the extraordinary that troubles the grand schemes of order and perfection that have become hegemonic in Egypt since the twentieth century. Not an opposition between state and civil society, nor a division between Islamists and secularists, but rather the competition between different perceptions of what makes up a complete life, forms the central line of conflict in the contestation of festive culture.
... His approach was particularly influential in work on the formation of modern pious Muslim subjects (Hafez 2011, Hirschkind 2006, Mahmood 2005. Other scholarship examined how understandings and practices of modernity may be constructed through religion (Deeb 2006), how the state attempts to create modern subjects through disciplining religious practice (Schielke 2012, Starrett 1998, and how religious and scientific knowledge are coconstituted (Hamdy 2012). ...
... These studies provide crucial insight into the relationship of middle-class or elite urban populations to revivalist processes and to broader religious and social change. Few scholars, however, focus on nonhegemonic, especially provincial or rural, practices that may not fit completely within revivalist ideas (notable exceptions include Boddy 1989, El-Aswad 2002, Mittermaier 2011, Schielke 2012. Given that many Arabmajority countries continue to have relatively high illiteracy rates and rural populations, neglect of practices that may be in tension with dominant forms amounts to a significant omission. ...
... One can also examine transnational circulations of religious commodities and of people on pilgrimages (Pinto 2007, Starrett 1995. Research on Sufis and saint veneration offers other perspectives on power and subjectivity, as well as on the tensions between revivalist and other conceptions of Islam (Hammoudi 1997, Mittermaier 2011, Reeves 1995, Scheele 2007, Schielke 2012. Work on new kinship formations (Bargach 2002, Clarke 2009) and medical/health concerns (Doumato 2000, Hamdy 2012, Spadola 2009) productively takes up the convergence of religion with these topical trends in the subfield. ...
This article reviews recent anthropological scholarship of Arab-majority societies in relation to geopolitical and theoretical shifts since the end of the Cold War, as well as conjunctures of research location, topic, and theory. Key contributions of the subfield to the larger discipline include interventions into feminist theorizing about agency; theories of modernity; analyses of cultural production/consumption that destabilize the culture concept; approaches to religion that integrate textual traditions with practice, experience, and institutions; and research on violence that emphasizes routinization and affect. Emerging work in the areas of race and ethnicity, secularism, law, human rights, science and technology, and queer studies has the potential to strengthen anthropology of the region as well as to contribute to the discipline more broadly.
... Sufi pilgrimages generate a space and time of celebration markedly different from everyday life, which can be seen as backward and un-Islamic by those who equate modernity and Islamic faith with order and discipline (Schielke 2012). And yet, the idea of learning to 'taste' (a Sufi metaphor for knowledge that is not mediated by language) the invisible layers of Islam remains compelling and productive also in an age of reformist revivals (Abenante & Vicini 2017). ...
... Lambek 2010), Mahmood's intervention has inspired a wave of studies foregrounding Muslim women's pious, ethical strivings (e.g.Huq 2009;Masquelier 2009;Hafez 2011;Jouili 2015;Liberatore 2016), and has established piety and ethics as key concepts through which anthropologists try to understand Muslim lives.Within that same turn, some anthropologists have highlighted the cultivation of a complex set of skills.MagnusMarsden (2005) describes how young Sunni and Ismaili men in Chitral, northwestern Pakistan, learn to skillfully balance and shift between different forms of cultivation, including religious debates, the pleasures of music and poetry, and careful considerations about when to act in what way, which feelings to show and which to conceal and when. In my own research in Egypt(Schielke 2015), I have argued that strivings for perfection and purity are inherently fragile. The intense ethical work described by Mahmood may be of short duration, and ethical strivings may more likely take the shape of temporal 'islands of certainty' that allow one to be committed to God in one moment, and follow other moral aims (and also amoral ones) at other moments.In reply, NadiaFadil and Mayanthi Fernando (2015) have critiqued approaches that, according to them, mistakenly treat religion and everyday life as separate entities, and normalise a liberal-secular ideal of resistance to religious norms, while possibly pathologising followers of Salafi and other revivalist movements. ...
... For example, Hirschkind, presumably associated with claims of continuity, is clear that the emergence of cassette tape sermons is a recent phenomenon legible through Islamic notions of ethical listening and more recent popular music traditions. While Schielke, the presumed proponent of rupture, shows how established practices of Moulid continue and are defended from Salafi criticism by its adherents (Schielke 2012). Instead, at stake are different ways of conceiving the aim and goal of ethnographic writing and of anthropological knowledge. ...
‘We are Muslim, we slaughter halal,’ Hassan muttered in irritation in response to a customer’s request to observe the recitation of the tasmiya upon slaughter. His assertion of Muslim identity as a source of trust in halal performance articulates a practice of halal that is now under threat from new forms of halal piety and the documentary demands of halal certification that each foreground complexity, suspicion, and doubt as the basis for halal in the contemporary world. In India where Hindu Nationalist discourse situates the imaginary of the Muslim-as-butcher as the symbolic antithesis of the nation, and where neoliberal aspirations forge a shiny future without Muslim presence—the stakes of offence, suspicion and purity are urgent. I foreground Islamic legal debates on halal as alternating between contested definitions of halal and pragmatic consideration of how trust in halal quality is to be established. Everyday halal practice in Mumbai is legible at the intersection of historically formulated forms of reason, intention, affect and material practice within a changing global market economy and an increasingly hostile political context. Moments of affective breakdown between Muslim customers and butchers reveal the intimacy between new forms of halal piety, a Hindutva politics of abjection, and the exclusionary economy of neoliberal aspiration. Through halal pragmatics, I argue for an ethical anthropology whereby contestations over forms of relation, materiality and subjectivity may form the basis for an ethical critique of political, economic, and scholarly formations.
... Some scholars have questioned the rupture altogether and have placed many of these non-liberal reformists within the fold of Islamic tradition, arguing that they draw on and build on existing discourses and practices in the Islamic tradition (Haj 2011;Ayoub 2016). However, I maintain that, despite this very different project that non-liberal reformists are invested in, one needs to be attentive to the effects of these changes, independently of the projects and discourses of their authors, because liberal concepts, discourses, and practices have come to inflect contemporary Islamic tradition (Deeb 2006;Silverstein 2011;Schielke 2013), so that even revivalist groups share with modernizers and secularists common epistemological assumptions and understandings of history, time, and religion (Iqtidar 2011;Quadri 2013). 26 To better understand these deeper changes of Islamic tradition in its encounter with the modern state, I suggest paying attention to the grammar of concepts (Asad 2003, 25) and to styles of reasoning in the tradition. ...
Up to the twentieth century, Islamic charitable endowments provided the material foundation of the Muslim world. In Lebanon, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of French colonial rule, many of these endowments reverted to private property circulating in the marketplace. In contemporary Beirut, however, charitable endowments have resurged as mosques, Islamic centers, and nonprofit organizations. A historical anthropology in dialogue with Islamic law, God’s Property demonstrates how these endowments have been drawn into secular logics— no longer the property of God but of the Muslim community—and shaped by the modern state and modern understandings of charity and property. Although these transformations have produced new kinds of loyalties and ways of being in society, Nada Moumtaz’s ethnography reveals the furtive persistence of endowment practices that perpetuate older ways of thinking of one’s self and one’s responsibilities to family and state.
... It can be a gathering for assembly (tahlil) at a small festival with a set of activities including an Evening Bazaar (Pasar Malam) (Muhaimin 2006). The complex nature of haul is enhanced and intensified when it relates to Sufism (Islamic mysticism) (Woodward 2011;Schielke 2012;Millie 2006;Jamhari 2001;Muhaimin 2006;Zamhari 2010;Turmudi 2006). ...
This thesis explores the roles of Alkhairaat in Palu Central Sulawesi as a modern Islamic boarding school and one of the most remarkable educational institutions in the development of Islam in eastern Indonesia. Established on June 30, 1930 by Al Habib Idrus ibn Salim Aljufri (1889-1969), locally known as Guru Tua, the institution has developed its own unique and distinctive reputation due to its leader as Hadhrami Sayyid, a man who is originally from Hadhramaut, Yemen and claims himself as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Like many pesantren in Java, Alkhairaat with its network in 13 provinces that consists of 1,550 schools and 49 pesantren, is shaped by local culture and moulded by values and tradition that are consistently nurtured by the founder. I argue that Alkhairaat is one of the leading Islamic educational institutions in eastern Indonesia, bringing about a significant reform into the local educational system and becoming a major recognised religious authority in the region. Guru Tua created an educational system not only to address the educational needs of the rural community but also to appropriate the materials, views, and attitudes of modernity in the society. This thesis further claims that Guru Tua has been a significant figure in the formation, transmission and reproduction of Islamic knowledge and authority in the region. The way Guru Tua has expanded the network of his school shows that his charisma was not only transferable through kinship ties (hereditary) to his progeny for subsequent leadership roles, but also via a scholarly connection expressed through the teacher-student relationship. Through his teachings and religious programs in his institution, he has nurtured many young Muslims with religious knowledge as they accumulate cultural capital essential for the establishment of their religious authority in their respective villages. Analysing Alkhairaat and its network, I reflect Bourdieu's concept; capital, field and habitus as a means of understanding the way in which Alkhairaat and its networks with all components intertwined. This study also draws on the Weberian notion of charisma to illuminate the leadership of Guru Tua. The use of Bourdieu's capital permits us to develop charisma as religious capital as an object of struggle as a valued resource. Therefore, by the combination of Weber and Bourdieu, we can see charisma to be a more secular power rather than God's grace and blessings or divine gift. Based on 12-month multi-sited research in Palu, Central Sulawesi and three other provinces: Gorontalo, North Maluku, and North Sulawesi, the study utilised participant observation methods, staying in the Alkhairaat pesantren for some time as well as engaging with local people. I interviewed prominent local figures, students, former students and dignitaries who were graduates of this institution. In sum, the thesis demonstrates that the school network offers a locally affordable but more reliable religious tutoring, making up a vibrant web of an educational institution with the support of local patronage. It is like a family network in which a sense of identity and a similar religious orientation has been produced and reproduced. The unchallenged Guru Tua's religious competence and teachings have become a tick of approval, providing peace of mind and a favourable point of consideration for local people to send their children joining this network.
... Ondanks de massale aanwezigheid in de moslimwereld sinds de 13e eeuw werd de viering van de geboortedag van de profeet altijd gezien als een betwiste innovatie (bid'ah). Hoewel dit ritueel in de loop der eeuwen door vele geleerden is goedgekeurd, werd het tegelijkertijd door andere beschouwd als een onrechtmatigheid [Tarsitani, 2007;Katz, 2008;Schielke, 2012]. De voorbije decennia werd deze laatste benadering versterkt door de wahabitische en reformistische interpretaties die het Mawlid-ritueel veranderen in een slagveld voor de voorvechters van gemeenzame vormen van de islam. ...
This paper takes the case of the Brass'Art cultural café located on the municipal square of Molenbeek, as a starting point for a study aimed at understanding the construction of a common urban space with a pluralistic purpose. Based on an ethnographic study between May 2017 and January 2018, this article aims to show how the presence of alcohol in this space mobilises and concentrates diverse and even contradictory repertoires – of a discursive, ethical and emotional nature – behind the creation of public space. The Brass'Art case study reflects at the micro and local level the implications of the coexistence of agents with different religious sensitivities and orientations. According to a pragmatic methodology, this paper tries to demonstrate that the fine tuning of the balance of power between the majority and the minority takes place not so much through conscious negotiations or strategies of “civic indifference”, but through practical adjustments in keeping with the principle of community relations.
... perçue comme une innovation contestée (bid'ah). Bien que ce rite ait été approuvé par nombre de savants au cours de longs siècles, il a fait en même temps l'objet d'une illégitimation par d'autres [Tarsitani, 2007 ;Katz, 2008 ;Schielke, 2012]. Lors des récentes décennies, cette dernière lecture se voit renforcée par les interprétations wahhabites et réformistes qui transforment le rite du Mawlid en un champ de bataille pour les défenseurs des formes populaires de l'islam. ...
This paper takes the case of the Brass'Art cultural café located on the municipal square of Molenbeek, as a starting point for a study aimed at understanding the construction of a common urban space with a pluralistic purpose. Based on an ethnographic study between May 2017 and January 2018, this article aims to show how the presence of alcohol in this space mobilises and concentrates diverse and even contradictory repertoires – of a discursive, ethical and emotional nature – behind the creation of public space. The Brass'Art case study reflects at the micro and local level the implications of the coexistence of agents with different religious sensitivities and orientations. According to a pragmatic methodology, this paper tries to demonstrate that the fine tuning of the balance of power between the majority and the minority takes place not so much through conscious negotiations or strategies of “civic indifference”, but through practical adjustments in keeping with the principle of community relations.
... Despite its widespread existence in the Muslim world since the 13 th century, the celebration of the prophet's birth has always been perceived as a controversial innovation (bid'ah). Although this rite has been approved by many scholars over many centuries, it has also been considered illegitimate by others [Tarsitani, 2007;Katz, 2008;Schielke, 2012]. In recent decades, the latter view has been reinforced by Wahhabi and reformist interpretations which have transformed the Mawlid rite into a battleground for defenders of popular forms of Islam. ...
This paper takes the case of the Brass'Art cultural café located on the municipal square of Molenbeek, as a starting point for a study aimed at understanding the construction of a common urban space with a pluralistic purpose. Based on an ethnographic study between May 2017 and January 2018, this article aims to show how the presence of alcohol in this space mobilises and concentrates diverse and even contradictory repertoires – of a discursive, ethical and emotional nature – behind the creation of public space. The Brass'Art case study reflects at the micro and local level the implications of the coexistence of agents with different religious sensitivities and orientations. According to a pragmatic methodology, this paper tries to demonstrate that the fine tuning of the balance of power between the majority and the minority takes place not so much through conscious negotiations or strategies of “civic indifference”, but through practical adjustments in keeping with the principle of community relations.
... I felt sorry to leave our companionship but I had to guard my energy. As stressed by Schielke (2012), physical discomfort and tiredness also make pilgrims feel intensively alive and carried by the crowd. There were eight persons in the taxi, including the driver, three adults in the front, and four adults and a child on the backseat. ...
This article offers a twofold analysis of the popularity of Cherif Ousmane Madani Häidara and the Muslim association Ansar Dine (founded by Haïdara in 1983) in the contemporary Malian Islamic sphere. The author initially observed signs in southwest Mali supporting the view that Häidara was more popular than neo-Hanbali reformist tendencies. In order to frame the debate in a self-critical way, however, the author later argues and elaborates that his perception of the unmatched popularity of Häidara and Ansar Dine in Mali possibly emanates from the persuasive arousal that he experienced as a crowd-fellow during the yearly Ansar Dine 'pilgrimage' of Maouloud in Bamako. Through this self-ethnography based on the phenomenology of a religious move-ment's gathering, the article states that experiencing popularity is about persuasion. In this sociohistoric context of rivalry measuring popularity is above all speculative due to politics, media, and sensationalism.
... Ordinary Muslims, these studies suggest, seldom openly denounce or resist the normative pressures that have come with the Islamic revival, either because of the risk of being branded as "un-Islamic" or because they are convinced by, or feel attracted to, some of its claims, but not to all (see, e.g., Peletz 1997). For many Muslims, moral ideas and practices are characterized not by a simple or unambiguous choice between scripturalist piety and not so pious or immoral behavior but by tension and ambivalence (Hefner 2010;Schielke 2015). ...
This chapter analyses the conspicuous not-praying of a young man in Aceh, Indonesia, a place where normative Islam has recently moved to the very forefront of the public domain. Acknowledgment of his own religious negligence, I show, played a central role in his understanding of personal religiosity, his intention of becoming a better Muslim, and his transformation from a relatively unbound youth to an adult with increasing social and individual responsibilities. I use this case to demonstrate the significance of a more broadly shared religious ethics in Aceh, in which future expectations, and the moral values of sincerity and intention, are valued over and above obvious shortcomings in outward behaviour. The basic sense that things might change, I argue, constitutes an important creative and motivating force within Acehnese social and religious life. It calls attention, moreover, to a generally under-recognized flexibility toward ethical formation in contexts that have been strongly affected by the global Islamic revival.
... Following this line of thought, scholars have provided rich historical material to show how, in the Euro-American space from the Enlightenment onward, a process has been set into motion to re-discipline the senses, auditory and otherwise, of the faithful in a more rationalist way in order to fashion appropriate modern individuals (see Schmidt 2000). Similarly, in the late 19th century in the Muslim world, a discourse of reform and modernization turned the more festive and ecstatic forms of devotion into an object of much criticism and rebuke (Schielke 2012). The post-colonial state's concern with defining a type of state-Islam subservient to the project of the modernizing state has equally impacted practices of listening in religious settings (Hirschkind 2006). ...
In the course of the last decades, sonic forms of Islam—including sound, music, and the spoken word—have diversified and become publicly present through an increasingly wide range of new technologies. These include, for instance, the call to prayer (adhān) disseminated through loudspeakers, radio, and television; the circulation of Quranic recitations, sermons, and anasheed (Islamic hymns or chants) through audio-and video-cassettes, and more recently the Internet; as well as new, more often contested, musical genres, such as Islamic pop, country, rock, and rap music. The audiences for such musical sounds have also pluralized as Islamic performers today appear at multicultural festivals and religiously-mixed cultural events, in addition to targeting dedicated Muslim listeners. And mediated Islamic sounds more generally circulate widely today, sometimes on a global scale, far beyond the control of producers and performers. These sounds not only reach the ears of their intended publics, but also those of Muslims and non-Muslims that they do not target.
In this special collection, we discuss the effects of the public presence of audible Islam by focusing on how Islamic sounds are produced, circulated, and listened to with different levels of intentionality by a wide variety of audiences in local settings where state and non-state actors manage religion in different ways. The individual contributions to this special collection all combine theoretical reflection on sonic Islam with substantial ethnographic fieldwork in Muslim-majority settings as well as in locations where Muslims constitute a religious minority. In her contribution, Jeanette Jouili focuses on the Islamically inspired artistic scene in France. She shows how ambitions to create a faith-sustaining artistic environment at times become entangled with civic projects that both aim to educate the largely working-class Muslim community to appreciate the arts, but also often seek to achieve a broader reach for their artistic projects. Focusing on rappers’ “stage talk” at live festivals in Morocco, Kendra Salois analyzes how hip hop performers and audiences collectively co-constitute a counterpublic that seeks to shape responsible modern citizens rather than pious Muslims, without, however, being indifferent to Islamic ethics. Isaac Weiner, examining a 2004 dispute about the amplified Islamic call to prayer from a mosque in Hamtramck, Michigan, shows how attempts to keep the public sphere free from religion paradoxically highlight the public presence of religion, while those in favor of multiculturalism and public religion tend to mute the specific religious character of a ritual, in this context the adhān. Brian Larkin, who explores the use of loudspeakers by religious actors in the city of Jos, Nigeria, points out how they are central to religious contests between Sufi and Salafi-inspired movements as well as between Muslims and Pentecostal churches. Rather than a tool to communicate a religious message, loudspeakers function as a mode of presence-making and a means to silence others.
Before returning to these individual contributions and how they relate to each other, we briefly elaborate on two trends that have engendered a new interest in auditory Islam. First, we discuss the transformation and proliferation of Islamic soundscapes in the public sphere, and how this relates to the emergence and transformation of the Islamic revival movement and to the dynamics of the (secular) governance of Islam. Next, we turn to new theoretical perspectives that have stimulated scholars to engage with this greater auditory presence of Islam, in particular the renewed interest in anthropology of the senses and sensorial perception, and the turn in Islamic studies from a textual approach to focusing on the multiple ways in which Muslims live Islam.
There is a long tradition of scholars arguing for the centrality of the sonic or auditory in Islam (al-Faruqi 1985, During 1997). The first Quranic verse revealed started with the word “Iqra,” that is, “Recite!” Throughout Islamic history, the art of the proper recitation of the Quran (tajwīd) has been highly valued, as has the correct performance of the Islamic call to prayer, even if the media through which these are amplified (loudspeakers) or broadcasted (radio) have, at times, been topics of considerable debate (Eickelman and Anderson 1999, Khan 2011). Other sonic forms, in...
This article draws from funeral rituals and performative festivals to reflect on how and why burials, reburials and performances of Eyo and Nzem Berom festivals provide excellent examples of cultural politics and represent occasions for the (re)production of kinship, belonging and claims to ownership in the cities of Lagos and Jos. It argues that existing literature on the politics of belonging in Africa either understates or overlooks the roles of funerals and festivals in expressing and contesting ownership of the city. Relying on institutional ethnography, the article illustrates the essentially political nature of festivals and funerals in relation to city ownership, not only in the sense that traditional place identity benefits some groups more than others but also in that it defines who belongs and who does not while inducing conflicts.
How can a collective sexual assault that took place in the mid-1990s in front of a private school in a middle-class neighborhood of Cairo help us reconsider the “circles of hell” that proliferated in protests during the Egyptian January 25 Revolution? This article weaves together three past and contemporary instances of sexual harassment and assault in educational settings to counter the social/political dichotomy that has dominated scholarly discussions about public sexual violence in Egypt and to situate these forms of violence in relation to broader historical processes, including the development of women’s education and mass public transportation and the emergence of the modern city in the late nineteenth century. Building on the work of Michel Foucault and Fatima Mernissi, the essay regards public sexual violence as a mechanism of sexual governmentality aimed at shaping and managing women’s conduct through the conceptualization of women as simultaneously at risk and a risk in public space. Drawing on research conducted in Cairo in 2014–15, I examine the ways in which the activist initiatives OpAntiSH and HarassMap subverted these notions through projects of direct action and community intervention that challenged notions of feminine vulnerability and masculine protection while creating horizontal structures of care in the spaces of protest and in the neighborhood. I conclude by discussing how these approaches can contribute to decolonizing feminism and reinvigorate anti-sexual-violence organizing in the current #MeToo moment.
This article argues that conceptions of time are undertheorized in human rights studies and that such conceptions have a significant impact on how people participate in systems of justice. Within the context of the transitional justice process launched in Tunisia in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring—a context deeply shaped by an Islamist/secular divide—I examine how competing notions of time led to opposing modes of participation in reparative justice. Specifically, I analyze the Islamic principle thawāb (reward in the afterlife for suffering experienced on earth) as a theological notion of time and show how it structured Islamist victims’ participation in reparations measures. Observing that critiques of reparative justice have developed through a strictly secular notion of time, this article foregrounds Islamic concepts that are still underrepresented in such studies, particularly Islamic notions of time and the afterlife. I argue that thawāb contests the universalism of the secular, linear notion of past-present-future dominant in human rights and transitional justice studies.
Focusing on the Orthodox sacrament of repentance and confession (sir al-tūba wa al-i ‘tirāf) in particular, the protagonists of this chapter are aware of its importance for their redemption. However, they sometimes consider it and its relevant rituals to be dysfunctional and irrelevant to (some aspects of) their lives. Therefore, without the aim of effectively trying to change their “sinful” lives through confession, they timidly grapple with their lack of desire or capacity to repent, together with the total dismissal of (some of) their everyday practices and interactions from the so-called “critical” reports, records, articles, and books written about Copts. Their accounts evoke a sense of anger, disgust, sarcasm, or even dismissal when intentionally telling or unintentionally exposing their stories to relevant institutions, writers, and acquaintances, without seeking to revise the “nihilism” of their desires, anxieties, and interests from the latter’s arguments and debates.
On dört asırlık İslam tarihinde çok az olay 10 Muharrem 61 (10 Ekim 680) yılında vukû bulmuş Kerbelâ Vak‘ası kadar dinî-siyasî etkileri açısından tartışılmıştır. Tarihi süreç içerisinde Kerbelâ olayı Müslüman halkların edebiyatında başlı başına bir tür olarak “Maktelü’l-Hüseyn”lerin oluşmasına sebep olmuştur. Sosyo-kültürel tarih açısından yeterli incelemeye tâbî tutulmamış Arapça maktellerden biri Şâfiî-Eş‘arî alimi Ebû İshâk el-İsferâyinî’ye (ö. 418/1027) ait olduğu ileri sürülen Nûru’l-‘ayn fî meşhedi’l-Hüseyn’dir. Bu makalede doküman analizi metodu kullanılarak Nûru’l-‘ayn’ın literatüre geçtiği dönem tespit edilecek, aynı zamanda mevcut yazma ve matbû nüshalarının tarihlerinden hareketle yazıldığı süreç ortaya konmaya çalışılacaktır. Ardından karşılaştırmalı yöntem kullanılarak Arapça makteller içinde kendine özgü yönlerinden hareketle eserin yazıldığı dinî ve kültürel çevreyle ilgili varsayımlarda bulunulacaktır.
Every October since the death of Moroccan born mystic Ahmad al-Badawi (c.1199), devotees travel from all over Afro-Eurasia seeking blessings from the saint during the grandmulid (fair). His body rests in the central Egyptian Delta city Tanta. When visitors arrive, the markets that surrounded his mosque and tomb greet them with the fragrance of sweets ranging from basbusa, honey, candy, sha’ar (hair) and savory treats such as nuts, seeds and chickpeas. These sweets and specifically (chickpeas) hummus have come to connote, joy and blessings from the saint and the festivities that surround the event. This article will explore the ways that devotees and pilgrims used hummus to consume the saint’s blessing (baraka) during the second half of the 19th century and argue that hummus represented a cultural aspect of the relationship between the devotees and saint and provide insight into Egyptian Delta cosmology during the 19th century.
This article examines the grassroots artistic initiative al-Fann Midan (Art is a City Square) in Cairo and a contrasting approach to street art organizing in Alexandria to demonstrate how each enacted a different relationship to ‘the political’ in a revolutionary moment. Extending sociologist Asef Bayat’s concept ‘quiet encroachment’, it analyzes these contrasting approaches through the sonic metaphor of ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’ politics. As a spectrum, this framework highlights how the everyday, the gestural, and the affective on the one hand can exist simultaneously, and at times in tension with, larger, more representational political expressions on the other. It thus avoids fetishizing creative ‘resistance’ or ‘dissent’, while nonetheless analyzing art in a revolutionary moment, by grounding creative expression more historically and with analytical attention to how it reanimates long-standing debates among Arab intellectuals regarding the role of the ‘artist’.
An Islamic festival in honor of the Prophet Moses (mawsim al-Nabi Musa) in late Ottoman Jerusalem (1850-1917) represents a unique response to the modern changes in fin de siècle Jerusalem. A new social order emerged during the modern era that granted Ottoman officials and urban notables in Jerusalem greater political authority over peasants and rural leaders. The modern festival introduced new ritual actors, processional routes, images, and pilgrims that defined the Ottoman state as modern, yet still committed to traditional culture. It also heralded the authority of the urban over the rural environment.
In this article, I examine the politics of kin-work performed by families of Tunisian foreign combatants, whose sons were recruited to jihadi militias following the 2011 Arab Spring. Here, I refer to a form of affective labor that engenders kinship relations through the performance of intentional acts. In the context of postrevolutionary Tunisia, where the state is currently embroiled in a domestic war against terror, families of foreign combatants perform such kin-work to make a moral claim on the state to assist them in repatriating their sons. In doing so, they must work against security discourses that define their sons as terrorists, thereby excising them from the rights-bearing category of the human. Nevertheless, kin-work is more than just a political strategy. I thus also attend to more intimate registers of kin-work, where it serves as a method for inhabiting uncertainty and providing care for absent kin.
This article describes the convergence of Sufi and modern traditions of thought within ritual practices in an Egyptian brotherhood and its Europeans branches. I disentangle the different threads behind one of my interlocutor’s words and experience of dhawq (taste), a spiritual sense that in Sufi tradition reconnects the disciple to the divine. I argue that the way my interlocutors experience dhawq builds up into a form of religious aesthetics and architecture of the self that draw on the encounter with European psychological traditions. Distinctive in this encounter is that the self emerges as the location of an experience that is always, and already, an experience of transcendence, of an outside that is constitutive of selfhood. By putting into dialogue two traditions of knowledge that stand at the margins of the modern world, namely the esoteric trend of Sufi tradition and the Gestalt tradition, my interlocutors’ religious aesthetics promotes an architecture of the self that is alternative to hegemonic understandings of modern Islam structuring the contemporary Egyptian public sphere, as it foregrounds divine intervention and backgrounds individual responsibility and action.
If the first step in developing an ethnography of everyday diplomacy requires re-scaling analytical focus on the forms of mediated exchange beyond the realm of the nation-state, this needs to be followed by an exploration of the ‘sites’ where everyday diplomacy actually takes place. One such ‘site’, which epitomizes the quintessence of diplomatic practice, is dining and commensality. By re-scaling this axiom beyond state-level diplomacy, I explore how the notion of sofra [table/dining etiquette] is deployed by a Muslim Dervish brotherhood in a post-cosmopolitan town in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. I suggest that the notion of sofra embodies both a mode of being diplomatic as well as a site of everyday diplomacy. The sofra thus enables the brotherhood to stage ‘events of hospitality’ to forge and mediate relationships between various ‘others’, locally and transnationally.
Five hundred years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D., the Shiite Fatimid dynasty that ruled Egypt introduced a new festival commemorating and celebrating the birth of Muhammad. This festival, known in Arabic as the mawlid al-nabi, birth of the Prophet, or mawlid for short, soon spread around the region and through the expanding Muslim world. Yet, from the beginning, the mawlid met with criticism: Was it a ‘Muslim’ festival or a ‘Shiite’ festival? Did its observance lead Muslims astray by suggesting that someone other than God should be venerated and, hence, making them guilty of shirk, or polytheism? Since the rise of Wahhabism in the late 1700s and the rise of conservative forms of Salafism in the late 1800s, the Muslim world, and particularly the Middle East, has witnessed an increasingly sharp division between those states that sanction the observance of the mawlid and those that do not. This chapter surveys the states of the contemporary Middle East, noting whether a state forbids, permits or requires (by making a state holiday) mawlid observance. It then maps these findings against the sectarian composition of each state’s population and the outlook of its government, assessing the role that these festivals, or their absence, play in fostering national, regional and/or sectarian identities. It closes by suggesting the broader implications of the celebration of Muhammad’s birthday for national identities and regional politics around the region.
This chapter examines the line of inquiry in the anthropology of Islam in the Middle East that started to appear in the late-1980s and early 1990s, but that especially marked the current millennium. It discusses the new body of scholarship and the new questions that this intervention has made possible, highlighting its important theoretical contributions to the study of religion and to our conceptual apparatus in anthropology and beyond, particularly around ethics, agency, and affect. The chapter also argues for conceptualizing coherence as an aspiration for both practitioners and traditions, whereby coherence for practitioners is the molding of the self into the ideals of the tradition, and coherence for the tradition as the attempt to define and enforce correct practice. Indeed, an investigation of the aspiration to coherence and its challenges is fertile ground to refigure Islamic tradition based on its intersections with other traditions, particularly liberal modernity.
Since the 1950s, the religious growth of Egypt's Coptic Christians has been shaped by diasporic migrations abroad, resulting in new ritual outcomes of representing their cultural and moral origins of communal coherence and periphery. This article approaches the modernizing aspects of Orthodox dispersion from their foundationally mediating locus in holy parts, and more specifically in relics and their technical continuities and discontinuities. Entering into the communicative exhibition of St. Marina's right hand in Egypt, it studies the practical extensions of remembering martyrs across space and time. Relic technics via sensory techniques and cinematic technologies create the very special living properties and metamorphic effects of divine imagination. Ultimately, in gesturing to the materialities of a post-natural body, it seeks to think through what felt fragmentability does for the geographic transmission of a communal body politic—i.e. the material making of the Coptic Orthodox “global” community.
It has become a nearly universal reflex to think about the contemporary Middle East as a region in which secularism is in decline. This is particularly true in countries like Egypt, where the modernist imagination of independence-era socialism seems to have been eclipsed by a grassroots vision of the future as a thoroughly Islamic place, and where the nature of the government's stance with regard to secularism and religion has long been an important question (Winegar 2009; Agrama, this CSSH issue). Since the late 1970s, a decade which saw the Iranian Revolution, the rise of televangelism in the United States, and the beginnings of an extraordinary wave of Protestant conversion in Latin America, it has become popular to produce histories of secularism that will help explain the failure of “the secularization thesis,” the idea that with economic development, the spread of education, and the advancement of Science, religion was a doomed commodity like pounce pots and butter churns. The moral vision of the popular long-running Star Trek mythology, in which humans as a species have given up religion altogether, seems ever more remote the closer its technological vision becomes. Surprisingly durable, religion refuses to wait quietly in the churchyard for people to visit. Instead, it stands on the street corner denouncing bad behavior and calling the world to salvation. But now the street corner is a television broadcasting satellite (or a cassette tape, or a website), and religion's call has succeeded in ways that no Cold War sociologist or political scientist could have imagined.
With its designation as the administrative centre of the north-east Syrian agricultural front in 1974, the city of Raqqa experienced rapid population growth and became subject to large-scale urbanization projects which sought to transform this old wintering station for semi-nomads into a model of Ba 'thist development. Yet the most spectacular new addition is a vast Shiite pilgrimage complex, financed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and dedicated to Companions of the Prophet who died in the seventh century. Construction on the site, however, was interupted in 1994. It continues to pose a major problem for this Sunni town, inasmuch as it occupies the site of ancient tombs that were the object of local cultic pratices and integral to Raqqa's urban identity. The appropriation of these tombs has allowed the Iranian state to widen the territory of Shiite pilgrimage in Syria, while at the same time providing the Syrian State a means of asserting its domination over these local "lieux de mémoire". They have thus been made the object of conflicting territorialities.
Dans un premier temps, l'A. degage les traits essentiels de l'approche par les specialistes egyptiens de Laylat Al-Nisf min Sha'bān. Il affirme ensuite que ce traitement contemporain est egalement valable pour d'autres bida comme le mawālid (fetes populaires basees sur les naissances et morts des hommes saints), Laylat Al-Isrā wal-Mi'rāj (nuit commemorant l'ascension de Muhammad aupres de Dieu), mawlid al-nabiyy (anniversaire du prophete Muhammad). L'A. a choisi les specialistes egyptiens en raison de la multiplicite de leurs points de vue au XX e siecle
Any visitor to the pilgrimage sites of Lourdes in France, Mashhad in Iran, or Varanasi in India is surely impressed by the crowd of pilgrims coming from various places in order to express their devotion and be in close, intimate contact with a source of sacred power. The same visitor is also sure to be overwhelmed by the market activities that take place near or sometimes inside the sacred shrines. Religious commodities of all sorts are sold in shops and bought by the pilgrims, who are usually avid consumers of religious memorabilia. Notwithstanding the fact that the commoditization of the religious tradition periodically attracts the wrath and condemnation of religious reformers, it is a constant feature of the pilgrimage systems that mobilize massive numbers of pilgrims through vast territories. Pilgrimages are a major feature of world religions, for they connect the local and the global—the particular and the universal—in a complex system of practices and beliefs, which allows them to create shared identities in a multiplicity of social and cultural contexts.
This article explores the links among pilgrimage, devotional practices, and the consumption of religious commodities in the production and organization of transnational forms of Shi'i Islam in the pilgrimage shrines in Syria. The general argument is that a connection exists between pilgrimage processes and the emergence of religious markets, meaning arenas of exchange where religious commodities are produced, sold, and consumed. The consumption of religious commodities structures channels of participation and articulates local identities in the translocal religious community created by pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage is a central religious practice in the production of "orthodoxy" and "orthopraxy" in Islam, for it brings together members of different Muslim communities, who might be separated by language, culture, political boundaries, and geographic distance, and mobilizes them into one large ritual and devotional activity. The engagement of each pilgrim in the performance of the collective ritual practices that constitute pilgrimage produces the experience of what Victor Turner defines as communitas, meaning a diffuse solidarity that transcends social and cultural differences. However, beyond the creation of a shared sense of belonging to the communitas, the gathering of Muslims of different social and cultural backgrounds in the activities that constitute pilgrimage also reveals the doctrinal or ritual differences that exist throughout the Muslim world. The consciousness of the local variation of the religious tradition entices among some Muslims the need to find the "pure" or "original" form of their religious tradition in order to restore the Islamic communitas, the umma.
The continuous re-creation of the religious tradition is done through the detachment of symbols, practices, and doctrines from their cultural context and their articulation as abstract systems that can be consciously presented as doctrinal and ritual models. This process was labeled by Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori as "religious objectification," for it allows religion to become "a self-contained system that its believers can describe, characterize, and distinguish from other beliefs systems." Pilgrims are constantly exposed to objectified forms of the religious tradition through sermons, images, and texts, which constitute the discursive and iconic universe of pilgrimage. They carry these codifications of the religious tradition back to their communities of origin as authoritative discourses and practices loaded with the holiness of the pilgrimage site.
Also, in the case of the Shi'i pilgrimage shrines in Syria, the process of the objectification of local religious traditions attracts the attention of political regimes, in particular those that incorporate religion into their system of governance or that have it as a domain to be controlled, such as Iran and Syria. The Syrian and Iranian states also aim to manipulate the process of religious objectification linked to mass pilgrimage in order to make it a channel for the diffusion of official constructions of orthodoxy. In this sense, the process of religious objectification unleashed by mass pilgrimage is invested by secular and religious states in order to create both the governance of religion and the mechanisms of governance through religion.
This analysis of the pilgrimage shrines in Syria reveals the complex web of discursive, iconic, and experiential elements that constitute transnational forms of religious solidarity and identities in Shi'i Islam in the Middle East. The experiential character...
Although radical Islam suffered numerous political defeats in the 1990s, it is still socially and culturally vigorous throughout the Middle East. The retreat of the welfare state in many cash-strapped Arab countries has opened the way for Islamic social organisations to fill the void, creating a new outlet for those critical of secularist elites and frustrated by their lack of political voice. The alternative of liberal Islam, meanwhile, has failed to draw disciples beyond a small minority from the educated classes. The struggle that counts, therefore, is between Islamic radicalism and the authoritarian powers that be.
"We shall not return to the state anterior to discoursein which nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just beginning to emerge out of the grey light; and we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind it; we shall remain, or try to remain, at the level of discourse itself
A task consists of notof no longertreating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak."
In this article, I explore how the festive culture of mulids, Egyptian Muslim saints-day festivals, troubles notions of habitus, public space, and religious and civic discipline that have become hegemonic in Egypt in the past century and how state actors attempt to “civilize” mulids by subjecting them to a spectacular, representative order of spatial differentiation. I argue that habitus must be understood as a political category related to competing relationships of ideology and embodiment and that the conceptual and physical configuration of modern public space is intimately related to the bodily and moral discipline of its users. [veneration of saints, festivals, habitus, public space, state, Islam, Egypt]