Islamic Rituals and the Construction of Muslim Identity

The Journal of Society & Media 2017, Vol. 1(2) 1-18 https://journal.unesa.ac.id/index.php/jsm/index IBADAT, THE BODY AND IDENTITY: ISLAMIC RITUALS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MUSLIM IDENTITY Medhy Aginta Hidayat Department of Sociology, Trunojoyo University Madura Email: [email protected] Abstract This library-based theoretical paper examines three types of Islamic rituals or ibadat, that is salat, sawm and hajj, to understand the important of embodied rituals in the construction of Muslim identity. By utilizing several key theoretical ideas including Durkheim‟s Sacred and Profane, Bell‟s ritual and ritualization, and Whitehouse‟s modes of religiosity, this paper corroborates the previous findings in the religious and sociological studies that the body plays an important role for the construction of identity, including religious identity such as Muslim identity. This embodied or ritualized body, with its characteristics of formality, fixity, and repetition, constructs, upholds, enforces and maintains Muslim identity through its rituals of salat, sawm and hajj. Keywords: identity, religious identity, embodied identity, Muslim identity, ritualization Introduction This paper examines the role of Islamic rituals in the construction of Muslim identity. Specifically, three types of Islamic rituals or ibadat are analyzed in this paper: salat, sawm and hajj. These three types of Islamic rituals are chosen deliberately as an explicit example of the embodied rituals in Islam. Catherine Bell‟s ideas of ritual and ritualization, and Harvey Whitehouse‟s concept of the modes of religiosity will be utilized as a frame of analysis. The first section of this paper reviews the sociological concept and definition of religion, and especially the important role of the Sacred and the Profane in religion. The second section specifically discusses Bell‟s conceptual thoughts of ritual and ritualization. The third section focuses on the dimensions of Islamic rituals and its relationship to the concept of identity. Finally, the fourth section analyzes the dynamic role of Islamic rituals in the construction of Muslim identity by using ritual and ritualization theory, and modes of religiosity theory as a means of analysis. Theoretical Frameworks Durkheim’s Religion: The Sacred and the Profane It seems that almost every religious scholar has his or her own definition of “religion.” In this paper, religion will be defined by following Durkheim‟s sociological definition of 2 | The Journal o f Society & Media 1( 2 ) religion. According to Durkheim in his famous book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), religion is understood as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim, 44). Durkheim‟s definition of religion emphasizes the importance of religious system of belief and practices, and the role of religious institutions – especially Churches – as “moral community” which acts to maintain the existence of society. His functionalist view of religion also gives religious institutions higher levels of position than those of religious individuals. This is mainly because religion is “first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it” (Durkheim, 227). In a more anthropological term, Durkheim‟s ideas of religion might be compared to Clifford Geertz‟s definition of religion. According to Geertz‟s explanation in his anthropological book The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1993), a “religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, 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, 90). In some degree, Geertz‟s symbolic definition of religion which placed its central conception in the face of “general order of existence,” as a foundational element of any religious society seems related to Durkheim‟s definition of religion. From my point of view, Durkheim‟s definition of religion which focuses on the role of religious institutions and its social functions can be usefully utilized as a departure point to understand the role of religious rituals in the construction of identity, more specifically a group identity (Islam or Muslim as a group of people) in a society. Furthermore, Durkheim describes religion in terms of beliefs and rites. The first are ideas, concepts, values, and states of opinion, while the second are particular modes of action in the religious realm (Durkheim, 34). According to Durkheim, “rites are rules of conduct that prescribe how man must conduct himself with sacred things” (Durkheim, 38). For Durkheim, rites are particular ways of dealing in thought and action with the fundamental dichotomy of the Sacred and the Profane. The Sacred can be understood as something that is protected and isolated by prohibitions. Meanwhile, the Profane are something to which the prohibitions are applied and that must keep a distance from what is sacred (Durkheim, 38). In Durkheim's view, furthermore, the Sacred is far from being synonymous with the divine. It means that not only gods and spirits can be sacred, but also things like rocks, trees, pieces of H i d a y a t | 3 wood, in fact anything can be sacred. In this sense, for what makes something sacred is not that it is somehow connected to the divine, but that it is the subject of a prohibition that sets it radically apart from something else, which is itself made something profane. Moreover, Durkheim conceded that “religious and profane life cannot coexist in the same space” (Durkheim, 312). Sacredness requires that special locations be set aside for religious rituals: the places where the ritual objects are stored when not in use, which are forbidden to profane persons. Accordingly, Durkheim also accepted that “religious and profane life cannot coexist in the same time” (Durkheim, 313). Sacredness also requires that special times be set aside for religious rituals. Thus, for example, the everyday activities of hunting, fishing and sporting must be suspended during the acts of religious ceremonies. The ideas of “the Sacred and the Profane,” especially the Sacred/Profane place and the Sacred/Profane time, are also elaborated in Mircea Eliade‟s work The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1982). He begins his finding by saying that "the sacred and the profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history" (Eliade, 14). Eliade claims that, whereas for non-religious man the spatial aspect of the world is basically experienced as uniformly neutral, for religious man it was experienced as non-homogeneous, partly sacred and partly not. In particular, religious man experienced the world as having a sacred centre and sought to live there. The major differentiation of space for religious man was that between cosmos (an ordered world) and chaos (a disordered world). Traditional societies understood their own territory as cosmos, a world created out of primordial chaos by their gods, with surrounding territory remaining as chaos. Eliade also stated that for religious man there were two types of time, chairos (sacred time) and chronos (profane time) (Eliade, 45). The former, for example, is experienced in religious festivals, while the latter in ordinary daily life. By contrast, modern, non-religious man does not experience sacred time. He or she has his periodic celebrations, but they are not experienced as sacred, as involving contact with the divine. However, even though both of these scholars discussed the same topic, it seems that Eliade‟s theory of the Sacred and the Profane, especially his ideas of the sacred place and sacred time, goes in a different direction from Durkheim‟s ideas. For me, Durkheim‟s ideas of the Sacred and the Profane are more likely to be applied for the Islamic rituals. Hence, for the purpose of this paper, I will use Durkheim‟s conceptual framework of the Sacred and the Profane as a means of analyzing of the ritual and ritualization strategy in the construction of Muslim identity. 4 | The Journal o f Society & Media 1( 2 ) Bell’s Ritual and Ritualization Theoretical explanations of ritual generally regard it as action and distinguish it from the conceptual aspects of religion, such as beliefs, creeds, symbols, and myths. In her book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992), Bell clearly stated that “beliefs, creeds, symbols, and myths emerge as forms of mental content or conceptual blueprints: they direct, inspire, or promote activity, but they themselves are not activities” (Bell, 19). Meanwhile, ritual, like action, will act out, express, or perform religious conceptual orientations. Ritual is a means by which “collective beliefs and ideals are simultaneously generated, experienced, and affirmed as real by the community” (Bell, 20). In other words, ritual is the primary means by which individual perception and behavior are socially appropriated or conditioned. In the context of social individuals‟ conditioning process, Bell suggests what she called “ritual mastery.” According to her, ritual mastery is the ability “to (1) take and remake schemes from the shared culture that can strategically nuance, privilege, or transform, (2) deploy them in the formulation of a privileged ritual experience, which in turn (3) impresses them in a new form upon agents able to deploy them in a variety of circumstances beyond the circumference of the rite itself” (Bell, 116). As a consequence, ritual mastery implies that ritual can exist only in “the specific cultural schemes and strategies for ritualization (i.e., for the production of „ritualized‟ practices) embodied and accepted by persons of specific cultural communities” (Bell, 107).

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