ISLAM OBSERVED Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia Clifford Geertz The University of Chicago fress Chica go & London for Hilly THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London Copyright © 1968 by Yale University All rights reserved Phoenix Edition published 1971 Primed in the U nired Stares of America 99 98 97969594939291 9089 109 8 International Standard Book Number: 0-226-28511-1 Contents v Preface I. Two Countries, Two Cultures I 2• The Classical Styles 3. The Scripturalist Interlude 4. The Struggle for the Real Bibliographical Note Index Maps Morocco 6 Indonesia IO 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Preface "Bad poets borrow," T. S. Eliot has said, "good poets steal." I have tried in what foliows to be, in this respect anyway, a good poet, and to take what I have needed from certain others and make it shamelessly my own. But such thievery is in great part general and undefined, an almost unconscious process of selection, absorption, and reworking, so that after awhile one no longer quite knows where one's argument comes from, how much of it is his and how much is others'. One only knows, and that incom­ pletely, what the major intellectual influences upon his work have been, but to attach specific names to specific passages is ar­ bitrary or libelous. Let me, then, merely record that my approach to the comparative study of religion has been shaped by my re­ actions, as often rejecting as accepting, to the methods and con­ cepts of Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward Shils, Robert Bellah, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and their intellectual pres­ ence can be discerned, not always in forms of which they would approve, throughout the whole of this little book, as can that of the man whose ·genius made both their and my work possible, Max �Veber. The certification of fact is, of course, another mat­ ter: to the degree that references documentary to my substantive assertions can be given, they will be found in the bibliographical note at the end of the book. In four brief chapters-originally delivered as the Terry Foun­ dation Lectures on Religion and Science for 1967 at Yale Uni­ versity-! have attempted both to lay out a general framework for the comparative analysis of religion and to apply it to a study of the development of a supposedly single creed, Islam, in two quite contrasting civilizations, the Indonesian and the Moroccan. Merely to state such a program is to demonstrate a certain lack of grasp upon reality. What results can only be too abbreviated to be balanced and too speculative to be demonstrable. Two cultures over two thousand years are hardly to be compressed into forty Vl Preface thousand words, and to hope, besides, to interpret the course of their spiritual life in terms of some general considerations is to court superficiality and confusion at the same time. Yet there is something to be said for sketches as for oils and at the present stage of scholarship on Indonesian and Moroccan Is­ lam (to say nothing of comparative religion, which as a scientific discipline hardly more than merely exists), sketches may be all that can be expected. For my part, I have drawn the inspiration, if that is the word for it, for my sketch mainly out of my own .field­ work as an anthropologist in the two countries concerned. In 1952-54, I spent two years in Java studying the religious and so­ cial life of a small town in the east-central part of the island, as well as pursuing various topics in Djakarta and Jogjakarta. In 1957-58, I was back in Indonesia, concentrating my efforts on Bali, but spending some time in Sumatra, and, once again, Cen­ tral Java, as well. In 1964 and again in 1965-66, I conducted similar researches (which are, as a matter of fact, still in prog­ ress) in Morocco, working mainly in a small, ancient walled city in the interior, but there, too, journeying about the country gen­ erally. An anthropologist's work tends, no matter what its osten­ sible subject, to be but an expression of his research experience, or, more accurately, of what his research experience· has done to him. Certainly this has been true for me. Fieldwork has been, for me, intellectually (and not only intellectually) formative, the source not just of discrete hypotheses but of whole patterns of so­ cial and cultural interpretation. The bulk of what I have eventu­ ally seen (or thought I have seen) in the broad sweep of social history I have seen (or thought I have seen) .first in the narrow confines of country towns and peasant villages. A number of people-historians mostly, but political scientists, sociologists, and economists as well-have questioned whether this sort of procedure is a defensible one. Is it not invalid to read off the contours of a whole civilization, a national economy, an encom passing political system, a pervasive class structure, from the details of some miniature social system, however intimately known? Is it not reckless to assume any such miniature social sys- Preface vu tern-some bypath town or village or region-is typical of the country as a whole? Is it not absurd to divine the shape of the past in a limited body of data dra�n from the present? The an­ swer to all these questions, and others like them, is, of course, "yes": it is invalid, reckless, absurd-and impossible. But the questions are misplaced·. Anthropologists are not (or, to be more candid, not any longer) attempting to substitute parochial under­ standings for comprehensive ones, to reduce America to ] ones­ ville or Mexico to Yucatan. They are attempting (or, to be more precise, I am attempting) to discover what contributions paro­ chial understandings can make to comprehensive ones, what leads to general, broad-stroke interpretations particular, intimate find­ ings can produce. I myself cannot see how this differs, save in content, from what an historian, political scientist, sociologist, or economist does, at least when he turns away from his own ver­ sions of Jonesville and Yucatan and addresses himself to wider problems. "Ve are all special scientists now, and our worth, at least in this regard, consists of what we are able to contribute to a task, the understanding of human social life, which no one of us is competent to tackle unassisted. The fact that the anthropologist's insights, such as they are, grow (in part) out of his intensive fieldwork in particular set­ tings does not, then, in itself invalidate them. But if such insights are to apply to anything beyond those settings, if they are to tran­ scend their parochial origins and achieve a more cosmopolitan relevance, they quite obviously cannot also be validated there. Like all scientific propositions, anthropological interpretations must be tested against the material they are designed to interpret; it is not their origins that recommend them. For someone who spends the overwhelming proportion of the research phases of his scholarly life wandering about rice terraces or blacksmith shops talking to this farmer and that artisan in what he takes to be the latter's vernacular, the realization of this fact can be a shaking experience. One can cope with it either by confining one­ self to one's chosen stage and letting others make of one's de­ scriptions what they will (in which case the generalization of vm Preface them is likely to be even more uncritical and uncontrolled), or one can take up, in the absence of any particular competence to do so, the task of demonstrating that less special sorts of material and less minute!y focused problems can be made to yield to the same kinds of analysis practiced on the narrowed scene. To choose the second alternative is to commit oneself to facing up to the ne­ cessity of subjecting one's theories .and observations to tests quite unlike those to which anthropological arguments are normally required to submit. What was private domain, neatly fenced and intimately known, becomes foreign ground, heavily traversed but personally unfamiliar. In these lectures I have, as I have already indicated, followed the second course with something of a vengeance. In doing so, I have sought to see what sense I could make of the religious his­ tories of Morocco and Indonesia in terms both of what I have con­ cluded from my :field studies and what, in more general terms, I think religion comes down to as a social, cultural, and psy­ chological phenomenon. But the validity of both my empirical conclusions and my theoretical premises rests, ih the end, on how effective they are in so making sense of data from which they were neither derived nor for which they were originally designed. The test of their worth lies there, as comparative, histqrical, macro­ sociology. A half -century after Weber's death, this sociology is still very largely a program. But it is a program, I think, well worth attempting to effect.Fo r without it we are prey, on the one hand, to the pallid mindlessness of radical relativism and, on the other, to the shabby tyranny of historical determinism. Lloyd Fallers, Hildred Geertz, Lawrence Rosen, David Schnei­ der, and Melford Spiro have all given earlier drafts of this work the benefit of extensive and careful criticism, some of which I have paid attention to.