eCommons@AKU Exploring Muslim Contexts ISMC Series 1-1-2012 Volume 3: Ethnographies of Islam : Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices Baudouin Dupret Editor Thomas Pierret Editor Paulo G. Pinto Editor Kathryn Spellman-Poots Editor Follow this and additional works at: http://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_emc Part of the Islamic World and Near East History Commons, and the Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons Recommended Citation Dupret, B. , Pierret, T. , Pinto, P. , Spellman-Poots, K. (Eds.). (2012). Volume 3: Ethnographies of Islam : Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices Vol. 3, p. 208. Available at: http://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_emc/7 234 x 156mm spine 12mm but folows there jacket Established in London in 2002, the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations aims to strengthen research and teaching about the Exploring Muslim Contexts heritages of Muslim societies as they have evolved over time, and to examine the Paulo Pinto G. and Kathryn Spellman-Poots Edited Baudouin by Thomas Dupret, Pierret, challenges these societies face in today’s globalised world. It also seeks to create opportunities for interaction among academics, traditionally trained scholars, innovative thinkers and leaders, in an effort to promote dialogue and build bridges. Exploring Muslim Contexts Series Editor: Abdou Filali-Ansary This series seeks to address salient and urgent issues faced by Muslim societies as they evolve in a rapidly globalising world. It brings together the scholarship of Ethnographies leading specialists from various academic fields, representing a wide range of theoretical and practical perspectives. This volume explores the ways in which ethnography can create a greater of Islam understanding of Islam in particular social contexts. It does so by advancing a Ritual Practices and Everyday Performances pluralistic use of ethnography in research about Islam in anthropology and the other social science disciplines. The contributors have used ethnography to engage Ethnographies Islam of Ritual Performances with and relate to specific empirical realities in regions around the world. The aim is to show the strength of this approach, despite variations in terms of the object of and Everyday Practices analysis, the theoretical frameworks or the disciplinary traditions of the researcher. They argue that this approach, which could also be called an epistemology, allows Edited by Baudouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, for a more precise and complex understanding of the practices and discourses that Paulo G. Pinto and Kathryn Spellman-Poots constitute social realities constructed and perceived as ‘Islamic’ by those who live them. Furthermore, the book encourages ethnography in the study of Muslim practices that have seldom been approached in this way. Key Features • Counters political discourses and stereotypical media portrayals of Islam as a monolithic civilisation • Demonstrates the benefit of using ethnography to engage with and relate to specific empirical realities • Includes case studies on rituals and symbols in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Britain, Pakistan, Brazil and Lebanon • Covers veiling, students’ religious practices, charitable activities, law, and scholarship in Egypt, Jordan, Singapore, Turkey and Yemen Baudouin Dupret is Research Director at the French Thomas Pierret is a Lecturer in Contemporary Islam at National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). the University of Edinburgh. Paulo G. Pinto is Professor of Anthropology and Director Kathryn Spellman-Poots is an Associate Professor at of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Universidade the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Federal Fluminense, Brazil. Civilisations. Jacket design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk ISBN 978-0-7486-4550-3 Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Ethnographies of Islam Exploring Muslim Contexts Series Editor: Abdou Filali-Ansary Books in the series include Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, “Islamic” and Neo-Liberal Alternatives Edited by Robert Springborg The Challenge of Pluralism: Paradigms from Muslim Contexts Edited by Abdou Filali-Ansary and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices Edited by Baudouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo G. Pinto and Kathryn Spellman-Poots Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past Edited by Derryl N. MacLean and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed www.euppublishing.com/series/ecmc Ethnographies of Islam Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices Edited by Baudouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo G. Pinto and Kathryn Spellman-Poots in association with THE AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations The opinions expressed in this volume are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. © Editorial matter and organisation Baudouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo G. Pinto and Kathryn Spellman-Poots, 2012 © The chapters, their several authors, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh eh8 9lf www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Goudy Oldstyle by Koinonia, Manchester and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4550 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4551 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5479 6 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5478 9 (Amazon ebook) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents Introduction 1 Baudouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo Pinto and Kathryn Spellman-Poots Part One: Performing Rituals 1. Black Magic, Divination and Remedial Reproductive Agency in Northern Pakistan 11 Emma Varley 2. Preparing for the Hajj in Contemporary Tunisia: Between Religious and Administrative Ritual 21 Katia Boissevain 3. “There Used To Be Terrible Disbelief ”: Mourning and Social Change in Northern Syria 31 Katharina Lange 4. Manifestations of Ashura among Young British Shi‘is 40 Kathryn Spellman-Poots 5. The Ma‘ruf: An Ethnography of Ritual (South Algeria) 50 Yazid Ben Hounet 6. The Sufi Ritual of the Darb al-Shish and the Ethnography of Religious Experience 62 Paulo G. Pinto 7. Preaching for Converts: Knowledge and Power in the Sunni Community in Rio de Janeiro 71 Gisele Fonseca Chagas Ethnographies of Islam 8. Worshipping the Martyr President: The Darih of Rafiq Hariri in Beirut 80 Ward Vloeberghs 9. Staging the Authority of the Ulama: The Celebration of the Mawlid in Urban Syria 93 Thomas Pierret Part Two: Contextualising Interactions 10. The Salafi and the Others: An Ethnography of Intracommunal Relations in French Islam 105 Cédric Baylocq and Akila Drici-Bechikh 11. Describing Religious Practices among University Students: A Case Study from the University of Jordan, Amman 115 Daniele Cantini 12. Referring to Islam in Mutual Teasing: Notes on an Encounter between Two Tanzanian Revivalists 124 Sigurd D’hondt 13 Salafis as Shaykhs: Othering the Pious in Cairo 135 Aymon Kreil 14 Ethics of Care, Politics of Solidarity: Islamic Charitable Organisations in Turkey 144 Hilal Alkan-Zeybek 15. Making Shari‘a Alive: Court Practice under an Ethnographic Lens 153 Susanne Dahlgren 16. Referring to Islam as a Practice: Audiences, Relevancies and Language Games within the Egyptian Parliament 162 Enrique Klaus and Baudouin Dupret 17. Contesting Public Images of ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910–78): Who is an Authentic Scholar? 170 Hatsuki Aishima Part Three: The Ethnography of History 18. Possessed of Documents: Hybrid Laws and Translated Texts in the Hadhrami Diaspora 181 Michael Gilsenan About the Contributors 193 Index 196 — vi — Introduction Baudouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo Pinto and Kathryn Spellman-Poots In the past three decades, the social sciences in general, and anthropology in particular, have developed an ambiguous relationship with their descriptive traditions, as epistemic relativism and self-defeating critique have led scholars to reflexive deadlocks and fruitless glossing over issues. Instead of attempting to describe the social world as it unfolds when empirically observed, researchers often lose the actual object of interest and propose new narratives in its place that are devoid of the contextual and praxiological specificities of any actual situation. This holds especially true where religious phenomena are concerned. This is probably due to a theorising attitude, what Wittgenstein called the “craving for generality”, that looks for big explicative schemes and neglects the situational and self-producing capacity of the social world to produce its own endogenous order. Without advocating a return to positivism, we contend that the social sciences should pay closer attention to actual social practices and adopt a more empirical and analytical attitude vis-à-vis their object of scrutiny. We can identify at least three problems in the social sciences which justify some sort of ethnographic re-specification of our attitude vis-à-vis “the real”. The first one is the tendency to seek for the nature of things instead of their workings, which often results in a “descriptive gap”. The second is the quest for data which is often oblivious to the conditions of how this data is produced and thus provide the reader with sketches that somehow miss the phenomena under scrutiny. The third problem resides in the depreciation of descriptive work