This entry should perhaps be titled ‘Islams’ (elZein 1977) since anthropologists have for long stressed the plurality of social forms and conceptions within the religion of some 15 to 20 per cent of humankind. This emphasis on internal plurality is not surprising, given such factors as geographical spread, doctrinal distinctions, authority structures, and academic imperatives. Geographically, Islam is the dominant religion in not only all Arabic-speaking countries, but also in most of the northern half of Africa, about half of Central Asia, and influential parts of Southeast Asia. Doctrinal differences can be located between the major branches of Sunni and Shi’a, between either of these and their so-called ‘sects’, and in the longstanding divisions among four major schools of Islamic law (shari’a). Contending authority structures are most clearly seen in the frictions and conflicts between authorized religious authorities (‘ulama) and the more believer-centred (‘mystical’) teachings of Sufi ‘saints’ whose shrines can spawn highly distinctive regional cults. Finally, anthropologists’ stress on variety followed the academic imperative of substituting their tradition of historial particularism for the *Orientalism and *essentialism of textual scholars who helped to create ‘the Islamic’ as the prototypical ‘Other’ of the Christian West.
Among anti-essentialist work that precedes the critique of Orientalism and continues to be influential, one may stress two approaches. One, usually cast in the language of *political economy, uses local histories and sometimes revised macrolevel periodizations in order to counteract stereotypical ideas of Muslim ‘essences’. The other, cast in the language of religion as a ‘cultural system’ and championed by †Clifford Geertz, relates local, regional or even national characteristics of Islam to the ethos of the civilization within which they make sense. In Geertz’s Islam Observed (1968), it is the underlying ‘Fabianism’ of Moroccan civilization and the ‘Utopianism’ of Indonesia that appear to shape both the external distinctiveness and the internal unity of Islamic ideas there. The argument develops against the backdrop of a dualist modern tendency which favours a progressive ‘secularization of thought …and the major response to it—the ideologization of religion’ (Geertz 1968:103). It may be doubted, however, whether such a separation of ‘religion’ from ‘politics’, as well as the secularism ascribed to the latter, are not themselves the outcome of *modernist ideologies.
This question has been foregrounded by the growing power and appeal of so-called ‘fundamentalist’ movements (that challenge state policies aimed at *modernization) and state structures (geared toward the secularist division of political from religious moralities). The term ‘fundamentalist’ is widely conceded to be historically misleading and analytically toothless, but it has helped to pull together the work of political scientists, historians and anthropologists (Marty and Appleby 1994). There are, as yet, no detailed micro-level ethnographies of Islamist initiatives placed in their local political, economic and cultural contexts, perhaps because of the difficulties of †participant observation and the endlessly-celebrated ‘crisis’ of *ethnography. They would have much to offer, however, especially since they could build upon the heightened anthropological awareness with which we now perceive the social ambivalences, seeming cognitive dissonances, and subtly articulated antinomies of ‘Islamic’ ideas cast and recast in contests for power (Gilsenan 1982). In placing activist Muslim ideas within their ‘political economy of meaning’, Roff(1987) has revived the use of the *comparative method, one of anthropology’s greatest ambitions, but also one of its most neglected projects. It may require intra-regional or local-level comparisons between ‘different’ Muslim activisms in order to re-imagine Islam as a discursive universe that allows for, and indeed encourages, different interpretations of a few basic axioms about the link between private and public moralities. This link flies in the face of the key idea of Western secular modernity, as exported through *colo-nialism, and it throws into question the most tangible inheritance of decolonization: the idea of the *nation-state (Piscatori 1986). This has consequences both for the formerly colonized and for their erstwhile colonizers.
On the Indian subcontinent one can see how nation-state ideologies are challenged, as well as used, by the protagonists of a ‘religious nationalism’ (van der Veer 1994), be they Muslim or Hindu. Anthropologists have begun to leave behind the methodologically indefensible myopia of studying Muslims regardless of the surrounding ‘others’ that they construct and are constructed by. Such an emphasis on the interactive dynamics between co-existing religious constituencies has become increasingly important also in the anthropology of Muslims living in the United States and Europe. Given that millions of Muslims took part in the great labour migrations from the 1950s to the 1970s, ideas of ‘assimilation’ came to be replaced by a state-sanctioned ideology of ‘multiculturalism’. Yet the so-called Rushdie Affair ended the civic dream that Islam, or for that matter any other religion, could be confined to the ‘private’, as opposed to the public and political ‘sphere’ of social life. Most Islams are known to query this dichotomy which is so fundamental to the secular nation-state, and anthropologists have been alerted by what might be called the ‘New Orientalism’: a populist construction of Islam as a threat to Western civic values and of Muslims as the post-migration ‘enemy within’. The crisis of nation-state ideologies which serve an economic system dependent on a global labour market and normative pluralism has also sparked the beginnings of interest in the study of Islam, and of Muslim movements and initiatives, from a transnational perspective.
