Theoretical and methodological discussions of ethnography and ethics have appeared regularly in the Journal of Religious Ethics for at least the past 13 years. Many of these conversations have been preoccupied by the relationship between “normative” work in religious ethics and “descriptive” work on moral worlds and patterns of reasoning. However, there has often been a perceived impasse when it comes to drawing “normative” ethical arguments from fine-grained ethnographic study. This paper begins by assessing significant contributions to religious ethics made (...) by ethnographers of Islam, focusing on the way they render a stark descriptive/normative binary irrelevant. I then turn to an example from my own fieldwork that expands our understanding of the relationship between ethnography and ethics. Through this example, I argue that ethical thinkers working outside the academy—theologians, activists, and cultural producers—also draw on an “ethnographic imagination” to make moral arguments. I end by reflecting on how the “ethnographic imagination” situates religious ethics as part of broader humanistic inquiry, showing that careful accounts of how people do live are always enmeshed with visions of how we should live. (shrink)

“Interpretive social science” includes a variety of differing epistemological, methodological, and political commitments. It is to the credit of Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely’s Interpretive Social S...

This paper addresses the near impossibility of writing the social history of knowledge production in India. It also considers the question of the historicity of Sanskrit traditions. It concludes with pointing at a major lacuna in the SKS project, namely the examination or ritual and religious knowledge.

This paper explores how Islam is understood by Muslim women entrepreneurs and considers its influence on their entrepreneurial experiences in the country-specific context of Lebanon. In so doing, we adopt a qualitative interpretative approach, drawing upon 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women entrepreneurs. Accordingly, we present empirical evidence detailing how Muslim women entrepreneurs utilise various aspects and teachings of Islam to make sense of their entrepreneurial decisions. We thus provide insight into how women’s entrepreneurship interlocks with Islamic teachings and the (...) restrictions imposed by patriarchal socio-cultural values in Lebanon. This paper advances entrepreneurship research by demonstrating how Islam unfolds as a source of inspiration and resilience for women entrepreneurs, if and when equipped with an Islamic feminist interpretation. (shrink)

With reference to a qualitative study on everyday religiosity among Muslims in St. John's, Canada, this paper examines trends in academic sources and public policy on Islam that over-privilege the most committed practitioners, thereby narrowly depicting “Muslimness.” I situate this overemphasis by reflecting on what Mamdani calls “culture talk,” an essentializing discourse heightened in the post-9/11 west. Interview data, along with a trend in social scientific research on Muslims that emphasize the most pious and the outcomes following the Ontario “Boyd (...) Report” and the Quebecois “Bouchard–Taylor Report” show the pervasiveness of culture talk that erases Muslim multiplicity. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Diese Einleitung führt in den theoretischen Rahmen des Sonderbandes zu Prozessen von Abgrenzung, Grenzziehung und Grenzverschiebung in islambezogenen Feldern ein. Zugleich wird reflektiert, dass auch religionswissenschaftliche Forschung Grenzen definiert und dabei mit dem Forschungsfeld interagiert. Religiöse und wissenschaftliche Diskurse werden als Bereiche eines interdependenten und miteinander verwobenen Kontinuums konzeptualisiert, innerhalb dessen die Grenzen nie ganz fixiert oder undurchlässig sind. Indem Konstruktionsprozesse von Islam oder muslimischen Identitäten an den Schnittstellen unterschiedlicher Felder geschehen, rücken Grenzen nicht nur als Werkzeug für politische (...) Strategien in den Blick, sondern auch als Kontaktzonen, Schwellen und Orte von Transfers und Wissensproduktion. Die Einleitung betont daher den religionswissenschaftlichen Beitrag zur Konstruktion von Islam und diskutiert die Verortung der Disziplin in diesem Spannungsfeld. (shrink)

Within Muslim communities, the ‘ulama are considered the most crucial corporate social agency that drives the ideological and spiritual energy to the members of the society who find religious teachings necessary for their individual and social, if not always political, lives. However, when the ‘ulama of Bangladesh gathered under the umbrella platform of Hefazat-e-Islam in 2010, agitated by the numerous upheavals of the government’s policies, scholars and members of the civil society often dubbed them as regressive, reactionary, and insensitive to (...) modern changes. While anthropologists have challenged this dichotomy, this article aims to understand the HI ‘ulama’s views on modern changes and how the ‘ulama safeguard the traditional integrity in legal, educational, and gender aspects within the domain of the Bangladeshi state mechanism. Based on anthropological notions of tradition and piety, this article argues that the ‘ulama’s position on education, woman, and legal questions is neither monolithic nor static; rather there is always discussion, debate, and dynamism within the ‘ulama itself. (shrink)

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging (...) with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency. (shrink)

Debates about preserving, modifying and applying sharia through principles of taqlid or ijtihad are immensely useful in thinking through a sharper definition of tradition for political theorists and historians of political thought more generally. Political theorists and historians of political thought have tended to use tradition in a range of ways without specifying key elements of the concept. Building on debates in Islamic thought related to taqlid and its relationship to ijtihad, and through a focus on the ideas of a (...) contemporary thinker, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, this paper proposes that tradition in political thought can be defined as a framework for knowledge production and consumption constituted of two key elements: method and sensibility. Further, the paper suggests that this definition allows us a better understanding of vibrancy in a tradition: vehement debate, contradictions and internal contestation are not signs of decay but of vitality within a tradition. It is the severe delinking of the two elements of a tradition, method and sensibility, which has greater potential to reduce its vibrancy. (shrink)

Der Artikel versteht sich als kritische Aufarbeitung essentialistischer Vorstellungen über das Muslimentum am Beispiel der Diskussionen um Sexualität und Gender, mit besonderem Augenmerk auf die derartigen essentialistischen Ansätzen eigenen Probleme. Da für diese Auseinandersetzung mit dem Essentialismus eine vor mir vorgeschlagene Differenzierung zwischen drei Begriffen, nämlich zwischen islām (kleingeschrieben), Islam (großgeschrieben) und Muslimentum, eine fundamentale Rolle spielt, steht am Beginn eine Definition dieser Begriffe. Daran anschließend wendet sich der Beitrag drei Formen des Essentialismus zu (wobei ich auch die dritte Form, (...) die eigentlich als Reaktion auf den abstrakten Essentialismus entstanden ist und „den Islam“ als Diskurs begreift, als eine Spielart des Essentialismus betrachte, weil sie viele für diesen charakteristische Züge annimmt). Am Beispiel der muslimischen LGBTQQIA (lesbische, schwule, bisexuelle, transsexuelle, queere, questioning, intersexuelle und asexuelle Menschen) sollen dann im letzten Punkt die methodischen Schwierigkeiten, die mit den erörterten Ansätzen einhergehen, veranschaulicht werden. (shrink)

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If (...) and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich am Beispiel des islamischen Diskursfeldes mit der metasprachlichen Beschreibung objektsprachlicher Ab- und Ausgrenzungsdiskurse. Dies bringt zwangsläufig eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Dynamiken zwischen objekt- und metasprachlicher Begriffsebene mit sich. Der Artikel diskutiert in einem ersten Schritt Talal Asads Konzeption islamischer Orthodoxie und den ihr zugrundeliegenden Traditionsbegriff. In einem zweiten Schritt werden anhand von Beispielen aus dem nordamerikanischen Sufidiskurs und dem modernen türkischen Religionsdiskurs objektsprachliche Grenzziehungsdynamiken innerhalb des islamischen Diskursfeldes analysiert. Der letzte Teil des Aufsatzes widmet sich (...) der Metaebene und führt, in Abgrenzung zum statischen Stammbaummodell, einen dynamischen Begriff von religiöser Tradition ein, der es ermöglichen soll, Überlagerungen zwischen religiösen Formationen niedrigen Verdichtungsgrades sowie Prozesse der Religionisierung ins Blickfeld zu nehmen. (shrink)

This book series deals with religion and its interface with the state and society in Southeast Asia. It examines the multidimensional facets of politics, public policies and social change in relation to contemporary forms of religions, religious communities, thinking, praxis and ethos. All articles in this Book Series were a direct result of a policy-relevant research collaboration conducted by investigators from the participating countries from 2013–2016. The issues under examination in this Series include: state management of diversity, multicultural policies, religious (...) social activism and state-society relations. All of the analyses in this Book Series are fixed within the context of a rapidly changing society in Southeast Asia. (shrink)

Len Bartlotti did his doctoral research on proverbs, Islam, and identity among Pashtuns, and serves as Research Tutor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. He served fourteen years in Asia and is founder and former Executive Director of the InterLit Foundation Publishers and Educational Consultants.

Social science is often described as a product of 19th century Europe, and as a handmaiden to its imperial and colonial projects. However, centuries prior to the Western social science enterprise, Islamic imperial scholars developed their own ‘science of society.’ This essay provides an overview of the historical and cultural milieu in which 'Islamic' social science was born, and then charts its development over time through case studies of four seminal scholars -- al-Razi, al-Farabi, al-Biruni and Ibn Khaldun -- who (...) played pivotal roles in establishing fields that could be roughly translated as psychology, political science, anthropology and sociology. The axioms undergirding Islamic social science are subsequently explored, with particular emphasis paid to the relations between said axioms and the discursive tradition, 'Islam.' The essay concludes with an exploration of how looking to social science enterprises beyond the ‘modern’ West can clarify the purported relationships between social science and empire. (shrink)