BEYOND IDEOLOGY AND THEOLOGY: THE SEARCH FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ISLAM

Abstract

In the course of our intellectual history, Islam came to be understood as a unified religious tradition and, in common with other institutional religions, taken as a guide to its own understanding (25). The conct!pt of Islam thus defined the nature of the subject matter and its appropriate modes of interpretation or explanation, but discoveries emergent within this framework have begun to contradict these premises. In order to reveal the significance and complexity of this problem, this review first examines two apparently opposed positions on Islam: the and the theological. These perspectives emerge from different assumptions concerning the nature of Man, God, and the World, use different languages of analysis, and produce different descriptions of religious life. Five anthropological studies are taken here to represent the internal variation within the anthropological perspective, while a general commentary suffices to describe the more standardized theological para­ digm. Of course, the works discussed here do not exhaust the relevant studies of Islam, but they exemplify certain major approaches well enough to allow discussion of the interaction of theoretical views and ethnographic description. In all ap­ proaches, the meaning of religion as a universal form of human experience and of Islam as a particular instance is presupposed, invariable, and incontestable. Conse­ quently, all claim to uncover a universal essence, the real Islam. Ironically, the diversity of experience and understanding revealed in these studies challenges the often subtle premise of the unity of religious meaning. It then becomes possible to ask if a single true Islam exists at all. By virtue of its scope and sophistication, the work of Clifford Geertz offers a suitable point from which to begin the investigation. Although he proceeds by assuming a single form of religious experience and a unity of meaning within Islamic tradition, Geertz simultaneously accentuates the diversity in the actual content of religious experience as lived in the everyday world. Although they are intricately