聖者が砂漠にやってくる

Abstract

Among the Bedouin living in the Mediterranean coastal zone of the Egyptian Western Desert, a word ‘faqih’ (fgi in the dialect) denotes a distinguished religious person living and having lived with them in the desert. Based on anthropological fieldwork, this paper analyses how the Bedouin talk about and behave towards faqihs, which should give insight to the Bedouin's traditional practice of lslam.Faqihs, both alive and dead, are frequently requested by the Bedouin to grant various kinds of wishes. Here two concepts, knowledge and grace, are crucial to understand the two different modes of being a faqih; living faqihs provide some religious services because they know Islam much better than the Bedouin; dead fagihs are thought to provide similar favors because they are given the grace of God as power to cause miracles on them and to be mediated to the Bedouin.That faqih is usually a stranger coming from the outside of the desert is the third important point. In principle, Islamic knowledge is open to everyone and only God knows to whom He gives his grace. Therefore, faqihs' being privileged holders of such knowledge or grace is not normative but practical, which is highly convenient for the Bedouin's practice of Islam. As an articulate point to the God and to the Muslim community as a whole, faqihs create internal homogeneity among the Bedouin and facilitate their effective incorporation into the wider outside. An outsider living along with them is quite suitable to such a social position.In Bedouin saint worship, it seems that two opposite polarities are at work; one is toward the assimilation of all the Muslims and the other is toward the differentiation; they have created a balance in the form of social articulation as faqih, which I may suggest is just a possible solution and that we would also find many other different balances in every socio-religious practice of Islam in the world.