Themes and Symbols in the Religious Lesson: A Jordanian Case Study

Abstract

My interest in the religious lesson (dars) springs from field research on religious life in a Transjordanian village conducted intermittently over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1959 and culminating in a (1989) book on the Muslim preacher and the Islamic sermon (khuṭba). That book did not describe or analyze the dars, but it assumed that its content was distinctive and different from the khuṭba. It expounded practical rather than legal norms of behavior and provided useful information on day-to-day religious obligations, what constituted violations of mores, and the rituals of marriage, birth, and death, rather than conveying meaning through core images and metaphors. The assumption was that the sermon dealt mainly with messages of religious exhortation and the lesson dealt with the legal and ritual aspects of religion. I also assumed that the ethos of the dars allowed ritual freedom and a fair amount of give-and-take between preacher and audience, while the khuṭba was informed by an ethos of ritual order. In terms of rhetoric, I assumed that although the sermon often involved a “transformation of quality [imaginative] space” (the phrase is that of James Fernandez), the lesson did not. Finally, I assumed that the lesson emphasized the preacher's role as “home-town boy” (ibn al-balad) far more than the sermon did, as expressed, for instance, in its dependence on colloquial speech and minimal use of theological themes. The detailed description and analysis below has led me to reconsider these assumptions.