What Is "Universal" and "Local" in Islam?

Abstract

L ocality arguably looms larger as an issue for Muslims than for followers of any other religion. Strictly tied to the Arabic language and the Arabian peninsula by a genealogical theory of religious practice, Muslims also conceive of their religion in highly universalistic terms. Christianity, especially in nonCatholic forms, has the universalism without the particularism-not even Catholics are obliged to make a pilgrimage to Rome; nobody learns Aramaic or Greek to be a good Christian. Judaism has the opposite combination of features, and Israeli Jews today find that this combination plagues their efforts to rethink what an Israeli nation can be. Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism is conceived of as ideally bringing all humans under one set of doctrines and institutions-a very different local/universal dynamic animates these faiths, one more oriented toward micro/macrocosmic relationships. Muslims' dual pull-toward practical and doctrinal universalism, toward the historical particulars of an Arabian revelation-leads to two complementary types of practice: struggles to define the universal qualities of the religious, and efforts to develop distinct identities, local by definition, with respect to these universal qualities. The first practice, the effort to sift the universal from the merely incidental, often turns on a kind of inventory of the religious status to be given diverse features of Arabian life. Are dates and white headgear by virtue of showing up in the Prophet Muhammad's life? They seem to be so, judging from the practices of Muslims, in particular during the fasting month of Ramadan. What does it mean to translate the Koran? In Indonesia, the idea of vernacular commentaries that did not even pretend to be translations was highly controversial in the early decades of this century, for in the eyes of some they endangered the uniqueness and inimitability of the Koran. These and other questions get to the bottom of Islamic religious theories, based as they are on the Prophet Muhammad's role as