Islamic Piety Research Articles

‘Urban, modern and Islamic’: The politics of muslim Men's fashion in Malaysia

This article focuses on the cultural politics of contemporary urban Muslim men's fashion in Malaysia. By looking at the debates surrounding these Muslim men's fashion trends and based on my observation in Muslim men's fashion boutiques and other urban spaces, this article explores how masculinity, ethnicity and Islam implicate each other. Most Malay Muslim men wear baju Melayu (traditional Malay clothing) during the festive seasons. However, there have been evolving trends in Malay men's fashion. The jubah (a long Arabic robe) and kurta (a long upper garment which many South Asians wear) have become popular, especially among segments of young Muslim men in urban Malaysia. The popularity of jubah a decade ago prompted some observers to worry about an ‘Arabisation’ or the perceived growth of Islamic conservatism. However, as I observe, the jubah in Malaysian fashion industries has been adapted to the local taste and fashion trends; hence, it is a modern and creative adaptation of ‘Arabness’ instead of a form of sweeping ‘Arabisation’. Since 2018, there has been a trend of wearing tanjak (traditional Malay headgear) to assert Malay political power and cultural identity. From modern appropriation of ‘Arabness’ to the contemporary reinvention of traditional Malay costume, urban Malay Muslim men's aesthetic expressions reveal the mediation of religious and ethnic identities amidst rapid urbanisation and socio-political change in contemporary Malaysia. How should an ideal Malay Muslim man dress? This debate reveals the politics of different versions of Islamic piety and Malay identity in Malaysia today.

Chaotic charisma: religious noise, crowds, and infrastructural disruption in Dar es Salaam’s Sinza ward

ABSTRACT This contribution explores the weaknesses, breakdowns, and possibilities of religious infrastructure in the Sinza ward, a multiconfessional residential suburb in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We focus on instances of infrastructural disruption connected to the grassroots activities of charismatic Christian churches and, to a lesser extent, Islamic piety movements. Through interviews, focus groups, fieldwork, and quantitative data, this study shows how the activities of grassroots faith groups exercising their right to the city in an infrastructurally fraught environment may exacerbate urban planning fault lines. This may result in hazards such as noise pollution, traffic congestion, and issues of structural safety and decorum. Religious sites and related assemblages may thus turn into ‘architectures of disruption’ generating uneven geographies of urban wellbeing. We posit that, despite these problems, religiously connoted urban assemblages are here to stay, and infrastructural thinking may productively be applied to this new normal.

Kartini, Online Media, and the Politics of the Jokowi Era: A Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACT The indigenous education activist and feminist of the late Dutch colonial era, R.A. Kartini, has remained an enduring public icon for more than a century. While celebrated as a national hero in Indonesia, like many iconic women of the Global South, Kartini’s symbolic force has been readily appropriated for political ends. As a ‘floating signifier’, her image absorbs fluctuating meanings and ideologies, making the analysis of her representation at a given point in time a valuable approach to political analysis. This article focuses on Kartini’s portrayal in the second term of the Jokowi presidency in mainstream Indonesian online media discourse. Recognising the dialectical relationship between the online news media and dominant political discourse, we use critical discourse analysis to identify and examine the mainstream ideologies embedded in the news media’s representations of Kartini. Our analysis provides a snapshot of dominant Indonesian political discourse, revealing a set of intersecting ideologies: conservative feminism, neoliberalism, softened Islamic piety, and perfunctory nationalism.

The Worth of Islamic Piety for High-Quality Work Performed by Employees without Fraud

Employees are the most important aspect of every organization, whose success can be determined by its employees whether they have good work quality or not. Good work quality is supported by performance without Fraud. This study aims to determine the role of an employee's Islamic piety value in work quality without Fraud. This is a work with a qualitative research method with an exploratory writing style. Selection of informants using purposive sampling. The primary data presented comes from in-depth and literature study as secondary data. Test the validity of the data as stated in the Triangulation of Sources and Theories technique. For Islamic people, piety is very much related to Fraud prevention, and also every pious employee will implement the teachings of his religion to be professional (not cheating). This research provides an overview to the stakeholders of each organization to find out other aspects in optimizing the quality of work of its employees. Keyword: Syariah Economy; Management; Employees; Work Quality; Fraud

(Im)Piety

Much has been written about Islamic piety from anthropological and sociological perspectives. However, Islamic impiety has yet to be theorised, which is interesting given how widespread it is in Muslim-majority countries. This article argues that it is essential to examine and theorise impiety because the lives of believers constitute pious and impious experiences. However, the central argument of this paper is not that theorising impiety alongside piety is essential for understanding Muslim communities. Instead, pious and impious experiences are only sometimes easily distinguishable. This is to say, piety and impiety do not exist on separate planes of social experience and behaviour. In other words, it is not necessarily the case that certain practices and behaviours are demonstrably pure forms of impiety, even when they contradict Islamic orthodoxy and mainstream standards of pious behaviour. Instead, the article suggests that pious nuances may exist in the most impious practices and behaviours, which I call (im)piety.

Commodification of instrumental Islamic piety in Indonesian political contestation 2019

ABSTRACT This study examined the practice of extensive commodification of Islamic piety by political actors during the Indonesian presidential election 2019. By identifying the posting of contestants between 23 September 2018 and 16 April 2019 and analyzing using the multimodality technique, this research found four forms of extensive commodification of Islamic piety. They are extensive commodification of piety-based developmentalism, social-oriented personal piety, Islamism-based nationalism, and welfare-state-based Islamism. This research concludes that Islamic piety became a political instrument. The religion of Islam is not only a system of beliefs and religious practices but also a political commodity, which political actors commodify during political contestation. The commodification of Islamic piety functions to increase the value exchange or marketability of political candidates. Any candidates are political symbols or commodities among Indonesian voters. The production of instrumental piety messages in political communication results from the intricate interplay between Indonesia's demographic structure, voter psychography, and patron-client culture.

Association of political candidates and ulamas during the 2019 election on Twitter

This article explores how Indonesian political actors associate themselves with Ulamas through Twitter visual messages to symbolise Islamic piety during the Indonesian Presidential Election 2019. Despite past political events, socio-political dynamics are still relevant to understanding the current political climate. This article employed a qualitative approach by observing and analysing messages from @jokowi, the official account of the elected President, during the political contestation period. Specifically, multimodal analysis was used to examine visual data. We conclude that Islamic piety symbolisms were strategically used as a political instrument during the Election. Political actors, such as Jokowi, associated themselves with Islamic piety symbols and other Islamic cultural attributes to construct a certain strong image and appeal to the Indonesian Muslim voters. An association with Islamic piety symbols could boost his image and appeal to voters.

The Renunciants and Early Sufis of Iṣfahān

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between renunciant piety ( zuhd ) and early Sufism in the city of Iṣfahān, a pivotal city along the Silk Road, from the late ninth to early eleventh-century CE. It focuses on the multifunctional nature of khāneqāhs (hostels) in facilitating the dynamic interplay between these two pietistic movements in early Islam. The study underscores the transformation of Iṣfahān into a significant regional center of Islamic piety by examining the gradual conversion to Islam, with particular emphasis on the inspiring role of renunciants ( zuhhād ) in catalyzing conversions and propagating Islamic ideals. To illustrate this transition, this article focuses on literary accounts concerning three major pious figures from Iṣfahān in this period, namely Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-Bannāʼ (d. 899 CE), 'Alī ibn Sahl al-Iṣfahānī (d. 919 CE), and Abū Manṣūr al-Iṣfahānī (d. 1027 CE). In its discussion of these pious personalities, this article emphasizes their interconnectivity and engagement with other notable Sufis, including al-Junayd al-Baghdādī (d. 910 CE) and Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (d. 922 CE), as well as their contributions to Sufi scholarship, including the compatibility of Sufism with Ḥanbalī jurisprudence as presented in Abū Manṣūr al-Iṣfahānī's surviving works. Altogether, this article provides a comprehensive survey of the historical and spiritual context of Iṣfahān in this period, shedding light on the interplay between renunciant piety and early Sufism in the region.

Zainab's traffic: spatial lives of an Islamic ritual across Southwest Asia

AbstractSince the 1979 Revolution, Iranian pilgrims have engaged in saint visitation (ziyarat) to sites in Syria. By travelling via Turkey on buses, and venerating Sayyida Zainab at their destination, these pilgrims disrupt conventional conceptions of not only Islamic ritual, but also Iranian mobility under sanctions. Their experiences venerating Sayyida Zainab – emerging out of a self‐described ‘poverty of mobility’ – demonstrate the utility of a more expansive conceptualization of ritual in anthropology. Instead of taking ritual for a scripturally canonized ‘manual for’ pious self‐cultivation, here I approach ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria. This approach produces a dynamic and spatial conception of ziyarat as a ritual of mobility. Ethnographic attention to these pilgrims’ politically conditioned and regionally networked spatial practices reveals that their movements are irreducible to ethical projects of cultivating piety alone. What is at stake in Iranian pilgrims’ movements is nothing short of the extra‐religious conditions of religion – those of the economy and the polity. These stakes illuminate how religious practices interarticulate with political and social institutions – including bazaars, borders, and shrines – that remain understudied in recent anthropological scholarship on Islamic piety.

West African Sufism and the matter of Black life

AbstractIn this article, I consider how migration practices around the Black Atlantic and discourses of repatriation mobilize Black African diasporic Muslim identities in present-day Senegal and in a mosque in South Carolina that is situated on land that was formerly a slave plantation. I use the term ‘reversion’ as a vocabulary of ‘diasporic becoming’ to signal how notions of Islamic piety are coupled with a politics of Black Atlantic Muslimness in the context of a West African Sufi tariqa – or ‘Black Atlantic Sufism’. Moreover, I consider how identity formation and African Muslim ancestry are impacted by discourses of geographic return and repatriation that are linked to spiritual tourism.

Review Editor’s Note

It gives me great pleasure to join JMEWS, the journal of gender in the Middle East, as the editor of the reviews section. I am especially thankful to the editorial team for their invitation to this position and to Didem Havlioglu as my predecessor.The books, films, papers, conferences, and various scholarly debates reviewed in this section are not limited to the work that explicitly focuses on gender. For several decades, our predecessors have contributed to the literature on Middle Eastern studies with their interventions on how seemingly gender-neutral institutions such as the nation-state, secularism, modernity, and religion are, in fact, built on gender norms and patriarchal values. How should we evaluate works that dismiss gender dynamics? What are the political and scholarly implications of any analysis that denies gender operations—when we read a work or listen to a panel that, let’s say, focuses on a form of Islamic piety in which the research was conducted with all-male interlocutors and no reflection on, let alone analysis of, the masculinity of piety at stake? Such screening and critical evaluation of works that do not immediately focus on gender to see whether and how those works are able to contemplate gender operations will be one of the objects of this section in the following years. Such reviews are also valuable to continue and advance the scholarship that various JMEWS authors and their predecessors have started. Fatemeh Sadeghi’s review of Jamie Allinson’s Age of Counter-revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East and Orkide Izci’s review of Deniz Yonucu’s Police, Provocation, and Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul in this issue are both authored with this gender critique in mind.I also would like to encourage graduate students and early-career scholars to use the reviews pages as an opportunity to articulate their critical positions on both published and unpublished work, such as public lectures, seminars, and various conference presentations. I am dedicated to encouraging emerging scholars in the field to own their voices and believe that authoring reviews can provide an exciting venue for this.

Эшон-бобо и его потомки: сакральный статус и религиозная роль династии ишанов

The historically cyclical nature of Islamic culture is visible in the repetition of heydays and periods of decline of Islamic piety and education. The most important factor influencing the religious upsurge was the activity of individual spiritual leaders, whose role in Central Asia since the 14th century most often have been played by the sheikhs of the Naqshbandiyya Sufi brotherhood. Sheikhs were recognized as spiritual authorities not only for a narrow circle of their disciples (murids) but for the entire community. People spoke about them with reverence: “They (pers. – Ishan)!” – thereby emphasizing the special sacred status of Sufi shaikhs. This article considers the specifics of religious processes in contemporary Uzbekistan, examining the activities of the Ishan lineage going back to Muhammad Sharif al-Bulghari, a sheikh of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya, well known in Khorezm as Eshon bobo. When exploring the history of this family, we will see how a single man of faith contributed to the symbolic capital of a sacral blood-related group and helped shape the dynamics of a transregional family and religious network, which members have greatly influenced local religious tradition. The article argues that the al Bulghari network “reactivation” is part of the state-supported discourse on “traditional Islam” in contemporary Uzbekistan.

Рец. на кн.: AMIRA MITTERMAIER. GIVING TO GOD: ISLAMIC CHARITY IN REVOLUTIONARY TIMES. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. XIV+233 p.

Amira Mittermaier’s book examines the practices of Islamic charity in contemporary Egypt. To answer the question of how and why pious Muslims engage in charity in their mundane lives, the author visits not only mosques, shrines, charitable and volunteer organizations, but also Tahrir Square in Cairo, an important locus for understanding Islamic piety. The place became widely known in 2011 due to the massive anti-government protests that came to be known as the Arab Spring in Egypt. The study of political activism allows the author to get a better grasp on the ordinary ethics of Islamic charity that considers the issues of social justice to be no less important compared to the political activism. But unlike liberal emancipatory projects, the understanding of social justice within the framework of Islamic piety relies on a fundamentally different ethics, political ontology, and temporal orientations. Drawing upon different cases, Mittermaier demonstrates the diverse ethical repertoire of Islamic giving, ranging from the examples of radical asceticism and self-denial, based on the Sufi ideal of the gift, to the more utilitarian approaches to charity, where gift exchange is considered to be a means to collect divine rewards for performed virtues. By comparing the Islamic gift ethics with the secular projects of social restructuring and reducing poverty, the author urges the reader to rethink Islamic charity as having a specific political meaning and potential vis-a-vis progressive ideas and politics.

Introduction: The Roots of Islamic Piety

Introduction: The Roots of Islamic Piety

Response to the Roots of Islamic Piety

Response to the Roots of Islamic Piety

Pious publicity, moral ambivalence and the making of religious authority in the Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan

ABSTRACT Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, believe that Muslims have abandoned ‘religion’ (din) for ‘the world’ (dunya) and this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). The only way to draw Muslims to Islamic practice, they say, is through their own distinct, ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat), which is the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue because it is modelled on Prophetic example. In this article, I argue that dawat represents what Birgit Meyer has called a ‘sensational form’, an authorized set of practices and techniques for mediating a relationship to transcendental power and creating divine presence. But dawat is structured by an internal tension. On the one hand, dawat requires performing the Prophetic model in order to create a ‘direct’ relationship to God, but, on the other, creating a ‘connection’ between Muslims depends on incorporating new genres and mediums drawn from popular culture and mass media that stretch the boundaries of religion. This moral ambivalence, however, does not just lead to moral failure but instead is addressed through an emphasis on pious companionship (sohbat) and through submission to the authority of pious others. Moral ambivalence, therefore, becomes the generative ground for religious authority. The production and reproduction of religious authority in turn serves as the basis for incorporating novel forms of mediation in order to address diverse and changing social, political and economic contexts while retaining the aura of religious continuity.

A Contested Identity: Contemporary Representation of Indonesian Chinese-Muslims on Instagram

The existence of Chinese Muslims in Indonesia is surrounded by a heavily prejudiced belief that Chinese-ness and Islam are considered "unsuitable". Chinese Muslims, particularly 'converts- turned-preachers', are still considered a unique identity. However, the rise of online Islamic piety on Instagram has become one of many ways for Chinese Muslims' to represent themselves and, to some extent, "normalize" their identities. This paper discusses how Chinese-Muslim preachers, namely Felix Siauw and Koko Liem, represent their versions of Chinese-ness and Islam on Instagram, a popular visual-based social media platform in Indonesia. This research uses Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) to observe the preachers' identity narratives and ways to articulate their Chinese-ness and Islam on their respective accounts posts. It is shown that the heterogeneous stances and contesting interpretations on and about Chinese-ness and Islam in the Chinese-Muslim minority group are to some extent represented through the visual appearance and narrative on Instagram of both preachers. From these two figures, the researcher concludes that elements of Islamic religious identity tend to dominate and even fade ethnic Chinese identity in the negotiations between Chinese and Muslim identities. However, their Chinese-ness was strategically used and symbolically commodified to attract the masses. These two preachers become part of the heterogeneous spectrum of Chinese-Muslim representation in Indonesia and the "pavement" for a common image of the combination of the two identities in Indonesia.

Pilgrimage, performance, and peripatetic kingship: Akbar's journeys to Ajmer and the formation of the Mughal Empire

AbstractBetween 1562 and 1579, the third Mughal emperor Akbar undertook 17 pilgrimages to the Sufi shrine of Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer in western India. This article analyses them as a form of peripatetic kingship. It studies specific actions of the emperor in and around Ajmer to show how they articulated a specific understanding of monarchy, one that derived legitimacy from the spiritual authority of Sufi masters and sacred sites. It then shows how the strategic location of the town of Ajmer allowed the young emperor to use it as a base for military expansion and political consolidation in western and central India. It also discusses how the journeys allowed Akbar to carry out vital facets of imperial governance, like exploring the realms, forging alliances with local chieftains, and creating public infrastructure. They also served as a public site for the performance of kingship and sovereignty. The final portion of the article explains how a paradigmatic shift in the conceptualisation and performance of Mughal kingship—whereby the ideal of monarchy as a product of Sufi charisma and Islamic piety made way for more universalist and millenarian ideals—brought a sudden end to the pilgrimages after 1579.

‘Popular Ijtihad’ and Entangled Islamic Discourse on the Covid-19 Pandemic in Russia

In this article, I examine initial reactions of the Russian Muslim community in social networks to the spread of the Coronavirus. My two main questions are: Who and how reinterprets the category of Islamic piety in the context of the pandemic, and to what extent does the online environment transform the Islamic tradition? To answer them, I focus on the following key narratives of Russian Muslims’ online discourse on the pandemic: Covid-19 as a retaliation against China for the persecutions of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang region, the search for signs of the coming doomsday, as well as various approaches to the reinterpretation of religious piety. Moreover, I consider how the pandemic sped up an entangled glocalised discourse. In the context of the increased role of the transnational online Muslim community, I suggest the term ‘popular ijtihad’ to describe individualised forms of religious engagement that the crisis situation stimulated.

CONTESTED SOVEREIGNTY: ISLAMIC PIETY, BLASPHEMY POLITICS, AND THE PARADOX OF ISLAMIZATION IN PAKISTAN

ABSTRACT Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam from what they imagine to be a deluge of incidents of blasphemy, a veritable moral panic organized around a set of blasphemy laws pertaining to the regulation and protection of Islam. The violence of blasphemy politics, which is disproportionately directed at sectarian and religious minorities, is predicated on the claim that is the duty and mandate of the state to enforce the blasphemy laws, and where the state fails, the onus falls on ordinary Muslims to fulfill the demands of Islam. In this article, I focus on the response to this blasphemy politics by Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. Like other Islamic groups in Pakistan, Tablighis consider blasphemy to be a grave sin and a deep threat to the Islamic community, but Tablighis believe that the solution to the growing incidence of blasphemy is to spread virtue through their distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat). I show that these different ethical responses to blasphemy reflect different approaches to the relationship between Islam and state sovereignty. Specifically, I argue that blasphemy politics presupposes the sacralization of the state but Islamic piety among Pakistani Tablighis provides an alternative ethical framework for addressing the moral injury of blasphemy.