Islamic Piety Research Articles

Islamic Mysticism and Ab T lib al-Makk : The Role of the Heart By SAEKO YAZAKI

Ahmet T. Karamustafa’s Sufism: The Formative Period (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) synthesized decades of research to grant Sufi studies its first rigorous, historically situated survey of classical Sufism. It highlighted how important a role Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī’s (d. 386/996) Qūt al-qulūb (‘Nourishment for the Heart’) played in ‘the emergence of a normative Sufi tradition, in the 4th/10th century[…]’, and it reflected the need to preserve, evaluate and analyse the complex legacy of the first masters’ (Sufism, p. 83). Compared to other pre-Ghazālīan manuals, the Qūt is by far the most voluminous, offering detailed insight into the praxis (muʿāmala) of one branch of early Sufism and constituting ‘an encyclopaedia of Islamic piety’ (Richard Gramlich, Die Nahrung der Haerzen [Franz Steiner, 1995], i. 17). Nonetheless, al-Makkī had received little scholarly attention; it is to Karamustafa’s credit that he managed to treat al-Makkī proportionally with other key figures. In this context, Saeko Yazaki’s work is a most welcome addition; it is the first published introduction to al-Makkī’s life and works and their reception by subsequent generations. It is based on her doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Edinburgh in 2010. Her thesis superseded those of Shukri (Edinburgh, 1976) and Amin (Edinburgh, 1991) and was joined by Bin Ramli’s excellent investigation of al-Makkī’s theology (Oxford, 2011), to which she refers.

British Raj to China's Hong Kong: The rise of madrasas for ethnic Muslim youth

AbstractThe madrasa, the Islamic institution of learning, has for centuries occupied a central role in the transmission of religious knowledge and the shaping of the identity of the global Muslim community (umma). This paper explores the sharp rise in the number of madrasas in contemporary Hong Kong. It examines, in particular, how South Asian Muslim youth, after receiving a modern education in a conventional day school, remain faithful to their religious tradition by spending their evenings at a madrasa studying and memorizing the Qur'an. Engaging with the stereotypical bias of Islamophobia and national security concerns regarding the ties of madrasas to Islamic terrorist movements over the last decade, this paper argues that the burgeoning South Asian madrasa networks have to be understood in the context of Hong Kong's tripartite Islamic traditions—South Asian Muslim, Chinese Hui Muslims, and Indonesian Muslims—and within each Muslim community's unique expression of Islamic piety. Furthermore, the paper also identifies factors contributing to the increase in madrasas in Hong Kong after the transition from British colonial rule to China's resumption of sovereign power in 1997.

A provocation to mission: Constance Padwick's study of Muslim devotion

This article offers an examination of the work of Constance Padwick (1886–1968), who served as a ‘literature missionary’ with the Church Missionary Society and the International Missionary Council in Egypt and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Through a study of Padwick's life-long engagement with popular Muslim devotional prayers, the article demonstrates how she was inspired to use language, devotion and liturgy to call for a richer, bolder and deeper Christian presence in the Muslim world. Formed by the prevailing Evangelical tradition of the epoch, Padwick was drawn to Islam's mystical tradition. Her commitment to teasing out underlying similarities between the two traditions influenced the theology of mission that she developed, as her study of Muslim devotions led her to encourage a greater emphasis on the contribution that Arabic Christian devotional literature could make to Protestant missions in the Muslim world. In addition to shaping a specific missiological approach, the experience of Islamic popular piety led her to exhort her colleagues to cooperate more closely with the Eastern churches in order to build up and strengthen the ancient Christian presence in the Arab world.

Development, Social Change, and Islamic Finance in Contemporary Indonesia

Summary The global spread of Islamic finance has transformed the financial systems of many Muslim countries, but analysts know little about the factors that shape individuals’ demand for Islamic finance. This paper examines the socioeconomic origins of consumer demand for Islamic financial products, using original survey data from Indonesia, where a growing Islamic financial market coexists with a large conventional financial system. Modernization and globalization play critical roles in shaping individual use of Islamic financial products. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no evidence that Islamic piety has any systematic effect on consumers’ choice of Islamic versus conventional financial products.

“A Way to Paradise”: Pious Neoliberalism, Islam, and Faith-Based Development

Three faith-based development organizations (FBDOs) in Cairo and the popular religious star, Amr Khaled, illustrate the melding of Islamic piety and neoliberal development. Together they produce a “pious neoliberalism” that transforms both Islamic charity and neoliberalism as they narrate an Islamic solution to social problems. Their narration links volunteerism, self-help rhetoric, and management science to piety. Focusing on three Islamic development organizations, this study demonstrates how they promote financial investment, entrepreneurship, and business skills as important components of religiosity. The combination of piety and neoliberal values illustrates a new space of compatibility between neoliberalism and Islamism that changes both the spaces for and impact of Islamic da’wa (preaching) in Cairo. FBDOs alter socioeconomic space in Cairo as they insert religiosity into spaces previously seen as un-Islamic. The research contributes to our understanding of the compatibility between religious and neoliberal values through an introduction to the concept of pious neoliberalism. It contributes to our understanding of the changing role of FBDOs in the Middle East and the spatiality of such transformations.

A quiet revolution: the veil's resurgence, from the Middle East to America

In Cairo in the 1940s, Leila Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West? When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil's return indicated a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. What she discovered, however, in the stories of British colonial officials, young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations. Ahmed observed that Islamism, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies' own tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. It is often Islamists, even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women's rights. Ahmed's surprising conclusions represent a near reversal of her thinking on this topic. Richly insightful, intricately drawn, and passionately argued, this absorbing story of the veil's resurgence, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia and into the West, suggests a dramatically new portrait of contemporary Islam.

Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, and Islamic Piety Movements in Mauritius

AbstractFor many Mauritian Muslims the participation in transnational piety movements is inseparably linked to what they consider to be modern and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Taking the growth of Islamic idioms and movements among Mauritian Muslims as an example, in this paper I argue for a more complex understanding of the links between contemporary Islamic piety movements and current trends of globalization. Moreover, the Mauritian state also encourages the growth of transnational religious networks as part of a policy of encouraging “ancestral cultures” in which major, standardized religious traditions have a central place. The example suggests that the intersection of processes at a global scale with state policies towards religion plays a key role in the emergence of religiously grounded cosmopolitanism in the contemporary world.

Typological Figuration and the Meaning of “Spiritual”: The Qurʾanic Story of Joseph

introdUction The Qurʾan is not without a center of narrative gravity despite its notoriously challenging narrative flow. This becomes especially apparent when we are being told about the experience of particular prophets or messengers with their proper community. History and the rise and fall of civilizations and cultures are punctuated by the appearance of these special envoys, according to the Qurʾan—thus their epic struggles in the divinely inspired effort to guide humans from ignorance to enlightenment and from savagery to civilization in whatever community they have existed (prophets have been sent to all of them, according to Q 16:36). However, such narrative continuity is frequently difficult to detect “on the page.” In these instances, certain characteristic Qurʾanic literary features maintain the integrity and coherence of the whole in the absence of explicit and continuous, unbroken narrative dramatic movement. The following is an attempt to discuss, in sequence, (1) typological figuration as it pertains to (2) the story of Joseph, concluding with a focus on one of the main “characters” in the story, namely, the famous shirt (qamīṣ), which functions as a touchstone of narrative continuity and as a symbol of Joseph’s spiritual journey and travails. This exploration starts from a premise that the Qurʾan and tafsīr are both literature. Typological figuration, a venerable and powerful literary device, is in both instances one of the central keys to an otherwise sometimes opaque Qurʾanic narrative continuity. In this article it will be seen that typological figuration functions beyond the confines of “mere” literature to inform Islamic piety and religious thought. 1

The relationship between Islamic religiosity and residents’ perceptions of socio-cultural impacts of tourism in Iran: Case studies of Sare’in and Masooleh

Religion is known to influence people’s perception and behaviour. This study explores the influence of Islamic religiosity (measured on dimensions of ‘Islamic Belief’, ‘Islamic Practice’, and ‘Islamic Piety’) on the perceived socio-cultural impacts of tourism among residents in two tourist areas in Iran. The results showed that respondents both possessed a high level of Islamic Belief and perceived socio-cultural impacts of tourism positively. The propositions which stated that ‘Islamic Belief’ and ‘Islamic Practice’ have negative relationships with the perceptions of socio-cultural impacts of tourism are not supported. However levels of ‘Islamic Piety’ had statistically significant variations relating to potential changes in infrastructure, life quality and cultural practices that may be due to tourism. This paper also discusses the implications of its findings.

Piety among Tablīghī women

Islamic piety in Muslim women has been on the rise in the last three decades around the world. Much of it involves formerly nominal Muslim women becoming observant of Islamic rules, rituals and practices and taking their faith seriously. For these women, it is a journey of spiritual elevation. It is a new endeavour of Islamic awakening and self discovery. All this is occurring in an era characterized by a modernity which claims, among other things, that religion is the basis for women’s oppression in society. Thus, western and western-educated scholars and feminist theorists have argued for the “unveiling” of Muslim women as part of the process of weakening the hold of Islam and allowing women to become free thinking, liberal and independent. This article is an attempt to explore the continuous growth of Islamic piety in Muslim women around the world. Using the Tablīgh Jamā‘at in Australia as a case study, the article seeks to understand the role of Islamic piety in Muslim women. The article argues that Islamic piety in Muslim women is an attempt by Muslim women to find a religious response to modernity.

Islamic piety against the family: from ‘traditional’ to ‘pure’ Islam

One might suppose that a foundational element of proper Muslim behaviour is respect for one’s parents. However, it is not unusual in the contemporary Islamic world, both in Muslim-majority countries and in the diaspora, for young people to be much more ‘Islamic’ in behaviour, dress and lifestyle than their parents. As this may suggest, modernist Islamic piety is not infrequently directed by young people against their parents, as a mode of resistance to parental authority. However, wearing the hijab, becoming a follower of a Sufi shaykh, or marrying a ‘good’ Muslim spouse from another ethnic group to one’s own, are different kinds of resistance from, for example, joining an inner-city youth gang, or rejecting one’s parents’ Asian cultural background for a more globalised identity. I discuss some of the ways in which Islamic piety can be deployed in resistance to parental authority through case studies from my Economic and Social Research Council-funded field research in Bangladesh and the UK, and consider in what ways these forms of behaviour resemble, and differ from, more familiar forms of resistance.

Introduction to special issue of Contemporary Islam: Islamic piety and gender relationships among contemporary Muslims

Introduction to special issue of Contemporary Islam: Islamic piety and gender relationships among contemporary Muslims

The visibility of a pious public

The downfall of Suharto's regime in 1998 has been marked by the increasing visibility of Islamic piety in a form of popular culture. Tracing the emergent new genre of sinetron religi (religious TV series/serials), this paper analyzes the discourses of Islamic piety in several different series/serials, the construction of the public and the wider implication of these discourses for the position of Islam culturally and politically in Indonesia. This article argues that religious melodrama series/serials are a site of contestation of incoherent concepts of piety. As cultural texts, they interpellate their public and allow us to see how the visibility of religious discourses in public becomes a subject of negotiations and confrontations, while at the same time they trigger the politicization of piety as national identity.

Constraints of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Natural Subject

AbstractIn this paper, I take aim at the typical anthropological routine of criticizing universalist assumptions in social theory by contrasting them with non-Western emic models. I do so by following up on one recent instance of this practice, which has been heralded as a testament to what anthropology can still offer to critical social theory: Mahmood’s work on the Islamic piety movement in Egypt, and her claim that the normative subject of liberal feminist theory needs to be denaturalized, because the women involved in the piety movement hold a self-model that is incommensurable with secular-liberal assumptions about action being structured by innate desires for autonomy and freedom. By analyzing ethnographic data on Egyptian Muslim women through the lens of a combination of non-determinist cognitive theories, I show that in order to understand the lives of pious women much can be gained from keeping psychological predispositions for autonomy in mind. Simultaneously, this paper can be read as an attempt to bring cognitive material on attachment, education and epidemiology of representations into conversation with one another, and discover emerging fault lines and potentialities for mutual reinforcement.

Explanation is Not the Point: Domestic Work, Islamic Dawa and Becoming Muslim in Kuwait

Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait have developed new-found ‘Islamic piety’.1 Occurring in a much maligned and understudied region—the Arabian Peninsula—this widespread phenomenon has either been elided, cynically dismissed or the motivations for these conversions and their sociohistorical conditions of possibility assumed. Domestic workers’ own articulations focus on ‘house talk’ and suggest a shift in analytic focus, with an emphasis on everyday relationships and activities within households as generative of their new-found Islamic piety. Domestic workers experience becoming Muslim not as a radical break from their previous relationships and religious practices, but as a gradual reworking of them. The domestic workers’ expression of their new-found Islamic faith points to the household as a space of confluence between Islamic ethical practice and the affective and immaterial labour entailed by domestic work, as well as between global Islam and the feminisation of transnational labour migration that marks our contemporary world.

The Islamic revival and women's political subjectivity in Indonesia

Synopsis The global Islamic revival is producing new kinds of Muslim political subjectivities. But what does the revitalization of religion in the public sphere mean for women? This article examines how Islamic piety can be a resource for Muslim women's political mobilization in Indonesia. I argue that the redefinition of Islamic piety as public practice helps to promote women's participation in the Indonesian public sphere. While some activists use Islamic discourses to contest gender inequality, others seek to contribute to the Islamization of Indonesia. Both visions are influenced by the conviction that piety is a public matter, but they reveal deep divisions among Muslims about how the concepts of public and private should be understood. I suggest that the new public piety, influenced by the Islamic revival and neoliberalism, has empowered many women activists, but the political reforms they seek to achieve are diverse and not necessarily egalitarian.

Daniella Talmon-Heller, Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria: Mosques, Cemeteries and Sermons under the Zangids and Ayyubids (1146–1260) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007). Pp. 320. $162.00 cloth.

Daniella Talmon-Heller, Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria: Mosques, Cemeteries and Sermons under the Zangids and Ayyubids (1146–1260) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007). Pp. 320. $162.00 cloth. - Volume 42 Issue 1

Pious Muslims in the Making: A Closer Look at Narratives of Ascetic Conversion

AbstractThis article examines conversion narratives of some Sufi ascetics by looking closely at their life-stories as expounded in Sufi biographical traditions. How is the ascetic conversion told in the Sufi biographical sources? What kind of purpose do the ascetic conversion narratives serve? In what sense can we see the ascetic practices as an intentional language of protest and opposition? and against whom/what? These questions form the major concern of this article. Different narratives of ascetic conversion will be discussed with the intention of demonstrating the larger context of setting the boundaries of an Islamic piety within which the portrait of idealized pious Muslims is framed in the main traditions of Sufi hagiography. It is, therefore, hoped that this article will shed light on the transformation of individuals from ordinary people to idealized pious Muslims.

From Colonialism to Neo-Colonialism: Nationalism, Islam, and the Cultural Framing of Conflicts in Afghanistan

1 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, Spring 2010 From Colonialism to Neo-Colonialism: Nationalism, Islam, and the Cultural Framing of Conflicts in Afghanistan Nathaniel A. Davis* Afghanistan has endured frequent invasions by imperialist and neoimperialist powers. During the century and half, there have been five major incidents of Afghan resistance, if the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 is included. Their disturbing regularity ensured that each generation of Afghans relayed to the next vivid memories of foreign violence done to their country. This idealized historical Afghan resistance to foreign incursions. The British invasions in 1839 and 1878 sparked two rival sets of cultural conflict framing: that of civilization against tribal savagery, and Islamic piety versus infidel aggression. However an examination of contemporary British writing on the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars reveals that these conflicts were not as stridently polarized as they appear. Despite proliferating some of the ugliest Orientalist stereotypes and assertions, these sources highlight significant shifts in British imperialist thinking on Afghanistan and South Asia. They also suggest the emergence of a nascent Afghan nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Defining resistance to infidel aggressors in terms of Muslim identity enabled Afghans to repress sectarian, tribal, and ethnic divisions. This compelled Britain to accept the consolidation of a *Nathaniel Davis is a Delyte and Dorothy Morris fellow and History PhD student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. A US Army veteran and linguist, trained in Serbian/Croatian, German, and Pashto. He earned his BA in Religion Excelsior University and his MA from American Military University (Charles Town, WV, 2009), his research interests are cultural exchange and politics in imperial contexts in Asia and the Middle East. 2 2 Amalendu Misra, “The Taliban, Radical Islam, and Afghanistan,” The Third World Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2002), 5. 3 Sana Haroon, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007), 211-217. 4 John Alfred Gray, At the Court of the Amir of Afghanistan (London: Kegan Paul, 2002), 500. 5 Abdur Rahman, Life of Abdur Rahman, 179, 182. historically imagined Afghanistan, between 1880 and 1881, under Amir Abdur Rahman. The British appeared defeated, yet only 13 years later, in 1893, they imposed the Durand Line upon the Amir, gaining through negotiation what they nearly lost by force of arms: a weak and fractured Afghanistan which posed virtually threat to the security of British India. Despite the glaring injustice of this settlement, it highlights an important shift in imperial discourse, one which US policymakers ought to heed. The monographs of M. Hassan Kakar, Amin Saikal, Olivier Roy, and Sana Haroon outline the recent historiographical context and indicate a measure of consensus on at least one issue: the intractable problems of Afghanistan cannot be solved while non-Muslim troops continue to occupy Afghanistan. In 2002, one scholar suggested that by the time the Taliban had asserted control in Afghanistan, “nationalism had truly and fully dissipated.”2 However, while civic nationalism may seem to have dissolved in Afghanistan because of the Soviet and US invasions, it has only merely re-submerged into Islamic identities that have formed the backbone of Afghan national consciousness, waiting for an opportunity. In her work, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland, Sana Haroon has demonstrated the historical continuity of Islam as political powerhouse in the Pashtun tribal regions, its tremendous clout wielded by local religious leaders, such as mullahs, mirs, and muftis.3 Before the establishment of the Durand line, this meant that Pashtuns, when united, controlled all of Afghanistan as we know it today and more. British infidel aggression bolstered Afghan religious framing of the conflicts. British intervention in the Anglo-Afghan wars also exacerbated ethnic conflict, tracing a Pashtun veneer over Afghan nationalism during its early twentieth century development. Even this is ambiguous, as the language at court was Persian (Dari); Pashto was deprecated as “unfit” for the royal household.4 However, while Abdur Rahman spoke and wrote Persian, he reveals that he also spoke Pashto, and favored the language in battle, particularly in giving his men orders while in the presence of non-Pashto (Dari/Persian, English) speakers.5...

Islam and nation: separatist rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia

Rooted in the latest theoretical debates about nationalism and ethnicity, yet written in an accessible and engaging style, Islam and Nation presents a fascinating study of the genesis, growth and decline of a nationalist movement. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with nationalist leaders, activists and guerillas, Aspinall reveals how the Free Aceh Movement went from being a quixotic fantasy to a guerilla army in the space of a generation, leading to a bitter conflict in which thousands perished. And by exploring the complex relationship between Islam and nationalism, Aspinall also explains how a society famed for its Islamic piety gave rise to a guerilla movement that ended up rejecting the Islamic goals of its forebears. Islam and Nation is a tour de force in the study of nationalist politics. It will be of great interest to readers concerned about Southeast Asia, Islamic politics, ethnic conflict and nationalism everywhere.