Muslim Piety Research Articles

Review of Fischer, Johan and Jammes, Jérémy (Eds.). Muslim Piety As Economy: Markets, Meaning and Morality in Southeast Asia

Review of Fischer, Johan and Jammes, Jérémy (Eds.). Muslim Piety As Economy: Markets, Meaning and Morality in Southeast Asia

Sharing and Caring


 Muslim women dedicate themselves to Islamic educational activities as an important aspect of their religious engagement, and pious Muslim Danish women are no exception. One important element of this engagement appears to be the sharing of the knowledge gained with younger generations. In this paper, I scrutinize this aspect of contemporary Danish Muslim piety, asking how and why Danish Muslim women ‘pass on’ knowledge to children. I show that this transmission should be seen as a way of caring for the children as part of the Muslim community, and that this way of caring appears especially important in a setting where Islam is practiced as a minority religion. At the same time, the sharing of knowledge should be perceived as a virtuous practice, given that it is an aspect of the women’s own efforts to live virtuous lives.

Queer Muslim Piety: The Hijab Practices of LGBTQ Muslims in Boston

Abstract: This article examines how queer Muslim pieties are constructed through sartorial practices, specifically, wearing hijab, and what these pious subjectivities suggest about gender, piety, authority, and identity more broadly in the American Muslim community. In Muslim communities, hijab is imbued with heteronormative assumptions and is often thought about in terms of modesty relating to hetero male desire. Yet people who fall outside heteronormative paradigms also choose to cover, suggesting there are alternative meanings to lift up. Based on interviews with three queer Muslim women in Boston, the author found that through donning hijab, queer Muslim women mark degrees of intimacy and privacy with others, protest and resist normative forces within Muslim and LGBTQ cultures, and secure for themselves a gendered and visible Muslim identity, while simultaneously subverting gender norms. This article shows the creative ways Muslim women have negotiated religious and secular authorities to imagine new, playfully pious possibilities for themselves and the Muslim community.

Queer Muslim Piety: The Hijab Practices of LGBTQ Muslims in Boston

Abstract: This article examines how queer Muslim pieties are constructed through sartorial practices, specifically, wearing hijab, and what these pious subjectivities suggest about gender, piety, authority, and identity more broadly in the American Muslim community. In Muslim communities, hijab is imbued with heteronormative assumptions and is often thought about in terms of modesty relating to hetero male desire. Yet people who fall outside heteronormative paradigms also choose to cover, suggesting there are alternative meanings to lift up. Based on interviews with three queer Muslim women in Boston, the author found that through donning hijab, queer Muslim women mark degrees of intimacy and privacy with others, protest and resist normative forces within Muslim and LGBTQ cultures, and secure for themselves a gendered and visible Muslim identity, while simultaneously subverting gender norms. This article shows the creative ways Muslim women have negotiated religious and secular authorities to imagine new, playfully pious possibilities for themselves and the Muslim community.

Oral and Written Shī‘ī Qur’ānic Elucidations in Twentieth-Century Indian Subcontinent

Sayyid ‘Alī Naqī Naqvī (Ar. al-Naqawī, d. 1988), popularly known as Sayyid al-‘Ulamā’ and Naqqan Ṣāḥib, is widely regarded as the most prolific, influential, and popular Indian Shī‘ī ‘ālim of the twentieth century. Although the author of a multi-volume tafsīr, Faṣl al-Khiṭāb, which includes a long prolegomenon (muqaddimah), Naqvī’s Qur’ānic elucidations are hardly limited to this text alone; they are to be found throughout his vast corpus. In this article, I attempt an overview of Naqvī’s multi-faceted engagement with the Qur’ān by weaving together these interspersed elucidations. This will be in contrast to the common scholarly approach that focuses on tafsīr as the only Qur’ānic commentary tradition worthy of study in Muslim piety and religious thought. Illustrating how Naqvī engages with the Qur’ān will shed light not only on the relatively invisible and understudied subject of the Qur’ān and its exegesis within contemporary South Asian Shiism but also on the amply deliberated major themes of religious and communal concern in contemporary Shī‘ī South Asia.

The Digital Public Sphere and Muslim Piety in Aceh: Rethinking Habermas’ Conception of Communicative Action

<p>This study offers insights into the transformation of social media platforms as an alternative to the digital public sphere for Muslim society in Aceh. The communicative action theory by Habermas is used as approach to respond to this challenge. Descriptive quantitative analyses were used to expose religious discourse about Islam amongst young Muslims in Aceh. The results show that WhatsApp has proven to be the most popular among social media platforms. WhatsApp has functioned as a new public sphere for Muslim society in Aceh and has evolved into an essential part of mediated Islamic discourse in the digital era. In this regard, WhatsApp has created a universal public sphere, available to Muslim society as dialogic communication in Aceh. This research concludes that the Muslims in Aceh are not merely users of WhatsApp. They can also be digital preachers who can build individual narratives as a part of the religious struggle to increase their piety.</p><p><em>Kajian ini dilakukan untuk memberikan pemahaman mendalam tentang bagaimana transformasi platform media sosial sebagai alternatif ruang publik digital pada masyarakat Muslim di Aceh. Teori tindakan komunikatif Habermas digunakan sebagai pendekatan untuk menjawab tantangan ini. Analisis deskriptif kuantitatif digunakan untuk mengekspos diskursus keagamaan Islam di kalangan generasi muda Muslim di Aceh melalui lanskap media sosial baru yang lebih kontemporer. Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa WhatsApp telah terbukti menjadi media yang paling populer di antara banyak platform media sosial. WhatsApp telah memberikan manfaat sebagai alternatif ruang publik baru bagi masyarakat Muslim di Aceh dan telah berkembang menjadi bagian penting dalam perkembangan diskursus keislaman di era digital. Dalam hal ini, WhatsApp telah menciptakan ruang publik yang universal, tersedia bagi Muslim sebagai satu bentuk komunikasi dialogis di Aceh. Penelitian ini menyimpulkan bahwa umat Islam di Aceh bukan hanya pengguna WhatsApp saja. Namun, mereka juga menjadi penceramah digital yang dapat membangun narasi individu yang dipilih sebagai bagian dari perjuangan dakwah untuk meningkatkan ketakwaannya</em></p>

Pre-Muhammadan Prophets in the Muslim Tradition and Piety

The belief in prophets before the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) and in the divine books that Allah Almighty sent to humanity/books revealed to the humanity by Allah Almighty constitute two of the six/five articles of faith in Islam. The denial of any one of them would result in “apostasy” and excommunication. All textbooks on the Islamic creed as well as all other major theological sources acknowledge these beliefs which also comprise a primary component of the curriculum taught to Muslim children. However, the impact of these beliefs in Islamic thought and practice needs to be explored extensively.
 This paper attempts to highlight the role played by the previous prophets in Islamic life, especially in its devotional practices, with the hope that this type of study will contribute to/aim of increasing the awareness of other religions and developing a more inclusive approach towards them in the spirit of mutual appreciation and respect. These are –undoubtedly – some of/among the more pertinent and noble objectives that concern the modern man and the society.
 The paper begins by explaining the importance of belief in the previous prophets as set in the sources of Islam and then proceeds to highlight some aspects of its practical importance in Islamic thought and life. It concludes with a special focus on some Sufi concepts and practices that display their intrinsic connections to previous prophets.

Women and Ritual Purity in Islam

Purity is a beautiful word that is pleasing to the eye, and a quality that everyone wishes to maintain. From an Islamic perspective, purity has a general meaning. Thus it may mean, on one hand, physical cleanliness which is the purity (of the body) from perceptible filth or ritual purification. On the other hand, it may mean spiritual purity which is the purity of the self from vices, sins and abandoning disobedience, and getting used to good deeds and words. Purity (Arabic: طهارة‎, ṭahāra is an essential aspect of Islam. It is the opposite of najāsa, the state of being ritually impure. It is achieved by first removing physical impurities (for example, urine) from the body, and then removing ritual impurity by means of wudu (usually) or ghusl. Rules which regulate the cleanliness rituals are placed both by Quranic requirements, and the rituals to acquire a new level of social status in everyday Muslim life. Physically, spiritually, ethically, and psychologically every Muslim must value cleanliness and purity. In this work, I investigate the concept of “purity” from the Islamic perspective. I argue that cleanliness and purity form an essential ideal in Muslim piety and consciousness. The Qur'an frequently refers to it.

Moral Epistemology and the Revision of Divine Law in Islam

Abstract This essay explores the relationship between moral epistemology and legal theory in Islamic thought. Reviewing selected works of Khomeini, Maududi, and Qutb, I show that Islamism, drawing upon certain currents of Muslim intellectual tradition, presupposes a rejection of moral rationalism and on that basis opposes the permanent alteration of explicit divine injunctions. Next, I argue that the unwillingness of ‘Abduh, Iqbal, and Soroush to articulate a consistent moral rationalism prevents these reformists from offering a tenable theoretical alternative to Islamist legalism. I subsequently consider the moral epistemology of classical Mu‘tazili scholar ‘Abd al-Jabbar in order to show how a robust moral rationalism justifies the prudential revision of divine law. On that basis, I suggest that moral rationalism is the necessary epistemic basis of any legal theory that stands as a clear alternative to Islamism while still remaining grounded in the most fundamental tenets of Muslim piety.

Mualaf Chic: Conversion and Mediation in Indonesian Pious Sociality

AbstractScholars of the visible rise of public forms of Islamic piety movements in Indonesia in the past two decades have noted its transnational character. Unsurprisingly, Arab inspiration has been prominent, as direct clerical influence and indirect aesthetic prestige. In this article, I suggest that another feature of this shared religious community relays a slightly different allure, that of accessing and domesticating foreignness through conversion and cosmopolitanism. I analyze this through examples from pious fashion celebrities who have large and passionate Indonesian audiences. Analyzing two genres, Indonesian pious celebrities who amplify their appeal through situating themselves in foreign settings, and foreign converts to Islam who have large Indonesian social media audiences because of their adoption of Muslim piety, I ask how the affordances of fashion facilitate a unique process of accessing the allure of the foreign that preclude its total domestication. I focus particularly on the example of Ayana Jihye Moon, a Korean woman whose conversion to Islam has created a substantial Indonesian fan base. Her “ journey to Islam” suggests alternate circuits in contemporary Indonesian Islamic culture and by extension, the role of the foreign in Indonesian conceptions of authority.

Pietaskscapes of halal living: subjectivity, striving, and space-making in Muslim Russia

ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnographic research in Tatarstan (Russia) and through an engagement with Foucauldian, phenomenological, and ecological social theories, this paper advances the concept of piety taskscape, or “pietaskscape”, to indicate the granular, organically emerging meshwork of settings and locations where Muslim pietists carry out self-fashioning. This concept aspires to grasp the nexus of ethical action, space-making, and experience, in concrete human environments such as the post-Soviet city. Such a concept may prove a valuable contribution to scholarly conversations about religion and space by placing subjectivity, performativity, teleology, and materiality in resonance with each other. It will be argued that, compared to alternative approaches, this framework affords greater analytical insight into the spatiality of Muslim piety beyond the scholarly box of Islamic “sites”.

Muslim Piety as Economy: Markets, Meaning and Morality in Southeast Asia. Edited by Johan Fischer and Jeremy Jammes. London: Routledge, 2020

Muslim Piety as Economy: Markets, Meaning and Morality in Southeast Asia. Edited by Johan Fischer and Jeremy Jammes. London: Routledge, 2020

‘Warrior fighting two wars’: Life of ‘Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak in the ‘Attar’s Memorial of God’s Friends

The publication presents the first translation into Russian of the 15th chapter from the hagiographic collection by Farid ad-Din ʻAttar (d. ca. 1221 AD) Memorial of God’s friends (Taẕkiratu’l-awliyā) originally written in Persian. The chapter deals with biography, exploits and sayings of ʻAbdallah b. al-Mubarak of Khorasan, a recognized collector and transmitter of hadith, a renown ascetic, successful merchant, and severe warrior, but first of all a devoted and true worshiper (ʻābid) of God. The translation has been completed from the critical edition by Muhammad Esteʻlami. It is introduced by short preface, which provides basic information on Ibn Mubarak’s life and his place in the tradition of Muslim piety. The translation is supplied with historical and linguistic commentary. The tranlator stresses the fact that although being constructed on Arabic sources the actual narrative created by ʻAttar fits into the framework of Iranian hagiography. In describing the life and deeds of ʻAbdallah b. al-Mubarak of Khorasan ʻAttar created an Iranian version of the “Sufi prototype”. He emphasized features, such as humility, self-abasement, miracle-working, and participation in miraculous events.

Humility in Islamic Contemplative Ethics

Abstract From the origins of Islamic history, humility (khushūʿ/tawāḍuʿ) has occupied a central place in Muslim piety. This has been in large part due to its defining role in the Qurʾān and ḥadīths, and no less because it stands as the opposite of pride (kibr)—the cardinal sin of both Iblīs and Pharaoh in Scripture. By drawing on the literature of Sufism or taṣawwuf from its formative period to the 20th century—spanning the writings of such figures as al-Makkī (d. 386/996), al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), Rūmī (d. 672/1273), al-Sha⁠ʿrānī (d. 973/1565), al-Darqāwī (d. 1239/1823), and al-Sharnūbī (d. 1348/1929)—the article examines the defining characteristics of this virtue, its marks or signs, and the dangers that lie in its embodiment. In the process, we shall see how humility occupies a place somewhere in between pride, conceit, and self-admiration, on the one hand, and self-loathing, self-denigration, and outright self-hatred, on the other. Although humility is, in theory, to be exercised towards both God and other human beings, the precise nature of its embodiment, as we might expect, varies in relation to both. The article ends with an epilogue on what it means to transcend humility altogether.

The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi

The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi

Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism

ABSTRACT Facebook meme groups created by Muslim students at American universities are sites of intensive daily productivity, where members post memes they create, or share memes they find elsewhere, joking about the everyday lived experience of practicing Islam as part of a family, a community, and a society. Through the practice of making memes about Muslim piety, members of these groups articulate a form of cultural citizenship in Western liberal secular society through humor. Young Muslim women engaged in meme-making must contend with the intersections of gender and religion while making claims to American citizenship, doing the work of re-shaping belonging both in terms of American citizenship and in terms of Islamic practice and belief.

The Izala effect: unintended consequences of Salafi radicalism in Indonesia and Nigeria

Salafism is a revivalist current in Sunni Islam rooted in the teachings of the fourteenth century Hanbalite jurist Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah and the eighteenth century Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab. Salafis condemn Sufism (Islamic Mysticism) and most forms of popular Muslim piety, including music, as shirk (polytheism) and unbelief. The Wahhabi variant of Salafism is the only form of Islam permissible in Saudi Arabia and the ideology underlying ISIS and other violent extremist movements. This essay shows that despite the expenditure of vast sums by the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments and NGOs efforts to promote Salafi teachings and armed struggles by ISIS and others to impose them, Salafism has a very limited popular appeal. It is based on textual, ethnographic and survey data from two of the most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia and Nigeria. It also shows that efforts to promote Salafism have led to a resurgence of traditional Sufi oriented piety, especially devotional music traditions.

Islam in face-to-face interaction: direct zakat giving in Nablus (Palestine)

ABSTRACTZakat is the Islamic obligation to give away a share of one’s moveable wealth for the sake of the community—primarily supporting people in need. Based on fieldwork in the Palestinian city of Nablus (2013–2014) where institutional channels for distributing zakat had become blocked due to security crackdowns in 2008, this article analyses direct zakat practices where givers and receivers confront one another in face-to-face interaction. In Nablus, openly displayed material want was assumed to ‘expose’ people living in poor households as well as their relatives and neighbours. Against this background, direct zakat manifested itself as discreet gestures of ‘covering’ need, while people not asking openly for support tended to be praised for their shyness and piety. In direct zakat transfers, people actively cared for how they appeared to one another in social interactions. This ‘ethical work’ of presenting oneself involved reading signs, embodying Muslim virtues and invoking God as the sole source of material provision. Considering the Islamic tradition’s presence within social interactions, this article seeks to understand how Muslim piety exceeds the individual and how the moral responsibility to cover the needs of others is socially distributed.

Islam and Cultural Heritage on Tajik Television

For many members of the Tajik governing elite, Muslim piety remains problematic—a stubborn, socially regressive holdover of anti-modern Tajiks—and Muslim leaders are often thought of merely as anachronistic cultural survivals. This paper interrogates the depiction of Muslim exemplars as they appear on Tajik state television by comparing a 2009 documentary about the life of Imomi Abūḣanifa, the eponymous founder of the Ḣanafī school of jurisprudence, with an exposé about Ėshoni Temur, a local Naqshbandī Sufi pir tried and convicted in 2015 for polygyny and various indeterminate offenses against official notions of Muslim religiosity. This article considers different regimes of Muslim alterity as depicted on state media and argues that the Tajik governing elite alternately renders problematic Islam as innocuous heritage or in need of swift extermination.

Religiosity and Self-Efficacy in the Prevention of HIV-Risk Behaviours among Muslim University Students

Introduction: The high prevalence of HIV infection among an age group of 18–25 years, both globally or nationally, was indicating students vulnerable to HIV/AIDS infections. Prevention of HIV risk behaviours can be used as a religiosity approach to strengthening the self-efficacy on prevention HIV-risk behaviour. However, there were limited studies on the association between religiosity and self-efficacy on prevention of HIV-risk behaviour among student, especially Muslim students. The aims of this study were to identify the correlation between religiosity with self-efficacy in the prevention of HIV-risk behaviours.Methods: The study employed a correlation study. The sample size comprised 404 Muslim university students with proportionate stratified random sampling. Student’s religiosity was measured by The Muslim Piety questionnaire and self-efficacy was measured by Self-Efficacy in the Prevention of HIV-Risk Behaviour questionnaire. Descriptive analysis using mean, standard deviation, percentage and frequency distribution. Meanwhile, inferential analysis using Pearson's Correlation.Results: The results were found that most of the students have high levels of religiosity and strong self-efficacy in the prevention of high-risk behaviour. Further analysis revealed a significant (p < 0.005) and strong correlations (r = 0.6780) between religiosity and self-efficacy in the prevention of HIV-risk behaviour. Higher levels of religiosity were followed by higher levels of self-efficacy on the prevention of HIV-risk behaviours among students.Conclusion: findings can be used by academic and health professionals, to implement a religiosity based program to strengthen a self-efficacy of HIV-risk behaviour. Further research can be a focus on the nursing interventions based on religious beliefs to strengthen self-efficacy in the prevention of HIV/AIDS infections.