Review: De-Essentialising Islam

Author(s): Vinay Lal

Reviewed work(s):
Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition by Michael M. J.
Fischer; Mehdi Abedi
Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 24/25 (Jun. 13-20, 1992), pp. 1257-1258
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4398513
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to the problems of LDBs, the following may
be mentioned.
Inadequate investment loan amount
coupled with lack of short-term credit acted
as a major cause of loan delinquency. The
target-oriented approach and heavy concen-
tration in minor irrigation lending which
turned out infructuous were the main causes
of overdues. Defaults were mainly due to
inadequacy of net incremental income.
Mortgage of land has not proved to be a
realisable security because when the lands
of wilful defaulters were sought to be auc-
tioned, there were no bidders.
A comparison between the performance
of PLDB and local branch of a commercial
bank has shown how the latter has a better
edge over the former in respect of funds
availability, procedural simplicity, flecibility
in security and lending for diversified pur-
poses. While the PLDB was rigid and could
not deviate from the rules, the local branch
was following a flexible approach in its
security norms. The commercial bank
branch advanced loans mainly for diversified
activities while the LDB's lending was still
confined to land-based investment.
More and more such area-specific, opera-
tion-oriented research programmes are re-
quired in order to bring out problems of
rural lending institutions arising from dif-
ferences in socio-economic background,
status of land reforms and crop pattern even
between one district and another within the
same state. It is from this concern that we
have to appreciate these two studies and
recommend their perusal by researchers and
bankers.
De-Essentialising Islam
Vinay Lal
Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition
by Michael M J Fischer and Mehdi Abedi; The University-of Wisconsin Press,
Madison, Wisconsin, 1990; pp xxxvi + 564, S 49.75 (cloth), S 23.50 (paper).
IN the older literature on west Asia and the
Muslim world, Islam,almost invariably ap-
pears as a religion of fanaticism, austere in
its outlook, menacing in its proselytising
tendencies, intellectually impoverished, an-
tagonistic towards reason, monolithic in its
structure, and above all essentially different
from western enlightenment, capitalism, and
democracy. The west's representations of
Islam have by no moans altered significant-
ly, and the study of west Asian history re-
mains a largely backward field. No school
such as that of the 'subaltervns' adorns the
study of west Asian history as it does the
study of Indian history, and respectable
scholars such as Bernard Lewis continue
benignly to write, as in his piece on 'The
Roots of Muslim Rage' in The Atlantic
Monthly (September 1990), on the alleged-
ly ineradicable difference between the
democatic west and the Islamic world, con-
trasting for example the principle of separa-
tion between church and' state enshrined in
the American constitution to the avowedly
theocratic nature of the state in many
Islamic cuntries. The recent controversy
over the Satanic Verses, and Khomeini's
decree calling for the death of Salman
Rushdie, have done little to enhance Islam's
feputation in the west. Nonetheless, the in-
tellectual traditions and practices by which
th west has sought to understand and repre-
sent Islam have been
subjected
to severe
scrutiny over the last few decades by scholars
like Anwar Abdel Malek, Raymond Schwab,
and Edward Said.
Debating Muslims, a work of two an-
thropologists at Rice University, partakes of
some of the recent' scholarship on Islam,
such as Lila Abu-Gughod and Alloula
Malek's writings on veiling, that has used
the insights of feminism, Marxism, post-
structuralism, and post-modernism in the
two-fold task of deconstructing some
cherished notions of western orientalism and
attempting to restore to the native his or her
suppressed voice. The older categories of
analysis, usually construed in sterile opposi-
tions like faith and reason, backward and
developed, traditional and modern, where
the second term of each pair is privileged
and thought to characterise the west (or the
local modernising elites), are rejected by
Fischer and Abedi. What they substitute in
its place is a historically-informed sociology
and a notion of Islam that enables us to see
it as a religion with variable levels of mean-
ing and interpretation. The voices that
emerge from the world of Islam are multi-
farious and speak to us with different urgen-
cy and intent. If Islam seems rather remote,
the authors attempt to make it rather more
intimate by conveying the oral life-world of
Muslims. Thus there are stories of scholars,
clerics, teachers, students, shopkeepers, and
others; as Abedi, himself a Shi'ite from Iran,
says, "the lived-in world of contemporary
experience" brings to "life the worlds of
scholarship familiar from texts" (p 5).
It is the figure of several concentric circles
that comes to mind in describing Debating
Muslims. Islam is the backdrop to all the
seven chapters, but it is Islam in Iran, with
its predominant Shi'ite population, that
especially interests Fischer and Abedi. Iran,
Islam, and Shi'ism exist ih a state of tension
in relation to each other in the diverse essays
that constitute Debating Muslims. Smaller
concentric circles are formed by Baha'ism,
a world-wide faith originating in Iran;
Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic religion of
Iran; the varying traditions of textual ex-
egesis of the Ouran; and the modern day
fundamentalism of Islamic ideologues and
clerics like Khomeini and his followers.
Another set of concentric circles locates
Shi'ism, not in relation to other faiths or
ideologies, but in space. In Chapter 1, the
scene is set in Yazd, where Abedi was born,
spent his childhood, and became socialised
to Shi'ism, and from here the scene shifts,
in Chapter V, to Houston, to which Abedi
emigrated sevral years ago, and which now
houses a large Iranian community. The
mode of narration in both these chapters is
autobiographical, which assumes rather
more significance when we consider that
autobiography is 'a relatively novel genre in
Islamic and Iranian literature (p 5), and the
tone is personal and familiar. The effect is
to suggest that Muslims struggle with their
faith like everyone else, and are no more
bounded by dogmatism or obscurantism
than people of other faith. Islam is,
moreover, a transnational faith, and it is the
annual pilgrimage to Mecca which under-
lines the importance of 'place to Muslims.
The 'hajj subject of Chapter III, is "the
womb of return, of 'historical rebirth', of
reorientation in the collective unconscious,
of reawakening from the oblivion of
ordinary life", and of the affirmation of
identity (p 150).
Chapters II and III acquaint us with the
forms of Islamic argumentation, and if they
show the revolution of 1979 is to be read
through texts, Chapter VI shows us how
revolutionary posters too can be read as
'texts'. Islam may appear to the west as
universally prescriptive, constrained by no
greater distinction than that between the
Sunnis and the Shi'ites, but dialectical
disputation is internal to Islamic hermeneu-
tics. Nowhere is this more apparent than in
what the authors describe as "Khomeini's
dialogic use of the Hadith game". Fischer
and Abedi point out that Khomeini, in seek-
ing to legitimise the Islamic revolution,
justify the new constitution and the special
role of clerics in the new parliament, and
explain his own elevation from supreme
faqih (juriconsultant in Islamic law) to head
of state, had to provide fresh readings of the
Quran, hadiths, and Islamic revelation.
However, he could not effect the closure that
he sought, and his arguments provided as
much ammunition against his positions as
they did in support of them.
Khom;ini
was
forced to admit that individually none of the
hadith he discussed could support him in his
endeavours, and only collectively could they
be thought to display the "logically obvious
intent of Islam" (pp 129-41). Hadiths, the
authors state, provide "access to ideological,
sectarian, social, and political history", and
this is a history that must be approached,
as they do, "dialectically (i e, aware of the
range of counter-arguments in a given
historical period), hermeneutically (i e,
aware of the allusions and contexts, nuances
and changes in word usage), and dialgically
(i e, aware of the political others against
whom assertions are-made)" (p 146). The
Quran itself has "polysemic"' meanings, but
its interpreters have often sought to reduce
Economic and Political Weekly June 13-20, 1992 1257
it to a "monological decreee" (p 148).
The "cultural spaces" which interest the
authors are
"hybridised"'
not distinct or
otherwise bounded. The chapter dn the
Baha'is of Yazd, once the largest refuge of
Zoroastrianism in Iran, also the seat of the
Isma'ili Imam and of the leader of the
Shaykhis, and now one of the most conser-
vative of Muslim cities, is an exploration of
the "intercultural dialogue' between Shi'ism,
Baha'ism, and Zoroastrianism. Though
Islam would appear to dominate the
religious and cultural landscape, much of the
contemporary debate about Islamic govern-
ment, social reform, and the "purification
of Islamic terminology of literalist and ex-
cessively other-worldly meaning" is, accor-
ding to Fischer, pre-figured in, and a con-
tinuation of, the traditional arguments
developed in the 19th century by Ismai'lis,
sufis, Bbis, and others (p 230). On the other
hand,Tslam exerts its own pressures. Neither
Zoroastrianism nor Judaism displayed
much
of an interest in their prophet figures, but
within an Islamic environment they were
compelled "to elaborate a single and central
prophet" (p 239). Likewise the Baha%is still
speak the language of Islam, "of prophets,
hierarchical authority, dreams, signs and
wonders", and their quest for martdom ap-
pc..s to Fischer as a "dated rhetorices of
little use in counteracting the genocidal
atrocities of Iran's Islamic regimes (p 244).
Ambivalence characterises the relations
between these different faiths.
We hear, in Debating Muslims, the voices
of women, Baha'is, and others who are
marginalised. A black Muslim woman in the,
United States, a Baha'i in Yazd,. an anti-
Khomeini activist in Houston all engage in
dialogue with Islam, as do the authors
themselves, and highlight the "areas Qf
blindness both in western complacencies and
in Islamic and patriarchal fundamen-
talisms", thereby seeking to "counter the
arrest of interpretation by fundamentalists"
and "makers of state ideologies" (pp xxiv,
268). However, "the fear of 'difference' is
an anxiety attending not only Muslim funda-
mentalists, but "American cultural conser-
vatives" as well, and. it is to the latter
audience, which generally exists in a state of
blissful ignorance about the Muslim world,
that the authors' "deconstructive and
reconstructive poetics" is equally directed.
Despite the authors' noble intentions, it is
unlikely that their use of Foucault, Derrida,
Bakhtin, Gadamer, Levinas, and others in
a great litany of names will endear them to
"American cultural conservatives".
much less
enlighten them. The frequently turgid and
occasionally obscurantist prose is also likely
to be a source of irritation to many readers.
Nonetheless, these limitations cannot detract
from the abiding merit of Debating
Muslims, which introduces some sorely-
needed sophistication in the scholarship on
Islam (and Iranian Shi'ism in particular),
and shows how anthropology can fruitfully
intersect with other kinds of discourses and
advance in new directions.
i; ;u ; 'Il
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