Ethics, tradition, authority: Toward an anthropology of the fatwa

Agrama, Hussein Ali

doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01238.x

Cited by 114 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…As part of its larger ambition to regulate and control the religious lives of its citizens, the Egyptian state has strategically cemented alliances with religious institutions of Al-Azhar and the Coptic Orthodox Church "in service of the state" (Moustafa 2000;Tadros 2009). Such acts of state-initiated regulation and reform have thoroughly transformed, for example, Islamic forms and pedagogical practices of knowledge (Starrett 1998), which consequently intersect and compete with long-standing discursive traditions of virtue and ethical discipline (Agrama 2010a;Hirschkind 2006). It is perhaps of little surprise that the governing structures of religious institutions have subsequently changed.…”

Section: Security and Sacramentalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

Heo

2013

American Ethnologist

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A B S T R A C TThis article examines the political and public culture of Coptic Christian miracles through the circulation and reproduction of images and the mimetic entanglements of artifacts and objects. To understand the threat posed by one case of a woman's oil-exuding hand, this study points to how semiotic orders of security and sacramentality intersect in the regulation of bodily miracles. It explores Coptic Orthodox Church and Egyptian state efforts to contain the activity of images and transform the public nature of truthful witness and divine testimony. In doing so, it suggests how the material structure of saintly imagination introduces bodily and visual challenges to an authoritarian politics of public order.

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Section: Security and Sacramentalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

Heo

2013

American Ethnologist

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“…Yet the desire for an embodied (and engendered) ethics and the cultivation of highly disciplined outward behavioural forms has long been a crucial part of the intellectual milieu of Islam, its religious precursors, and its ideological competitors as well. Hussein Agrama calls this widespread concern, following Foucault, ‘the care of the self’ (: 13). In fact, we know this precisely because so much energy has been expended by Islamic scholars in both reading Aristotle and trying to stem his influence .…”

Section: ‘You're All So Educated’: Medicalizing Islamic Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Chastity Society: disciplining Muslim men

Hughes

2017

Royal Anthropological Inst

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At a time when Western humanitarian rescue discourses seek to save Muslim women from irrational and violent Islamic masculinities, the Jordanian Islamist charity ‘the Chastity Society’ seeks to train young men to restrain their excessive masculine passions to ensure that Muslim women are spared the fate of the benighted and oppressed Western woman. This article traces parallel emphases on gender essentialism, rationality, cultural pathology, and abjection to argue that a shared language of contention unites both Islamists and those who advocate for Western humanitarian interventions. I explore how several kinds of social control are legitimized through these symmetrical polemics about gender, order, and civilization.

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“…This new trend in the anthropology of Islam has mostly focused on actors directly involved in Islamist movements and has led to an important body of literature on ethics, piety, and the cultivation of moral affects (Mahmood 2005;Hirschkind 2006;Agrama 2010). This new trend in the anthropology of Islam has mostly focused on actors directly involved in Islamist movements and has led to an important body of literature on ethics, piety, and the cultivation of moral affects (Mahmood 2005;Hirschkind 2006;Agrama 2010).…”

Section: Islamic Framework and Ordinary Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their postures are both inward and outward looking: their command of Islamic knowledge is a source of self-empowerment, a form of "care of the self" (Agrama 2010) that nurtures a sense of distinction. Indeed, the new Muslim actors sketched out in this article testify of subjectivities oriented toward "moral life."…”

Section: Islamic Framework and Ordinary Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Snapshots of British Islam

Billaud

2016

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

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This article seeks to capture the reconfigurations of Islamic morality in England through a collection of snapshots depicting the new actors who have made their apparition in public in the post 9/11 and 7/7 context. While underlying the unintended and paradoxical effects of neoliberalism and of state interventions in the domain of "race relations," it displaces current debates on "Islamism" from a focus on organized religious movements to one that is sensitive to everyday social practices, embodied performances, and cultural assemblages. Islam in England is envisioned as a "framework," in the sense of Charles Taylor (1989), for exploring the Self and identity and for promoting the "good ethical life." Building on Lambek's (2010) notion of "ordinary ethics," I argue that Islamic morality does not automatically derive from norms promoted by religious institutions but is rather shaped by everyday practices and interactions. These dynamics are apprehended through snapshots collected during ethnographic "flâneries" in various British cities. The processes of differentiation and assimilation they reveal provide a basis for the phenomenological interpretation of Islam as it is enmeshed in the everyday world of "multiple modernities."This text is an attempt to depict the new cultural assemblages and moral constellations born out of the encounter between Islam and the British public sphere. It builds on ethnographic anecdotes collected during successive periods of fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2014 in various British cities and focuses on spaces where Islam has become a visible feature of the multicultural landscape. Using Nilüfer Göle's metaphor of "snapshots" (2000) as methodological entry points into "multiple modernities," this essay seeks to trace the diversity of British Islam as it unfolds in various urban cosmopolitan settings. By putting these fragments together, my aim is to complicate current representations of Islam and highlight its intrinsic heterogeneity as well as its entanglement within broader neoliberal forces and political projects put in place in the post-9/11 context and, more precisely, after the 7/7 London bombings that took place in 2005. These political interventions aimed at governing Muslims have had unintended and surprising effects. By targeting a specific section of the population, earlier forms of solidarity that existed across communities have been challenged and moral panics around the supposed "islamization of Britain" have emerged. Concurrently, this new attention to the "Muslim other" has increased Islam's visibility by promoting new actors (and marginalizing others) as well as new ways of being in public. These dynamics have been responsible for the transformation of the British public sphere, blurring the lines between the "religious" and the "secular," opening up new possibilities for exploring the Self and creating new political spaces for identity making. They have simultaneously transformed the conceptions, ideals, practices, and institutions of Islamic religious life itse...

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Ethics, tradition, authority: Toward an anthropology of the fatwa

Cited by 114 publications

References 27 publications

The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

The Chastity Society: disciplining Muslim men

Snapshots of British Islam

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