The Book of Visions: Dreams, Poetry, and Prophecy in Contemporary Egypt

Mittermaier, Amira

doi:10.1017/s0020743807070390

Cited by 7 publications

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“… 2. This is seen in the work of many: Asad 1993; Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Lambek 2008; Mahmood 2005; Mittermaier 2007; Pandian 2008a, 2008b; and Silverstein 2008, for example.…”

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confidence: 96%

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

Agrama¹

2010

American Ethnologist

114

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Prevailing approaches to the fatwa construe it as primarily an instrument of Islamic doctrinal change and reform, as bridging the constant gap between a settled doctrinal past and a future of continual novelty. Underpinning these approaches are familiar but questionable assumptions about temporality, imitation, creativity, and tradition that obscure the fatwa's integral ethical dimensions and our understandings of its pervasive authority. This article unsettles these assumptions and, through ethnography of the Fatwa Council of Al‐Azhar in Cairo, offers a different view of the fatwa that helps us both understand its ethical authority and challenges conventional oppositions between authority and ethical agency.

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“… 2. This is seen in the work of many: Asad 1993; Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Lambek 2008; Mahmood 2005; Mittermaier 2007; Pandian 2008a, 2008b; and Silverstein 2008, for example.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

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

Agrama¹

2010

American Ethnologist

114

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“…Dreams and visions are a common conversation topic at almost every gathering. Numerous members of the community regularly see the Prophet Muhammad and his saintly descendants, and the group keeps a collective record of its members' dreams and visions (Mittermaier 2007). All of Shaykh Qusi's followers, as Umar himself often pointed out to me, have cultivated and refined their ability to see beyond the visible.…”

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confidence: 99%

Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim subjectivities beyond the trope of self‐cultivation

Mittermaier

2012

Royal Anthropological Inst

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155

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Drawing on dream stories from a Sufi community in Egypt, this article probes the limits of the paradigm of self-cultivation which has come to be widely employed in the anthropology of Islam. While the concept of self-cultivation has complicated the equation of agency and resistance, its emphasis on intentionality and deliberate action obscures other modes of religiosity that centre neither on acting within nor on acting against but on being acted upon. Far from reaffirming a self-cultivating subject, narratives of visitational and divinely inspired dreams are profound reminders of the unpredictability of divine interventions and the contingency of life itself. Through an analysis of Egyptian dream narratives and in conversation with anthropological literatures on an ethics of passion, this article traces a relational understanding of subjectivity which poses an even more radical challenge to the liberal model of the autonomous self than do practices of self-cultivation.

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“…In Islamic cosmologies, the dream space is not a purely imaginal realm animated by psychic energies from the unconscious; rather, it constitutes an intermediary space “between the spiritual and the material, between the visible and the invisible, between God and humans” (Mittermaier 2007, 231). Known as “the isthmus” ( barzakh ), the zone in which dreams unfold mediates between multiple worlds of which the natural world is but one, allowing for contact and knowledge exchange between living persons and unseen entities, including spirits of the living and the dead (el‐Aswad 2010; Schielke 2012).…”

Section: Ambiguities Of Remembrancementioning

confidence: 99%

Kin-Work in a Time of Jihad: Sustaining Bonds of Filiation and Care for Tunisian Foreign Combatants

Miller

2018

Cult. Anthropol.

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In this article, I examine the politics of kin-work performed by families of Tunisian foreign combatants, whose sons were recruited to jihadi militias following the 2011 Arab Spring. Here, I refer to a form of affective labor that engenders kinship relations through the performance of intentional acts. In the context of postrevolutionary Tunisia, where the state is currently embroiled in a domestic war against terror, families of foreign combatants perform such kin-work to make a moral claim on the state to assist them in repatriating their sons. In doing so, they must work against security discourses that define their sons as terrorists, thereby excising them from the rights-bearing category of the human. Nevertheless, kin-work is more than just a political strategy. I thus also attend to more intimate registers of kin-work, where it serves as a method for inhabiting uncertainty and providing care for absent kin.

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The Book of Visions: Dreams, Poetry, and Prophecy in Contemporary Egypt

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Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim subjectivities beyond the trope of self‐cultivation

Kin-Work in a Time of Jihad: Sustaining Bonds of Filiation and Care for Tunisian Foreign Combatants

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