Journal ArticleDOI
Ethics, tradition, authority: Toward an anthropology of the fatwa
TLDR
In this article, an ethnography of the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar in Cairo is presented to understand its ethical authority and challenge conventional oppositions between authority and ethical agency.Abstract:
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.read more
Citations
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MonographDOI
Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism
TL;DR: Menchik et al. as discussed by the authors argue that Indonesia's Islamic organizations sustain the country's thriving civil society, democracy, and reputation for tolerance amid diversity, yet scholars poorly understand how these organizations envision the accommodation of religious difference.
Journal ArticleDOI
Is There a Secular Body
TL;DR: In this article, the authors follow out one line of inquiry into secularism and the secular opened up by the pioneering works of William Connolly and Talal Asad: namely, the extent to which the development of secularism has historically entailed a unique configuration of the human sensorium.
Journal ArticleDOI
Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that Egypt's religious-political ambiguities are expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the very foundation of modern secular power, and that its power relies crucially upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes.
Book
Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism
TL;DR: In this paper, a wide-ranging analysis of the work of scholars in the Arab Middle East and a number of scholars belonging to the Deobandi orientation in colonial and contemporary South Asia is presented.
Poems to Open Palms: Praise Performance and the State in the Sultanate of Oman
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors trace the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman and argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the country form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed
TL;DR: In Islam, ijtihad is the maximum effort expended by the jurist to master and apply the principles and rules of uṣūl alfiqh (legal theory) for the purpose of discovering God's law as discussed by the authors.
MonographDOI
The Calligraphic StateTextual Domination and History in a Muslim Society
TL;DR: In this article, Brinkley Messick examines the changing relation of writing and authority in a Muslim society from the late nineteenth century to the present and explores the structure and transformation of literacy, law, and statecraft in Yemen.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty
TL;DR: In this paper, a transatlantic clash and a trans-atlantic clash is described, followed by the rise of French and German privacy laws, and the emergence of the European tradition of debauchery.
Journal ArticleDOI
Value and virtue
TL;DR: The authors argue that economic value and ethical value are incommensurable and argue that the latter deals with ostensibly relative, commensurable values and the former with ostensibly absolute and incomensurable ones, and suggest that sacrifice may be a site where meta-value is established.
Journal ArticleDOI
DISCIPLINES OF PRESENCE IN MODERN TURKEY: Discourse, Companionship, and the Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice
TL;DR: In this paper, a contemporary Turkish Sufi order's devotional practice of sohbet is examined to show how characteristically modern practices and techniques have come to take a role in the constitution of dispositions that are central to the viability of Islamic virtues.