Sufism

Abstract: Benjamin F. Scares. Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. xiv + 306 pp. Maps. Photographs. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper. Islam and the frayer Economy is an ethnographic and historical study of Muslim society among the people of Nioro, a town in western Mali near the border with Mauritania, which the French colonial administrator Paul Marty once described as a "veritable boulevard" of Islam in the region (58). Benjamin F. Soares has drawn upon extensive fieldwork in Mali and archival research in France and Dakar to produce this nuanced and smoothly written study of Muslim leadership, practice, and culture in this community from the nineteenth century to the present. He argues that in the postcolonial period Nioro has witnessed the growth of a "prayer economy" driven most powerfully by the town's major Sufi leaders, representing the Hamawiyya and Tijaniyya orders. He explains, "The prayer economy is, in effect, an economy of religious practice in which people give gifts to certain religious leaders on a large scale in exchange for prayers and blessings" (153). The book's title notwithstanding, discussion of the prayer economy forms only a small part of Soares's story. It would be more accurate to describe the book, instead, as an analysis of the complex social, political, and economic mechanics of Islam in Nioro that situates this locality within the broader frameworks of Mali, West Africa, the former French empire, and the world. Historically Nioro served as an important center for the Saharan trade with West Africa; during the nineteenth century it served as a capital for the state formed by al-Hajj 'Umar Tall; and during the twentieth century it was an Islamic pilgrimage center. Yet if Nioro has become "a relatively small and economically marginal town in Mali" ( 11 ), it is neither somnolent nor isolated today. Soares mentions that during the early stages of his fieldwork in the 1990s, he met Nioro Muslims who had relatives in countries such as France, Oman, and Thailand, or who later moved there themselves. Likewise, the Islam of Nioro, as Soares presents it, has been a culture in constant motion. In this sense the town is surely representative of Mali as a whole. For while Islam has been present in the region's trading centers for more than a millennium, Islam became the religion of the overwhelming majority only during the twentieth century. Soares rejects an earlier model of anthropological scholarship, represented by the works of Ernest Gellner, which portrayed Muslim societies as either "traditional" or "modern," "orthodox" or "heterodox," and which assumed that rising levels of education and urban living would lead away from "folk" practices and toward a religion grounded in a scholarly and textual mode. Instead Soares approaches Islam as a series of "interrelated practices" and examines Muslim practices vis-a-vis Sufism and what he calls the "esoteric sciences," which include geomancy, divination, and the use of amulets. …

Abstract: * Preface and Acknowledgments * List of Abbreviations * Transliteration of Foreign Terms * Introduction. Morocco and the Problem of Sainthood in Islamic Studies * Part I. Sainthood and Authority in Morocco: The Origins and Development of a Paradigm * Chapter One. Sainthood in an Urban Context: Sulaha', 'Scholars, and "Anchors of the Earth" * Chapter Two. Arbiters of the Holy in the Countryside: Rural Legists, Spiritual Masters, and Murabitun * Chapter Three. Knowledge, Power, and Authority in Monographic Biography * Chapter Four. Qualifying the Ineffable: Sainthood in the Hagiographical Anthology * Part II. The Paradigm Institutionalized * Chapter Five. Moroccan Sufism in the Marinid Period * Chapter Six. An Emplotment of a Paradigmatic Saint: The Career of Muhammad ibn Sulayman al Jazuli * Chapter Seven. The Ideology of Paradigmatic Sainthood: The Jazfilite Doctrine of the "Muhammadan Way" * Chapter Eight. Paradigmatic Sainthood in the Material World: The Jazuliyya and the Rise of the Sharifian State * Conclusion. Power and Authority in Moroccan Sainthood * Notes * Glossary of Technical Terms * Selected Bibliography * Index

Abstract: LIKE OTHER PARTS OF THE MUSLIM WORLD, Indonesia has experienced an Islamic revival since the 1970s (cf. Hefner 1997; Jones 1980; Liddle 1996, 622‐25; Muzaffar 1986; Schwarz 1994, 173‐76; Tessler and Jesse 1996). To date, representations of Indonesia’s Islamic revival have featured forms of religious practice and political activity concerned with what in the Sufi tradition is called the ‘‘outer’’ (lahir) expression of Islam: support for and observance of religious law (I. syariah, A. syari’at), including the practice of obligatory rituals. Thus commonly mentioned as evidence of a revival in Indonesia are such things as the growing numbers of mosques and prayer houses, the increasing popularity of head coverings (kerudung, jilbab) among Muslim women and school girls, the increasing usage of Islamic greetings, the more common sight of Muslims excusing themselves for daily prayers and attending services at their workplaces, the appearance of new forms of Islamic student activity on university campuses, strong popular agitation against government actions seen as prejudicial to the Muslim community, and the establishment in 1991 of an Islamic bank. This kind of representation of Indonesia’s Islamic revival, however, fails to call attention to the increasing popularity of Islam’s ‘‘inner’’ (batin) 1 spiritual expression,

Abstract: Imagining Islam Islam and Muslims Church and State secularism nationalism revelation the Qu'ran exegesis Muhammed Hadith tradition the ideal community women dogmas sacerdotal power authority Judaism, Christianity and paganism the Greek heritage Islam, science and philosophy Sufism the person human rights ethics and politics Mediterranean culture.