Islam Obscured The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation by Daniel Martin Varisco (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 226 pages.)

Abstract

Daniel Martin Varisco’s Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological
Representation provides a very sound and well-informed literary critique of
Clifford Geertz’s Islam Observed (1968), Ernest Gellner’s Muslim Society
(1981), Fatima Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil (1975), and Akbar Ahmed’s Discovering
Islam (1988). The author, an experienced ethnographer of Middle
Eastern societies, examines the treatments and representations of Islam in
these seminal texts. After presenting his topic and background in the introduction,
he demonstrates how these four authors obscured, misrepresented,
and elided the everyday lives of Muslims. In the epilogue, Varisco gleans
some important lessons for the study of Islam from his entertaining and
witty exploration of these social science texts.
In the book’s introduction, the author briefly discusses the intellectual
history of anthropology and ethnographic studies of Muslims. He notes that
the discipline of anthropology has encountered numerous problems, including
its recognition of Victorian traveler’s reports, Spencerian “evolutionism,”
and the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric textual representations of
non-western others. Addressing the current state of anthropological theory,
Varisco mentions the blurring of boundaries between established disciplines
as well as the particularly American problem over whether to maintain the
four-field approach of holistically studying human beings.
In keeping with this Eurocentric slant toward “primitives,” he observes
that there were very few ethnographic studies of Muslims, except Evans-
Pritchard’s 1940s work on Cyrenaican Bedouins and those by others following
his example, until ethnographers began to produce Robert Redfieldinfluenced
community studies.Yetmany of these latter studies were done by
researchers who, with little proficiency inArabic, wrote from a distance and
thus barely penetrated the surface of Islam in local Muslims’ lives. Varisco ...