The Pure and Powerful Studies in Contemporary Muslim Society by Nadia Abu-Zahra. lthaca Press, 1997, 320 pp.

Abstract

While most of the literature on Islam over the past two decades has concentrated
on the issue of Islamic resurgence, focusing mainly on the nature and
workings of political movements and militant Islamic groups, this book examines
instead the beliefs and practices of ordinary Muslim, exploring an intricate
web of social relationships involving the 'ulama, government, Islamic institutions,
Sufis, and the people Jiving in the rural and city areas of the country.
The analysis demonstrates how in order to further our understanding of
Muslim society, we must gather fieldwork data on the relationship of the common
person's Islamic practices to those of the Islamic tradition and apply the
relevant analytical concepts to examine them. It further challenges the existing
ethnography of Muslim society which is not only based mainly on limited
empirical data but also conceals issues worthy of study and is, moreover, full
of assumptions oversimplifying the nature of the complex social relationships
involved. For instance, anthropology implicitly assumes that the "native" is a
naive and ignorant person who, as a corollary of this, is ignorant of his own
religion. The consequence of this supposition has been that anthropologists
who have written on the subject have not found it necessary to examine how
the Islamic practices of the common people have been related to the Islamic
tradition.
It was also often assumed that the Islamic knowledge of the 'ulama, and their
status as the learned ones, somehow separated them from the lives of the common
people. Only recently have researchers started studying the effect of their
fa tawa on society and people, little work having been done before on their lives
and influence. This work refutes the assumption that the Islamic text is outside
society and that the 'ulama are an entity separate from the people.
The author re-examines the view that different societies contain different
versions of Islam and points out that this type of thinking does not of itself
advance our knowledge of the subject, nor does it offer a viable criteria for ...