Recognizing Islam Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East by Michael Gilsenan. London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 1993, 287 pp.

Abstract

Michael Gilsenan is an anthropologist who has done extensive fieldwork
in Egypt and Lebanon and has extensive knowledge of the literature,
paticularly ethnography, on the Middle East, including North Africa. His
book Recognising Islam is a detailed ethnography of the practice of Islam
in the Middle East. When it was fi.rst published, it was considered a significant
anthropological contribution to the understanding of the complexities
of Islamic societies in the Middle East. To be more precise, it is about
Islam as practiced in the villages and urban centers of Lebanon, Egypt,
Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Iran. These are the places from which he
draws illustrative enthnographic material, weaving into the narrative his
analysis of the specific case studies of urban and village !if e showing how
Islam is practiced in the context of much larger national and international
events taking place.
The Islam that Gilsenan wishes to be recognized is not that of the literate
specialists or of learned sheikhs. Neither is it of theological discussions
and debate, although no doubt it has implications for those debates, nor is it
of Orientalist conceptions or the Western media's caricature of Muslims as
the inscrutable "other"----the barbarous, corrupt, enemy of Christianity, and
nemesis of Western civilization. In other words, the focus on the practice of
Islam in the villages of the Middle East and urban enclaves of such major
cities as Cairo is not just a description of the exotic or strange practices of
people as bounded entities, each one being an isolated species of Muslim
groupings. Rather, Gilsenan's work shows how daily life is informed by ...