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Kumar, Harini; Lanzillo, Amanda
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354761pmid: N/A
This introduction to the special section “Methodologies of the Everyday in South Asian Islam: Beyond Received Frameworks” explores how “the everyday” has been used conceptually across disciplines such as anthropology, history, and religious studies in the study of Islam. In this special section, authors demonstrate the need for a renewed focus on the methodologies of studying the everyday as well as the importance of studies of Islam in South Asia to this project. The introduction connects the interventions of the six articles in the special section, which demonstrate how scholars across disciplines use the everyday as theory and method, and it provides examples of how scholars might engage cross-disciplinary perspectives. Recognizing the well-established and extensive literature on Islam and the everyday, the introduction and the special section as a whole insist on the continued relevance of the everyday and highlight the need for increased attention to the varied methodologies that elucidate it.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354737pmid: N/A
This article focuses on mosques on the southeastern coast of India that are built in a distinctive style and rooted in local architectural idioms. Such mosques are an integral part of the Tamil sacred landscape, indexing the region's long-standing Muslim presence as well as histories of maritime trade and mobility. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in preserving the tangible heritage of coastal Tamil Muslims among members of the community. At the same time, the Islamic built environment in India is under tremendous strain. Mosques, especially, are disparaged as “ocular reminders” of India's Muslim past. In this context, how can we understand the range of significations that such sites have for Muslims in everyday life? This article explores the sensory life around Tamil mosques and how such sites are reimagined as spaces of heritage, historical consciousness, and cultural value. The article argues that the material and aesthetic practices in and around mosques are crucial to understanding how a community constructs its past and thereby its modalities of belonging in the present. In doing so, the article highlights the various textures of everyday life of a community that has been understudied in scholarship on Islam in South Asia.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354745pmid: N/A
This article reconsiders “conversion” or “Islamization” as the embodied and affective grasping and embrace of din, foregrounding the docility, disciplines, and dependence upon others crucial to converts’ quests of learning their new faith. Where textual accounts of converts are few and adversarial, this article turns to the recently documented archaeological assemblages of a qasba, Indor, built by the newly faithful and inhabited from the fourteenth century AD onward in Mewat, India. It follows the provocations of ordinary artifacts that emerge as conspicuously related to women's pursuit of iman at Indor: glass bangles. Revisiting akhlaqi languages of the ornamented self, this article performs an archaeology of ethical life to provide an exegesis of how these bangles effect reeducations of the gaze central to converts’ avoidance of hasad (envy), a precondition for their striving for virtue. The bangles raise questions of text and artifact, discourse and embodiment, gender and ensoulment, the enigmatic and the normative. Learning from the bangle, this article argues that our accounts of (especially premodern) Muslim life can be transformed if we attend to distinct genealogies of din, to the formations of iman that join bangle maker and patron, and to the bangle as a collective act of material tafsir.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354729pmid: N/A
This article proposes viewing practices of religious conversion through the conceptual optics of translation and transference. To view conversion as such directs attention to the dialectic of the everyday and the evental and the mixing of temporalities involved in movements between forms of life situated across sectarian divides and religious borders. The temporalities and temporal scales of conversion mix spontaneity and calculation, the sudden and the scheduled, which is to say that conversion practices reflect everyday ambivalences and contingencies. Yet the quotidian practices entailed in conversion draw their semiotic relevance and affective force by repeatedly citing some life-transforming, sometimes self-shattering, event. The dual focus on translation and transference highlights the analytical affordances of a dialectical picture of event/structure and everyday/process. This picture problematizes purist, syncretistic, reductive, and triumphalist ideas about conversion and Islam in South Asia. To that end, the article closely reads two conversion stories from colonial India that flesh out the ontology of translation and transference across religious divides.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354785pmid: N/A
This article analyzes early twentieth-century Pashto-language kasbnamahs, or “books of trade,” to ask how textual sources help us understand the intersections of quotidian laboring and religious practices. These short, printed treatises describe idealized Muslim practices of crafts such as blacksmithing, carpentry, and pottery, providing prophetic and Sufi lineages for work, as well as Quranic verses that workers should recite during their labor. The article examines how kasbnamahs represented labor as sacralized. This reading does not necessarily tell us how Islam was practiced in the context of daily work—or how work was practiced in the context of Muslim faith—but rather how some Muslims cultivated and promoted a concept of labor as a daily pious practice. Subsequently, the article positions Pashto-language kasbnamahs as social objects. I ask what their circulation and use might tell us about how laborers (and other users of the text) interpreted and experienced the intersections of religious and laboring practices, beyond their textual representation. The article considers specifically how craftworkers’ engagement with kasbnamahs may have shifted in the context of economic, social, and political pressures that laborers faced in the early twentieth century.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354801pmid: N/A
Law has a strange way of dealing with the everyday. To substantiate its authority, law renders the unclear clear, makes the fuzzy precise, and turns the ordinary into the juridical. It erases context and contingency, and it privileges theory over practice. These patterns are no less prevalent in the domain of Islamic law, where prolific writings on theory have led some scholars to question the existence of practice. Intervening in the theory/practice debate, this article uses archival records from the dar-ul-ifta (fatwa-granting institute) of the Sadarat-ul-‘Aliya (Noble Secretariat) of the princely state of Hyderabad from the middle of the twentieth century to show how jurists called on legal theory to address questions of the everyday. The institute's files, showing the debates, deliberations, and investigations its employees pursued, provide evidence that jurists called upon different legal resources to answer the questions they received. The library they consulted contained classical works of fiqh (jurisprudence) but also included other references from state laws to company policies to reflections on custom and context. By extending the scope of their investigations, jurists brought theory into conversation with the everyday and demonstrated how legal practice generated new approaches to theory.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354793pmid: N/A
Fazlur Rahman (1919–88) was one of the twentieth century's most important scholars of Islam. He was eventually driven out of his native Pakistan in 1968 following a series of “controversies” and the unceremonious reception of his book Islam. This essay suggests that Rahman's ambiguous relationship with Muslim modernism, as well as the uneven character of his time in Ayub Khan's Pakistan, might be clarified by reconstructing his attitude toward what the editors of this section call “the everyday.” Though it was a category he never used himself, Rahman's identification of Islam with “the social order,” his preoccupation with the persistent question of “the masses” and their “day-to-day actual,” and his development of the idea of a “living Sunnah” can be understood as ciphers for “the everyday” in his thought. These entangled concepts are read with reference to Rahman's own complex political philosophy as it developed in the middle of the twentieth century as well as the historical context of early Pakistan and the itineraries of Muslim modernism itself. The essay suggests that Rahman's fixation on such concepts and his arrival at “the everyday” emerged from his study of two diremptions or struggles in the history of Islam: the conflict between philosophy and theology, and the relationship of law to ethics. It was in the specific context of Pakistan that he thought these twin splits could be resolved or repaired. The idea of “the everyday” ultimately functioned in Fazlur Rahman's thought as an exit—a way of repairing a fissure and escaping violence.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12354769pmid: N/A
This essay is an afterword to the special section “Beyond Received Frameworks: Methodologies of the Everyday in South Asian Islam.” It reflects on how the essays included in the section deploy the “everyday” as a broadly diversified category to shed light on material and literary artifacts pertaining to Islamic social contexts in South Asia.
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