Introduction: Print, Writing, and the Politics of Religious Identity in the Middle East
Texts, writing, and print create new forms of communication, community, and authority. Their
transformative influence pervades Middle Eastern and Muslim religious and political forms.
Scholarly attention to them collapses conventional assumptions of a "great divide" separating
"tribal" and urban, nonliterate and literate in the region. "Textual" ethnography sheds light on
phenomena as diverse as the continued significance of the genealogy of the Prophet's ancestors
for representing Muslim tribal identities, the linkage between legal writing and the patriarchal
authority of the landed gentry in Yemen, pamphlets and tracts in Islamic resistance to Marxist
rule in Afghanistan, and the emergence of an Islamist anthropology.
Texts, writing, and print create social and political identities, not just mirror them. The
intellectual technologies of writing and printing create not only new forms of communication,
they also engender new forms of community and authority. For anthropologists, Jack Goody's
edited Literacy in traditional societies (1968; see also Goody 1977, 1986) was a significant step
toward recognizing the religious and political implications of the written and printed word, and
Benedict Anderson's Imagined communities (1983) subsequently marked the point at which the
transformative value of writing and printing for national and religious identities was fully
realized (see Eickelman 1992; Bowen 1993). The four essays which follow deal centrally with
writing, printing, and the social imagination in Middle Eastern societies. Collectively, they
consolidate advances beyond earlier formulaic assumptions of a "great divide" between "tribal"
and urban, nonliterate and literate, in Muslim and Middle Eastern societies and suggest new
ways in which ideas of text, print, and writing can shed light on religion and politics.
Daniel Varisco deals both with the historiographic representation of tribes and the sociopolitical
"reality" they represent. His main focus is on why the idea of "tribe" in classical Arabic texts is'
closely linked to the genealogy of the Prophet Muhammad. Contemporary anthropological
accounts have focused on tribe-state relations and on tribes as construed within segmentary
lineage theory. By shifting his focus to the paradigm for Arab tribes implicit in medieval Arab
genealogical texts--specifically, the genealogy of the ancestors of the Prophet Muhammad-Varisco assesses: ( 1) the significance of the terms used in medieval texts to describe tribal units,
( 2) the structure of tribal relations, and ( 3) the historical and political "credibility" of
representations of Muhammad's ancestors. Varisco's shift in emphasis in the study of Arab tribal
genealogies accords with Jon Anderson's work on the Pakhtun of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Pakhtun genealogies look like segmentary representations, Anderson writes, but in the end
account for little in terms of tribal political formations; named lineages are foundation stories
which, in the case of the Pakhtun, link the Pakhtun to Mecca: "The ancestor of all Pakhtun, Qais,
went to Mecca at the time of Muhammad and received Islam direct from the Prophet of God,"
thereby setting the Pakhtun apart from their neighbors (J. Anderson 1993).
Varisco's Qur'anic epigraph and opening question, "What is a Tribe?" recall Jacques Berque's
"Qu'est-ce qu'une 'tribu' nord-africaine?" (What is a North African "tribe?") (Berque 1974 [orig.
1953]). For Berque, the notion of "tribe" was as central to cultural and political identity in North
Africa as was the idea of "nation" to nineteenth-century Europe, the subject of Ernest Renan's
famous essay, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" (What is a nation?) (1882). As a serving colonial
officer, Berque may, of course, have been impeded from asking "Qu'est-ce qu'une 'nation' nordafricaine?" Setting "tribe" in inverted commas, he refrained from imputing a fixed meaning to
the concept and from suggesting that it was the North African equivalent of "nation." Berque was
a postmodernist before his time: European and Arab representations of tribe were intertwined
with the fluidity of social and political life that these representations sought to depict. The
powerful currents of mid-century nationalism did not eclipse all other forms of political and
religious identity in significance. Similarly, Varisco suggests a reading of classical genealogical
texts at variance with contemporary anthropological convention yet in accord with enduring
issues of Muslim identity.
With the exception of Joseph Chelhod (1974) on the ambiguity of kinship terms in Arab
genealogical literature, Pierre Guichard (1977) on Muslim Spain, and Paul Dresch on Yemeni
historiography (1989: 158-235, esp. 176-179), few anthropologists or social historians have
applied contemporary anthropological questions to medieval Muslim genealogical
representations. Chelhod concluded that the medieval Arab genealogical literature is too
ambiguous to use for a "paradigm" of tribal structure in Arab societies. Guichard, for his part,
transposes Ernest Gellner's North African models of Berber tribal organization to Muslim Spain,
including (with critical reservations) a presumed oscillation between tribal strong men and
"democracy," noting that genealogies encompass political contradictions (1977: 66-69).
Both contemporary anthropologists and medieval Arab genealogists (who often recorded the
usages of Berber and Persian-speaking groups as well) depict tribe as an "essentially contested
concept," involving "endless disputes about its proper understanding and use on the part of its
users," much like disputes over the "true" meaning of democracy (Gallic 1968: 157-158). As in
present-day genealogies, those of the Prophet's ancestors record only those names needed to
make sense of politically significant tribal relationships. To express these relationships, the
literati who constructed the Arabic texts Varisco analyzes preferred the metaphor of body parts,
but Varisco is uncertain that the tribespeople whose genealogical relationships are represented
shared this metaphor. Based on contemporary genealogical usages, Varisco concludes that, in a
general sense, the genealogical template that medieval scholars offer for Muhammad's ancestors
could plausibly correspond to what happened in history. However, this template loses credibility
when the specific ancestors are plotted out.
Even if the Prophet's significant ancestors are "mythical," bearing no direct relation to historical
events, it is not clear why medieval genealogists represented the Prophet's ancestors as they did.
Traced back to Adam, the tribal representations of the Prophet's genealogy, Varisco argues,
symbolically redefine the lives of Abraham and other "biblical heroes" so that they are linked to
Mecca as "the sacred center of the Islamic universe." The genealogy of the Prophet "combines
the original biblical ancestry of Abraham with a distinctively Arab stock," thus providing a
sacred charter linking "a seventh-century Arab from the small Meccan tribal group of Quraysh
with the God of Abraham revered by Jews and Christians." At the same time, the genealogy
suggests the contest for authority within the developing Islamic community.
Varisco argues that the genealogy's lack of historicity should not be confused with its credibility.
Following Edmund Leach's analysis of the genealogy of King Solomon, Varisco looks
particularly at the role of the tribes from which the wives of the Prophet's ancestors came. These
relationships, he argues, reflect the give-and-take of tribal politics, defining Muhammad's
Quraysh as the dominant lineage and the only serious contender for leadership of the Islamic
community. Hence the choice of wives of the Prophet's ancestors further validates Muhammad's
links to Abraham and the preeminence of Quraysh. The kind of tribal relationships created by the
paradigm of the Prophet's ancestors is more like a royal lineage than--as some contemporary
anthropologists might anticipate--descent groups in opposition to one another. "The focal point
of the genealogy is Muhammad himself," not the Quraysh as a tribe. As such, it forms part of
"the evolving Islamic discourse" on the Prophet and prophecy.
Brinkley Messick does for "textual ethnography, in which local documents serve as points of
departure for an integrated contextual, doctrinal and discursive analysis," what Clifford Geertz's
"Deep Play" (1973) does for ethnography without written texts. Geertz begins with the cockfight,
Messick with court and settlement documents. Messick argues that these texts are transformative
and not simply epiphenomenal to other events.
Messick's point of departure is a protracted family dispute which began in 1935, ostensibly over
two family trusts (waqfs) established by a wealthy landowner, Hajj Muhammad, in a Yemeni
provincial center. It was eventually settled with a 1947 shari'a (Islamic law) court ruling and a
settlement by binding arbitration the following year. Although the court judgment appears in
official registers, copies of the arbitrated settlement mentioned in the court papers are held only
by the interested parties. Because such "spiral texts" are rarely found in archives, they seldom are
encountered by historians. This particular case stood out both for its intractability and the
involvement of a prominent judge and the heir to the Yemeni throne.
Messick's account is one of the few concerning Islamic court writings and procedures that is
readily accessible to nonspecialists. He compares Hajj Muhammad's public and private trusts
with their American equivalents: just as Americans have the Rockefeller Foundation as a public
trust, so is Hajj Muhammad's name read out weekly in the mosque of his home town as a
principal donor. The properties involved in American trusts are mainly securities. In the Yemen
landholdings predominated: "While one set of beneficiaries cut coupons, the other received bags
of grain." Just as family trust law was being established in nineteenth-century America,
Europeans in the Middle East, North Africa, and British India attacked Muslim family trusts to
enlarge state control, alienate land for settlers, and subject holdings to taxation.
Messick writes, "Like the property relations to which they refer, textual relations are relations
between humans," with court judgments and settlements the sites of textual combat. In the
Yemen, as in countries such as Oman and Morocco, legal texts were "active instruments"
defining descent groups. A donor could "effectively create descent groups based on collective
property holding and corporate interests in trust revenues." People carefully guarded their
documents, "rolling and folding them, placing them in protective tubes." Judges who, as authors
of rulings, staged quotations, citations, and evidence, managed antagonistic positions, assessed
competence and relevance, and engaged in "fundamental" acts of power and the creation of
social facts.
If the family trust was a basic instrument for sustaining the patrilineal descent groups of landed
gentry in Yemen, the political and economic changes of the 1950s led to the decline of the
household patriarch. Messick suggests that the "basic structural problems" of the landed gentry
involved not just the "special position" of the eldest male sibling, but also the conflicting
interests of multiple wives and their respective sets of descendants, endogamous versus
exogamous marriages, and a contest over which beneficiaries would administer the family trust.
Messick elsewhere (1993: 167-186) argues that resolving such issues was a "central activity" of
the pre-1962 Yemeni state. The case of Hajj Muhammad's estate shows how the judge queried
the imam (royalist Yemen's head of state and religious leader) in order to confirm his
interpretation. The judgment and settlement documents present "a complex textual venue for the
interpretive weighting and interrelating of the perceived facts of the world and the received
formulations of doctrine," showing the multiple interpretive levels involved in creating legal
texts and expressing "styles of power and authority."
Of the four essays David Edwards' deals most explicitly with the political implications of "print
Islam" (Eickelman 1989: 17). Edwards' main theme is that Afghan Islamic political movements
strengthened their position by harnessing "new media technologies." The political use of print
technologies at different historical moments, compressed into little more than a century in
Afghanistan, in contrast to the more leisurely evolution of print communication in Europe over
half a millennium, altered how people talked about Islam, practiced it, and related Islam to their
social and political actions.
The first Afghan newspapers of the late nineteenth century had a limited circulation, although, as
in Central Asia at about the same time (Khalid 1992: 116), they reached a small literate elite
which had an influence far beyond its numbers. Newspapers also provided a focus for the
development of political ideas independent of court, tribe, and mosque and intensified the
growing divide between the largely "traditional" rural milieu and the reformist urban one.
By the late 1920s and 1930s newspapers in Afghanistan had become a major vehicle for
advancing political causes. Edwards argues that newspapers gave prestige to the government
internationally and to Afghanistan's "small but important" intelligentsia; they offered
employment to graduates of Afghanistan's secondary schools and madrasas (religious schools);
and--through subsidies--they restrained potential dissidents by keeping them on the government
payroll.
By the late 1940s secular modernists had begun to speak out against the traditional religious
establishment. Religious leaders were unprepared for "the new modes of disseminating political
propaganda and organizing popular movements" that secular leftists began to employ, so that
traditionalist religious scholars were initially on the defensive. By the 1960s leftist newspapers
flourished, but by 1968 only one major independent religious newspaper, Gahiz, had emerged.
Leftist newspapers and pamphlets, supplemented by Soviet radio propaganda in Afghan
languages, provided arguments for supporters to use against Islam. In turn, Gahiz and religious
tracts, in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world in the 1960s and 1970s (Eickelman
1989: 4-5), provided crucial texts and arguments for Muslim intellectuals. Although Gahiz
countered Marxist propaganda, unlike its Marxist counterparts, it was not tied to the
organizational activity in which leftists were engaged.
Whatever the major differences between secular leftists and religious modernists in the 1960s,
both were "first-generation literates and graduates of new government schools," forming an
"imagined community" at the core of the state and its ancillary institutions. Although party
newspapers had only a limited circulation, like their religious counterparts they formed unified
fields of exchange which offered "narrower bases of practical association" than the state. Indeed,
Edwards notes that Lenin's view of newspapers as a vehicle for party mobilization--"an
enormous pair of smith's bellows that would fan every spark of the class struggle and of popular
indignation"--were more relevant to Afghanistan than Benedict Anderson's view of them as
fostering national identity.
Political radicals encouraged confrontation and polarization in Afghanistan through pamphlets,
translating the emotions generated by newspapers and demonstrations into "political ideologies
and concrete organizational structures." Pamphlets, notes Edwards, conveyed ideas and
articulated "new modes of political relationship based on obedience to authority, organizational
secrecy, and the relentless pursuit of party objectives." This linkage between pamphlets and
political organization was pioneered in Afghanistan by the Marxist parties and their Soviet
sponsors, but by the mid-1960s, some Muslim organizations--notably the Muslim Youth
Organization at Kabul University-emulated this lead--inspired both by their Marxist antagonists
and the model of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, observed first-hand by Afghans who studied in
Cairo in the 1950s.
Most of the distributed tracts were only a few pages in length or were hand-copied "notes"
written in local languages--not in Persian or Arabic, the principal languages of an earlier
generation of religious scholars and literati. Each recipient was expected to make ten or twenty
copies by hand. Like dissident samizdat literature in Russia, receiving such notes was an act of
political engagement, so the tracts not only communicated ideas but also established lines of
communication and authority. More than books and newspapers, these hand-copied notes created
audiences, engaging recipients in an ever-widening network of transmission which constituted a
"foundational" political act, transforming the Muslim Youth "from a more or less egalitarian
study circle into a hierarchically organized political party, the Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan, bent on
the violent overthrow of the [Marxist] Afghan government." Audio cassettes, easy to smuggle
and readily duplicated, are beginning to replace pamphlets for at least some forms of religious
debate throughout the Muslim world, although the pamphlet has the advantage of greater
anonymity for the author. Thus in Morocco, the preachers of "subversive" religious cassettes are
almost entirely foreign, beyond the reach of the local security apparatus.
In earlier generations the exposure of students to Islamic ideas would have been through the
Qur'an and religious treatises. In Afghanistan of the 1960s and 1970s, as elsewhere in the
Muslim world (Eickelman 1992), the first understanding of Islamic ideas--with the exception of
some Qur'anic verses memorized as a child--were pamphlets and notes. As Edwards writes, these
"brought Islam out of the culture of the madrasa" and allowed Muslims to talk about current
events and "challenge the assertions of leftists who denigrated the role of religion in the Modern
world."
The main printed vehicle of the exiled Islamic resistance in Afghanistan was magazines, which
contained interviews with representatives of other Muslim countries, works by leading Muslim
authors, history, and the obituaries of martyrs, implicitly organized by seniority in the resistance
movement. As with the Kabul newspapers of the 1920s, these magazines provided employment
for educated refugees. Slick magazines also helped project a substantial and legitimate image of
Islamic resistance organizations as statesman-like and suggested that obedience to the aims and
authority of the movement is like obedience to the Prophet.
Richard Tapper's "'Islamic Anthropology' and the 'Anthropology of Islam'" shifts attention to a
form of argument which could be considered a consequence of the "objectification" of religious
knowledge, when religion is explicitly thought of as a system by large numbers of people.
Tapper points out that there has been an anthropology of Islam, an application of the current
methods of cultural and social anthropology to "the study of Islam as a world religion" and to
related social institutions. In contrast, Islamic--or, as Tapper suggests, Islamist--anthropology
means an anthropology derived broadly from Islamic texts or some other identifiably Islamic
base.
Some of the authors Tapper discusses are concerned only with Muslim societies, others with
applying universal Islamic principles to societies worldwide. Even the best of these studies,
however, suffers from outdated critiques of the Western anthropology that Islamic anthropology
is intended to replace. Merryl Wyn Davies, for example, argues that various modern Western
anthropologies, despite their claim to universality, interpret "other" societies only in terms that
are firmly rooted in the "intellectual tradition and discourses of western civilization" (1988: 25),
although she also asserts that Western anthropology tends to collapse history into a
"Malinowskian reformulation" (1988: 140). Davies cites Raymond Firth's Elements of social
organization (1961 [orig. 1951]) as an up-to-date example of anthropological analysis, and
concentrates most of her attention on the shortcomings of a Malinowski-style functionalism.
Tapper observes that her appeal for fresh approaches to anthropological understandings of
"other" societies have characterized "non-Muslim" approaches for several decades. Prevalent
trends which she does not discuss include gender studies, a close attention to language and
communication, reflexivity, "dialogic inquiry," and ideas of history and historical thought
considerably more nuanced than the mid-century notions which she sees as normative of
"Western" anthropology today.
Akbar Ahmed (1986) is even less successful in this respect, using extensive extracts from John
Beattie's Other cultures (1964) to demonstrate Western anthropology's "general theoretical
stagnation," but ignoring virtually all subsequent work and offering nothing but a vague
promissory note on what an "Islamic" anthropology would look like. Indeed, as Tapper points
out, Ahmed's specific discussion of Islamic societies offers only taxonomies and "models" which
derive little from an understanding of Muslim scholars writing on their own societies,
notwithstanding invocations of the medieval Muslim scholars Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) and alBiruni (d. 1048).
The emergence of an lslamist anthropology in recent years might be seen as part of a general
trend to which Akbar Ahmed referred in a lecture presented in Pakistan in 1987. According to a
newspaper report (Hyatt 1987),
One Pakistani gentleman asked, "Why Islamic anthropology? There's no such thing, just like
there's no Islamic bomb." This drew a laugh from the audience and Dr. Ahmed replied in an
equally light way, "Well, since everything has to have a label I thought I'd give it one too." On a
more serious note he added that there is British, Russian and other kinds of anthropology, so why
not Islamic?
Most Russian ethnographers would be the first to admit that much of their work was conducted
until recently within the confines of an ideological straightjacket (Khazanov 1992). This
shortcoming may inadvertently now characterize Islamist anthropology. Tied to a selfconsciously elaborated ideological system, an Islamic anthropology, as opposed to an
anthropology of Islam, risks limiting itself to dogma and guarded internal debate, much like the
other "isms" to which Ahmed refers. Alain Roussillon (1990: 237-47) points out that most
Islamist visions of the social sciences reject their universality, arguing instead for an Islamic
"specificity." To the point, he cites Ismail Faruqi (cited in Roussillon 1990: 245): "Muslim social
scientists are the 'ulama [religious scholars] of today's umma [worldwide community of
Muslims]. They are its strategic planners and the designers of its future." Olivier Roy adds: "The
exact sciences fascinate the Islamists, not the human sciences, because the human sciences are a
process of deconstructing humankind in general." Even Ibn Khaldun's famous concept of
'asabiyya (group solidarity) is viewed with suspicion by Islamists, because Western sociologists
find it such an interesting springboard for the study of nationalism, tribes, ethnicity, classes,
social categories, and interest groups (Roy 1992: 97-99).
Of course, Roussillon and Roy use the term "Islamist" to mean "Islamic activist," but they, like
the authors of the texts analyzed by Tapper, advocate an Islamic anthropology or social science
based on Islamic texts and themes. As Tapper writes, Islamic anthropology "should be taken
seriously because it addresses a wide audience, avows its ideological base and invites critical
discussion."
But perhaps the most vigorous Islamic anthropology would be one which did not have to assert a
dubious autonomy from Western scientific traditions. Its advocates might heed the insight of the
Zairean anthropologist and literary critic, V.Y. Mudimbe, who finds unconvincing the efforts to
assert an African anthropology without Western antecedents. He writes, "It seems impossible to
imagine any anthropology without a Western epistemological link" (1988: 19). Western
traditions of science, including anthropology, are now "part of Africa's present-day heritage."
Rather than cut African anthropology from its epistemological roots, Mudimbe argues that
one might also conceive the intellectual signs of otherness not as a project for the foundation of a
new science, but rather as a mode of reexamining the journeys of human knowledge in a world
of competing propositions and choices (p. 79).
In a parallel vein on the anthropology of Islam, Tapper writes that whatever "ism" is attached to
anthropology, anthropologists ask "awkward questions" about "how ideologies are constructed,
and how language and other systems of symbols are manipulated." The best anthropologies of
Islam, by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are created by those who have resisted the tyranny of
scripturalist approaches, whether "Orientalist" or Islamist. He concludes: "The anthropology of
Islam involves translating and humanizing ordinary believers' cultures as well as analyzing the
production and use of Islamic 'texts.'" Tapper clearly advocates what Islamists would call a
"deconstructionist" position in that he re-introduces the question of what is the "Islam" that
anthropologists and Islamic activists study and on which there is a continuing--perhaps
"essentially contested"--debate over the significance of texts, practice, beliefs, and history.
Tapper's essay is not intended as the last word on Islamist anthropology. He points to an
intellectual development which merits the same attention in English-speaking scholarship it is
accorded in the Francophone world of Roy and Roussillon.
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By Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth Colleg