Anthropology of Islam
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Edited by:
Florentina Badalanova Geller
This is the first book series devoted to the anthropology of Islam and Muslim cultures. It is a characteristic of anthropology that it makes a distinction between the norms of a society, and the respective diverse cultures and activities that may occur within it. This is particularly important within the Islamic world, because an emphasis on normative behaviour has led to an increasing neglect of empirical explorations of the plurality and diversity within Muslim cultures. Anthropology of Islam seeks to rectify this imbalance.
The series does not only look for traditional ethnographic projects, rather it encourages particular approaches – ones that emphasise clearly argued, focussed discussions of Muslim life. This restricts the series not exclusively to contemporary subjects, but includes historical or archival works which include this focus (Historical Anthropology). Geographically, the series is open to works from and on all Muslim countries, as well as studies on diaspora populations.
Historically, Hazaras were a marginalised ethnic and religious community in Afghanistan. They were perceived as the 'labourer class' in the country for many decades. In turn they were at the bottom of the country’s social hierarchy. However, since the 1990s and early 2000s, Hazaras have made great strides in various fields.
After the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001, Hazaras gained greater visibility in Afghanistan. This shift in the community’s circumstances, predicated on educational success and an active civil society significantly impacted self-perceptions within the community, moving away from marginality and towards continued success. Thus shifting internal perceptions of Hazara identity and what it means to be Hazara in the present. The internalised negativity associated with being Hazara in the past has diminished, and there is now growing community confidence, political mobilisation and ethnic consciousness among transnational Hazaras.
As a result, Hazara identity has shifted from being perceived as a marginalised identity to an identity which is now positively affirmed and proclaimed within the community, globally. This shift within the community, which has tremendously impacted Hazara ethnic consciousness, is the focus of this book.
A translocal ethnography about Tajik migrants’ engagement in projects of reform Islamic life in Dubai, the book maps Gulf migration onto larger geographies of Muslim mobility, piety and belonging across places in Eurasia, the Gulf, and wider Middle East. Spatializing the intersection of migration, work and Muslim piety, the book examines how formations of ethical subjectivity are closely tied to the multiple places that shape migrants’ travel itineraries and related experiences of dwelling there and crossing them. Situating these spatial biographies in broader transregional fields of Muslim mobility, connectedness and placemaking, the book explores why in the early 2000s young Tajik Muslims pursued spiritual, social and moral progress in the booming religious economy of Dubai’s fur coat business sector. The book’s spatial approach works threefold: With a focus on abroad, it interrogates the interplay of spatial perceptions of ‘the good elsewhere’ with migrants’ placemaking ‘there’. A second focus is on how multiplicity and flexibility of migrant situatedness (spatially, temporally, socially) in Persianate, Russophone and Arab culturescapes shape mobile pious subjectivities and cosmopolitan belongings. The book also develops a situated Tajik perspective on Gulf migration, that grounds in circulating spatial imaginaries, Muslim knowledge repertories, as well as in individual travel modes, paths and migrant experiences resulting from precarious livelihoods and discriminating migrant regimes. Linking anthropology with new area studies approaches, this book seeks to enhance multidisciplinary scholarship about the complex relation between religion, migration and mobile subjectivity in both Central Asian and Gulf studies and in the anthropology of Islam.
