Volume 75, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Modern Muslim Subjectivities; Edited by: Sebastian Elsässer and Kirstine Sinclair

The Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological belief in Islam as a comprehensive system ( šumūlīya ) implies ambitious ideas about forming and re-forming the minds, spirits and bodies of Muslim individuals through educational activities within the organisational framework of the Brotherhood. Internal debates reveal that actual educational practice in the Muslim Brotherhood balances different priorities and goals and allows a range of different expressions of Muslim subjectivity. Tensions between different, sometimes contradictory goals are solved theoretically by the concept of balancing ( tawāzun ) and practically by a division of labour within the movement that only requires a small elite to reach the highest levels of an “Islamic personality” ( šaḫṣīya islāmīya ). This article traces debates in programmatic and educational writings, in memoirs and in weblogs and social media outlets in order to reach a critical assessment of Muslim Brotherhood education in the Arab world, primarily between the 1980s and the mid-2010s and focused on Egypt and the Arab East.

This contribution examines the relationship between understandings of modernity, Islam and educational ideals at Cambridge Muslim College (UK) and how such understandings contribute to the formation of meaningful selves amongst the students attending the college. The analysis takes as its point of departure the understanding of modernity of the founder of Cambridge Muslim College – Tim Winter aka Abdal Hakim Murad – as it is expressed in his publications, social media appearances and from conversations at the college. In a nutshell, modernity for Winter signifies a fragmentation of meaning and coherence and is associated with blind consumerism and superficiality. The aim of the college is to counter such fragmentation by providing coherence and meaning to its students. The college is presented – and perceived by students and graduates – as mediating between Islamic traditions and modern Muslim lives in the West and as living up to a responsibility of engaging in the development of both Muslim minorities and the wider society of which they are part. Thus, the educational ideal is not only pursued in traditional academic activities – it implies a certain lifestyle based on a particular understanding of Islam which is not as much about theological content as it is about how to instrumentalise the religion in everyday being and practice.

There is a tendency in the literature to emphasise how contemporary Islamic movements promote ways of living a pious Muslim life alternative to those proposed by secular liberal modernity. For this reason, the domains of religious and civic engagement have often been thought of as opposed to each other. In counterpoint to this tendency, the paper explores the intertwining of national views about mass education and modern citizenship with a renewed Islamic emphasis on the need for moral and ethical reform of society within the Nur movement in modern Turkey. Methodologically, the paper draws upon ethnographic material from research conducted in 2010 on the Suffa community in Istanbul, as well as on an account of the life and projects of the leader of the movement, Said Nursi, mainly drawn from secondary sources. This case is explored in light of the theories of successive modernities that inspired the analytical framework for the Modern Muslim Subjectivities Project applied in this special issue. In so doing, it illustrates the complex nexus that Nursi established between long-standing views of Islamic ethics and modern perspectives on education and civic engagement in response to the emergence of the modern nation-state in the first half of the 20th century.

This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its role as a bodily practice in the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities among the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya Sufi communities in Iraq. During the climax of collective dhikr gatherings, male Sufi novices perform extraordinary and dangerous acts, perforating parts of their bodies with swords or long skewers without seriously injuring themselves. From the Sufi perspective, this ritual is, first of all, interpreted as the miracle of a Sufi shaykh and not of the performing Sufi novice since it is seen as an expression and proof of God’s power as transmitted through the shaykh. Moreover, it has been argued that the ritual is constitutive for the formation of the religious subjectivity of the performing Sufi novice since it allows the embodiment of mystical concepts as emotional, sensorial and existential realities. For the individual ritual experience to work, the social construction and constant reframing of these “miracles” needs to be taken into account as well, namely the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary which allow the miracles to be perceived as such. The present case of the Kasnazāniyya will show how Sufis combined their pious with a modern, critical and self-reflexive subjectivity and successfully managed to reframe this highly controversial practice – which is criticised by religious reformists and secularists alike – beyond its traditional ritual context with the modern science of parapsychology.

The staging of the funeral procession of Major General Qasem Soleimani (d. 3 January 2020) strengthened the Iranian state’s legitimation amidst the crisis related to intensified US sanctions. Images of his funeral parade across the country with its dense mourning crowd were circulated widely and commented on in both Iran’s official media and the international media. In response to these images, media commentaries engaged obsessively and exclusively with the biographical reviews that emphasised his heroic individuality and charismatic figure. This article engages critically with these reactions, while asking instead what his funeral tells us about the unfolding of the statist cult in Iran. I analyse two ethnographic scenes, one showing the entanglement of the official discourse of martyrdom with the statist culture, and the other, how the atmosphere of grief and veneration during the martyrs’ funeral processions unsettle the dichotomies between compliance and resistance, orchestrated and emergent affects. These observations open a new vista on the mutual processes of singularity and the collective subjectivation that goes beyond one-sided causal explanations of heroic individuality on the one hand and blatantly dramatised expressions of the state’s religious policies on the other.

The main goal of this study is to demonstrate the influence of local-traditional perceptions of sexuality in the construction of subjectivity among men involved in same-sex sexual practices in contemporary Iran. In order to do so, I shall briefly outline some essential features of the local-traditional understanding of sexuality, which I consider to be epistemologically and ontologically different from the modern concept of human sexuality. Subsequently, the continuity of the local-traditional understanding of sexuality in the identity construction of those individuals involved in same-sex sexual practices will be demonstrated through an inquiry on contemporary pornographic stories written by users of an online platform with erotic and pornographic content. I will argue that the perception of and the explanation for same-sex desire as well as the categorisations of subjects found in these stories point to the predominance of local-traditional patterns of thought in the imagination of the authors of these stories. However, it will also be demonstrated that the modern idea of sexuality is present among some other users of this platform, whose modern worldview is in conflict and competition with the local-traditional views on sexuality. This conflict is best illustrated in the commentary sections of the stories on this website, where modern-thinking users question the “truth” of the epistemology behind these local-traditional narratives. This modern users’ criticism of the local-traditional view on same-sex desire shall be addressed in the last part of the paper.