The Pure and Powerful

While most of the literature on Islam over the past two decades has concentratedon the issue of Islamic resurgence, focusing mainly on the nature andworkings of political movements and militant Islamic groups, this book examinesinstead the beliefs and practices of ordinary Muslim, exploring an intricateweb of social relationships involving the 'ulama, government, Islamic institutions,Sufis, and the people Jiving in the rural and city areas of the country.The analysis demonstrates how in order to further our understanding ofMuslim society, we must gather fieldwork data on the relationship of the commonperson's Islamic practices to those of the Islamic tradition and apply therelevant analytical concepts to examine them. It further challenges the existingethnography of Muslim society which is not only based mainly on limitedempirical data but also conceals issues worthy of study and is, moreover, fullof assumptions oversimplifying the nature of the complex social relationshipsinvolved. For instance, anthropology implicitly assumes that the "native" is anaive and ignorant person who, as a corollary of this, is ignorant of his ownreligion. The consequence of this supposition has been that anthropologistswho have written on the subject have not found it necessary to examine howthe Islamic practices of the common people have been related to the Islamictradition.It was also often assumed that the Islamic knowledge of the 'ulama, and theirstatus as the learned ones, somehow separated them from the lives of the commonpeople. Only recently have researchers started studying the effect of theirfa tawa on society and people, little work having been done before on their livesand influence. This work refutes the assumption that the Islamic text is outsidesociety and that the 'ulama are an entity separate from the people.The author re-examines the view that different societies contain differentversions of Islam and points out that this type of thinking does not of itselfadvance our knowledge of the subject, nor does it offer a viable criteria for ...