Islamists are defined as those among Muslim revivalists who focus on taking over the state—they certainly seem to take the state, both as an idea and as a material object, very seriously (see, for instance, Fuller 2003). However, even as taking over the state remains the proclaimed aim-prompting, in response, an alarmist discourse about the imminent dangers of an Islamist coup, actual strategies pursued over the last two decades have involved a subtle move away from the state as the locus for mobilizations. It is argued here that in rough alignment with the shift in global political imagination where the state is no longer the dominant mobilizer of political energies and projects, Islamist strategies belie a move towards using the market as an alternative engine for defining and facilitating moral and political change. This shift does not imply a complete break with the past and certainly at the rhetorical level the focus on the state continues. However, as shown below, increasingly marginalizing Maududi's vision of the state as the central agent of change in the modern world, contemporary Jamaat-e-Islami activists are grappling with the many contradictions in their relationship with the market as an engine for the formation and transformation of the moral community. Moreover, the idea of the market remains infused with conflicting sentiments.

Introduction

In Pakistan's elections of October 2002 a coalition of ‘religious parties’ was elected into government in the North West Frontier Province's provincial assembly. The political parties making up this coalition, the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA), or United Action Front, claimed during the campaign that they would introduce ‘Islamic’ or shari'a law into Pakistan's legal system. Indeed, they did quickly set to the task of ‘Islamizing’ the Frontier: playing audio music cassettes was banned in the region's public transport vehicles, for example. In the summer of 2003 I was in the Frontier conducting research in Chitral—a mountainous region that is predominantly populated by Khowar-speaking ethnically Chitrali Muslims. Chitral too had seen the victory of MMA politicians in both the provincial and national assemblies. After their election, these men issued statements saying that Chitrali women working in the offices of international development NGOs active in the region should wear the Afghan burqa to work. Many of Chitral's mullahs complained both before and after the MMA's election success that the sight of men sitting with women in plush white jeeps whilst listening to Indian music cassettes was corrupting the emotions of Chitral's Muslims. They argued in their mosque addresses that the presence ofwomen in public was a form of public indecency that rendered women prostitutes in the eyes of Islamic law. In the face of these Islamizing injunctions, several women verbally challenged the messages of Chitral's ‘hardened’ men of learning and piety (dashmanan).

Introduction

In this essay I discuss how three Muslim men hold to be true apparently contradictory ideas about the legitimacy of saints. The principal argument is that much of the sociology of religion, at least as often expressed in contemporary anthropology, relies on somewhat static and instrumental notions of belief and knowledge. I illustrate this and demonstrate the consequences for the more general understanding of popular Islam and reformism in South Asia.

The kind of simplifying drudge I have in mind is most extremely characterized by surprisingly common statements such as ‘Muslims believe X and Y’, the error of which hardly need to be demonstrated. However, there are other levels at which this tendency operates. It requires cultivated personal or professional interests in order to question statements such as, ‘The Barelvis hold that spiritual intermediaries are a vital part of the society of Islam’. Such statements should beg the following kinds of questions: is this group of Muslims (associated with the teaching of Ahmed Rida Khan and Hanafi jurisprudence) formed solely by the uniformity of belief among its members? Do all spiritual intermediaries hold Barelvis in equal regard with other Muslims? Are all intermediaries held in equal regard by the Barelvis? Who says so? How do they know? What does it mean to believe or hold that something is true?

Introduction

In the Introduction to the hagiography of the reform Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir, the ‘Living Saint’, who died in his lodge near Kohat, Pakistan, in 1999, poet and devoted khalifa (vicegerent) of Zindapir Rab Nawaz writes:

Introduction

Muslims are 8.9 per cent of Sri Lanka's population and they live scattered throughout the country in small communities. The only two significant population concentrations are to be found in the Eastern and Western provinces. Although the Sri Lankan conflict is generally described as one between Sinhala and Tamil ethnic groups, Muslims—especially those of the conflict-affected areas of the Northern and Eastern provinces—have been affected by the violence and militarization. They struggle today to have their experiences acknowledged. The Islamic piety movement has become visible in Sri Lanka, with Muslims all over the country adopting the uniforms of piety—hijab and abhaya for women, beard and Tablighi Jama'at's large tunic and pants for men. The movement itself takes many forms. In this essay I argue that the manner in which piety is perceived and propagated among Muslims in Sri Lanka must be understood as located within the context of ethnic conflict and the polarization between ethnic groups that occurred in its wake. I will explore the work of one Muslim women's da'wa (preaching) group—Al Muslimaat—that pioneered the process of making piety popular among lower-middle- and middle-income Muslim women in a semi-urban Colombo neighbourhood. Looking at the group's activities and specifically through analyses of the bayan or lay sermons delivered by their most charismatic member, I will look at the nature of the pious practice that is preached.

Introduction

In Kerala we find strong currents of Islamic reformism, the largest organization being the Kerala Naduvathul Mujahideen (KNM). This radical reform movement, originating in the 1920s and (to date) limited to Kerala state, draws its inspiration from a wide range of strands both within India and from the wider Islamic world. Kerala's Islamic reformism is simultaneously local—in that it emerges within a specific social, political and historical context—and also pan-Islamic or transnational—in that it embodies orientations which historically characterize the development of Islam across the world. While Kerala's Mujahids (as KNM supporters are known) participate in wider currents and are part of a universalistic trend, at the same time, Mujahid projects cannot in any way be tritely subsumed under labels such as ‘global Islam’ (e.g., Roy 2004). Kerala reformism must be understood as being simultaneously part of a global Islamic impulse towards purification and also as a deeply locally rooted and specific phenomenon, which produces itself on the ground through practice and through dialogue with significant others, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Indeed, public debate in Kerala between ‘reformist’ and ‘traditionalist’ Muslims produces shifts in practice and works continually to generate and redefine the focus of ‘reform’ and ‘anti-reform’.

We are here critiquing anthropological tendencies to idealise and celebrate sufi ‘traditionalism’ as somehow authentically South Asian in contrast to reformism, which is then inaccurately—and dangerously buttressing Hindutva rhetoric—branded as going against the grain of South Asian society.

Introduction

I was sitting in Suhanaben's living room near the Sonai Cinema border, not far from the plot where she and her brothers had organized the Sonai relief camp for Muslims displaced during and after Gujarat's 2002 riots. Suhanaben said, ‘dhamaal ke baad basti badi hai’ (after the riots the population has grown). All I could see from her living room were boards of various sizes advertising low-investment housing schemes (from one room-kitchen tenements to four bedroom row-houses) and housing loans on very low interest rates. Suhanaben was a Sunni Vohra from Charotar in Kheda district. A native Gujarati speaker, she nonetheless insisted on speaking to her children in a Gujarati version of Urdu. She had originally lived in Haleem-ki-Khadki in Shahpur, in the heart of Ahmedabad's walled city, but had moved to Juhapura after the 1985 anti-Muslim riots. Although, Suhanaben had a postgraduate degree in Hindi Literature from Gujarat University, she was also a qualified beauty-therapist, making a decent living by running a beauty parlour in the heart of Juhapura. But at the end of the 1990s, she gave away her business, concerned that she had been encouraging women to commit numaish (beautification and exposure of a woman's body), and hence that any money earned from such a business was haraam (money not earned by fair means).

Introduction

Long before 9/11, madrasas were made infamous in India by Hindu Right wing parties. The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and their ideological fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), all blamed the madrasas for teaching hatred towards the majority (Hindu) community and engaging in what they claimed were anti-national activities. In 1995, the VHP declared that it would not tolerate the nefarious designs of madrasas as they were teaching ‘anti-Hindu’ ideas to their students. The Hindu Right termed the madrasas ‘dens of terror’ training jihadis to massacre Hindus and turn India into an Islamic nation. During the BJP led government, a ministerial committee report of 2001 stated that madrasas were engaged in systematic indoctrination of Muslims in fundamentalist ideology, which was detrimental to communal harmony (Sikand 2005: 271). The Report suggested that ‘modern education’ be imparted in madrasas in an effort to bring them into the ‘national mainstream’. Certainly, while in power the BJP could persuade only a handful of madrasas to introduce modern subjects, for which grants were made available by the state.

During our first research in Jhakri, an exclusively Muslim village in Bijnor district (north-western Uttar Pradesh), the sterilization drive associated with the Emergency of 1975–77 was a recent memory. Our field-notes, then and subsequently, have repeatedly registered the conviction that using contraceptive techniques, especially sterilization [nasbandī or ‘tube closing’], is contrary to Islam. Recent surveys elsewhere in India indicate that 9 per cent of currently-married Muslim women—but only 1 per cent of Hindu and Christian women—say that their main reason for not intending to use contraception is because it is ‘against their religion’. For Bhat and Zavier (2005: 400), these figures reflect Muslims' slavish obedience to ignorant mullahs and account for most of the differences in contraceptive use between members of the three communities. Islamic doctrines are widely presumed to be central to Muslims' everyday lives. Superficially, Jhakri residents might seem to endorse this rarely examined or substantiated assumption, but leaving matters there would fall far short of adequately accounting for their fertility behaviour.

First we outline how several aspects of Muslim reformers' agendas might seem consistent with fertility limitation, yet the historical record provides no clear impression of their views on contraception. Further, the idea that Muslims slavishly follow a monolithic ‘Islamic doctrine’ ignores the contested and shifting understandings of contraception yielded by the same authoritative Islamic sources.