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Akbar Ahmed’s anthropological excursion into Islam

Published on July 9, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, politics, religion cosmology, Us and Them

“One of the most famous anthropologists in the world” was he called by Alan MacFarlane. According to the BBC he is “probably the world’s best known scholar on contemporary Islam”. Akbar Ahmed‘s new book Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalisation is out and according to a review in The Blade he has “painted a fascinating picture of contemporary Islamic world”:

He is a master of simplification. He can take snarled strands of culture, religion, and traditions and through the reason and logic of an anthropologist, Islamic scholar, and historian, is able to untangle the complex jigsaw puzzle and present it in an easy to comprehend narrative.

But maybe this ability to simplify also represents a weakness as he seems to generalize too much? Ahmed’s book was “Book of the week” in The Guardian. Reviewer Edward Mortimer writes:

To a surprising extent he (Akbar) accepts Huntington’s premise that Islam and the west are still distinct civilisations. Only once does he abandon this construct and refer to “a world civilisation”, in which “people are now too close to and dependent on each other to afford the luxury of ignoring and excluding others”. The rest of the time he treats western and Muslim cultures as discrete entities, which need to be brought closer together.

Two weeks ago he said according to The Guardian:

“It’s not just 9/11. It started in the 19th century when the first clashes between the west and Islam took place. We’re seeing the same patterns being played out today.”

The book is based on a “anthropological excursion”: Ahmed Akbar and two students visited eight Islamic countries — India, Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia — to talk to a cross section of people about their attitudes towards America, their fears and their concerns according to The Blade:

Most of the people in those countries feel alienated from the West and believe that the war on terrorism is in fact a war against Islam being waged under the rubric of globalization. (…) This fear is partly based on the 500-year colonial era. The colonists ruled Muslim lands with two objectives; to exploit natural resources of the occupied lands and to civilize them by converting them to Christianity. The current push for globalization is, to many, the re-colonization of the Islamic world, albeit with a difference. This time the seeds of exploitation are hidden in the Trojan horse of globalization.

>> review in The Blade

>> review in The Guardian

>> Alan MacFarlane interviews Akbar Ahmed

Akbar has also started to blog (a bit) and has a professional website with links to articles and interviews.

Akbar Ahmed appears regularily in the media, see for example:

West ‘must stop looking at Islam through the lens of terror’ (The Guardian, 28.6.07)

Akbar Ahmed’s Call for Compassion: How has globalization changed the world in terms of religious tolerance and stereotyping? (The Internationalist, 4.3.07)

Interview with Prof. Akbar Ahmed (ABC News Austraia, 19.9.01)

‘It Is Time for Muslims to Reciprocate’ (Newsweek, 28.9.06)

Globalist Interview: Akbar Ahmed: Islam Under Siege (The Globalist, 20.6.03)

Conflict with Iraq: Akbar Ahmed (BBC, 2003)

Akbar Ahmed studies differences but seeks unity (Princeton University, 7.11.00)

Articles on Islam by Professor Akbar S. Ahmad (Islam For Today)

Anthropological perspectives on suicide bombing

Protests against British research council: “Recruits anthropologists for spying on muslims”

Doctoral thesis: Towards a transnational Islam

Muslims in Calcutta: Towards a middle-class & moderation

What does it mean to be Muslim in a secular society? Anthropologist thinks ahead

Islam: Embracing modernity while remaining true to their traditions and core beliefs

Book review: Mahmood Mamdani: “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim”

Islam in Europe: Mainstream society as the provider of conditions

Interview with Arjun Appadurai: “An increasing and irrational fear of the minorities”

"One of the most famous anthropologists in the world" was he called by Alan MacFarlane. According to the BBC he is "probably the world’s best known scholar on contemporary Islam". Akbar Ahmed's new book Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of…

New blog: Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

Published on July 4, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, politics, religion cosmology, Us and Them, websites

The Anthropology of Islam and Jihad Beyond Islam are the most recent books by Gabriele Marranci. In January this year he has started his own blog Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist. He is also writing for the excellent Middle East blog Tabsir.

Gabriele Marranci explains:

By nature, academic publications, even when attempting to reach the general public, are not very widely read outside the ivory tower of academia. (…)For this reason I also started, with Prof. Daniel Varisco, and regularly contribute to, Tabsir.

I believe that anthropologists, as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead have taught us, should engage and contribute to their time by facilitating debate.

In his recent post Collateral damage in the Wars on Terror: between Afghanistan and Glasgow, he comments on the public discourse and press coverage of the recent car bombings in Britain that were linked to al-Qaeda:

Yet are these attacks really al-Qaeda-sponsored? It is too early to say, but I have the impression that this series of attacks were the work of some ‘amateurs of terror’.

(…)

Prime Minister Gordon Brown misleads us when repeating ,

“It’s obvious that we have a group of people – not just in this country, but round the world – who’re prepared at any time to inflict what they want to be maximum damage on civilians, irrespective of the religion of these people who are killed or maimed are to be.”

It’s obvious, I would say, that this is not what those people want; this is, in this case, the inevitable ‘collateral damage’. This group of people kills because they want to achieve their idea of justice and good; they are fighting their battle against ‘evil’ to affirm ‘good’; they are ‘gifting’ us with a purifying fire which will be able to bring joy and prosperity in the future. They are gifting their victims with paradise, they are terrorising us for what they think is right, though costly to achieve. So they say.

Yet are we not terrorising, killing and maiming Afghan civilians to achieve what we think is the right cause? Have we not killed, possibly tortured, illegally detained (i.e. kidnapped), thousands of innocent people, or asked rogue Middle Eastern dictatorships to do so, to achieve what, paraphrasing Mr Brown, is in the interests of a perversion of our western democracy?

During these years of research with different Muslims, having different ideas and beliefs, I have reached the conclusion that we, the homely people of all colours, cultures, faiths and nationalities have found ourselves between not just one ‘War on Terror’ but two. And here is the issue: Terror fighting terror, the only result can be an endless chain of death.

>> visit Gabriele Marranci’s blog

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

“Discuss politics!” – How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

More and more anthropologists, but they’re absent from public debates – “Engaging Anthropology” (1)

Good anthropological writing: “Nuclear Borderlands” and “Global Body Shopping”

Published on July 2, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, globalisation, Northern America, politics

Examples of good anthropological writing? In his constant search to find books he can hand to students and say: “Here is anthropology”, Christopher Kelty is two books richer in 2007: Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry by Xiang Biao’s and Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico by Joseph Masco.

On Savage Minds he reviews both books.

Xiang’s book, he writes “could serve as an excellent starting point for a new generation of comparative ethnography of quasi-formal labor systems”. But what is body shopping? Laborers as a commodity in the new global labour market? A new form of slave trade? The anthropologist explains:

(…) a usually Indian intermediary firm hires a bunch of “qualified” Indian IT employees, deals with immigration and visa issues, and in turn sends them off to work for EU, Aus or US IT firms. Often the intermediary can be taking up to half (or more) of the employee’s wages, but they also take all the risk in terms of immigration and labor-market surpluses. It leads to lots of unemployed Indian IT workers (“benched”) milling about places like Central New Jersey and Southern Silicon Valley waiting for IT firms to take up the slack. There are all kinds of horrible results, but it has been central to making Indian labor so globally visible and accessible in the IT industry…

>> read the whole review on Savage Minds

>> read the introduction of the book

Whereas Xiang’s book was excellent for its simplicity, Masco’s book Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico is excellent for its controlled complexity, he writes. It is “a frankly cosmological book; it is about how the bomb makes us who we are today”:

The naive anthropology student might approach New Mexico as a place with many different populations: anglo scientists, pueblo indians, neuvomexicanos, hippie anti-nuke activists — each with their own distinctive lifeworld and worldview. But Masco is having none of that: for him, the bomb is the bomb. It has determined nearly every aspect of our lives (and “our” means basically everyone on the planet) for 50 years… to say nothing of our futures. Thus, in the chapters that explore the lives and thoughts of these different groups, the same cosmological questions about the impact of Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War keep coming up—and keep providing ways to connect these seemingly diverse groups to each other: through the lab, through secrecy and hypersecurity measures, and through politics of race and sovereignty.

>> read the whole review on Savage Minds

>> read the introduction of the book

Examples of good anthropological writing? In his constant search to find books he can hand to students and say: "Here is anthropology", Christopher Kelty is two books richer in 2007: Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the…

Anthropological perspectives on suicide bombing

Published on June 6, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, persons and theories, politics, religion cosmology, Us and Them

“On Suicide Bombing” is the title of a new book by anthropologist Talal Asad. In the introduction he writes:

For many non-Muslims in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, the suicide bomber quickly became the icon of an Islamic “culture of death.” This led me to try to think in a sustained way about the contemporary mode of violence that is described by much of the Western media as “Islamic terrorism.” Is there, I asked myself, a religiously motivated terrorism? If so, how does it differ from other cruelties? What makes its motivation—as opposed to the simple intent to kill—religious? Where does it stand in relation to other forms of collective violence? How is the image of the suicide bomber, bringing death to himself and others, addressed by Christians and post-Christians?

He also examins the “clash of civilizations” thesis that purports to explain contemporary Islamic jihadism as the essence of contemporary terrorism, and he argue against the kind of history that assumes self-contained civilizations having fixed values. Asad also discusses state terrorism and violence exercised by the modern state:

I am simply impressed by the fact that modern states are able to destroy and disrupt life more easily and on a much grander scale than ever before and that terrorists cannot reach this capability. I am also struck by the ingenuity with which so many politicians, public intellectuals, and journalists provide moral justifications for killing and demeaning other human beings. What seems to matter is not the killing and dehumanization as such but how one kills and with what motive. People at all times have, of course, justified the killing of so-called enemies and others they deem not deserving to live. The only difference is that today liberals who engage in this justification think they are different because morally advanced.

>> read the whole introduction

By the way, Paradise Now is a great film about suicide bombers.

There are several articles by or about Talal Asad online, among others:

Interview with Talal Asad (Asia Source, 16.12.02)

Interview with Talal Asad: Modern power and the reconfiguration of religious traditions (Stanford University)

Talal Asad: A single history? Francis Fukuyama’s defence of the universalism of western values and institutions is challenged by modern global political realities (Open Democracy, 5.5.06)

Talal Asad: Reflections on Laïcité & the Public Sphere (Keynote address at the “Beirut Conference on Public Spheres,” October 22-24, 2004)

Talal Asad’s hour-long Stanford Presidential Lecture

"On Suicide Bombing" is the title of a new book by anthropologist Talal Asad. In the introduction he writes:

For many non-Muslims in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, the suicide bomber quickly became the icon of an Islamic “culture…

Criticizes the “apathy of anthropologists toward the human rights situation in Balochistan”

Published on May 14, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, indigenous people / minorities, politics

“Anthropologists should shed light on the violence in Balochistan Province in Pakistan, anthropologist Hafeez Jamali writes in Anthropology News May 2007. Balochistan is presently the scene of a bitter and violent struggle. Multinationals are exploiting the region’s mineral resources. Hundreds of ordinary Baloch died, some 84,000 civilians predominantly have been displaced and hundreds of political activists have been arrested and tortured.

Jamali criticizes the “apathy of the discipline and of anthropologists toward the appalling human rights situation” there: There is hardly any effort by anthropologists who have worked amongst Baloch people to raise this issue in their ethnographic work, he writes. Most of the current work on Baloch people does not address current political issues:

Indeed (…) much of the past and recent anthropological work on the Baloch people has tended to focus on pastoral-nomadic aspects of Baloch social organization by employing concepts of ecological adaptation and kinship networks. These ethnographic works (…) give the impression that the Baloch are pre-modern beings living in bounded cultural groups which are relatively unconcerned with larger geo-strategic and political developments in the region and the world.

This approach is misleading because Baloch tribes’ resistance movements against colonial rule of the British Raj as well as against inequities of postcolonial states such as Iran and Pakistan were intrinsically linked to regional anti-colonial struggles. The present day struggle in Balochistan also draws inspiration from contemporary movements for self-governance in other parts of the world and in that sense is comparable to the struggles being waged by Palestinians, Kurds and other marginalized ethnic groups.

In view of this situation, it is important that anthropologists who work in and study Balochistan take the influence of regional geo-strategic politics as well as the intrusion of neoliberal globalization in the Baloch people’s lives and the response of the Baloch to such intrusion more seriously in their work.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News

MORE INFO:

Hundreds missing in conflict-torn Balochistan (IRIN, 10.5.07)

Pakistan’s battle over Balochistan (BBC, 26.8.06)

By the way, in Anthropology News April 2007, there are several articles on the Oaxacan Rebellion (Mexico)

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

‘War on Terror’ Has Indigenous People in Its Sights

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

"Anthropologists should shed light on the violence in Balochistan Province in Pakistan, anthropologist Hafeez Jamali writes in Anthropology News May 2007. Balochistan is presently the scene of a bitter and violent struggle. Multinationals are exploiting the region’s mineral resources. Hundreds…