Recognizing Islam

Abstract

Michael Gilsenan is an anthropologist who has done extensive fieldworkin Egypt and Lebanon and has extensive knowledge of the literature,paticularly ethnography, on the Middle East, including North Africa. Hisbook Recognising Islam is a detailed ethnography of the practice of Islamin the Middle East. When it was fi.rst published, it was considered a significantanthropological contribution to the understanding of the complexitiesof Islamic societies in the Middle East. To be more precise, it is aboutIslam as practiced in the villages and urban centers of Lebanon, Egypt,Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Iran. These are the places from which hedraws illustrative enthnographic material, weaving into the narrative hisanalysis of the specific case studies of urban and village !if e showing howIslam is practiced in the context of much larger national and internationalevents taking place.The Islam that Gilsenan wishes to be recognized is not that of the literatespecialists or of learned sheikhs. Neither is it of theological discussionsand debate, although no doubt it has implications for those debates, nor is itof Orientalist conceptions or the Western media's caricature of Muslims asthe inscrutable "other"----the barbarous, corrupt, enemy of Christianity, andnemesis of Western civilization. In other words, the focus on the practice ofIslam in the villages of the Middle East and urban enclaves of such majorcities as Cairo is not just a description of the exotic or strange practices ofpeople as bounded entities, each one being an isolated species of Muslimgroupings. Rather, Gilsenan's work shows how daily life is informed by ...