Islam Obscured

Abstract

Daniel Martin Varisco’s Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of AnthropologicalRepresentation provides a very sound and well-informed literary critique ofClifford Geertz’s Islam Observed (1968), Ernest Gellner’s Muslim Society(1981), Fatima Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil (1975), and Akbar Ahmed’s DiscoveringIslam (1988). The author, an experienced ethnographer of MiddleEastern societies, examines the treatments and representations of Islam inthese seminal texts. After presenting his topic and background in the introduction,he demonstrates how these four authors obscured, misrepresented,and elided the everyday lives of Muslims. In the epilogue, Varisco gleanssome important lessons for the study of Islam from his entertaining andwitty exploration of these social science texts.In the book’s introduction, the author briefly discusses the intellectualhistory of anthropology and ethnographic studies of Muslims. He notes thatthe discipline of anthropology has encountered numerous problems, includingits recognition of Victorian traveler’s reports, Spencerian “evolutionism,”and the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric textual representations ofnon-western others. Addressing the current state of anthropological theory,Varisco mentions the blurring of boundaries between established disciplinesas well as the particularly American problem over whether to maintain thefour-field approach of holistically studying human beings.In keeping with this Eurocentric slant toward “primitives,” he observesthat there were very few ethnographic studies of Muslims, except Evans-Pritchard’s 1940s work on Cyrenaican Bedouins and those by others followinghis example, until ethnographers began to produce Robert Redfieldinfluencedcommunity studies.Yetmany of these latter studies were done byresearchers who, with little proficiency inArabic, wrote from a distance andthus barely penetrated the surface of Islam in local Muslims’ lives. Varisco ...