Page 9 - The Keble Review 2016

why study Islam in the Middle East? Given the Muslims in Lebanon would like to present such interventions as
sheer density of media coverage the question
seems hardly to need answering. Still, I came to the region in the first instance more through a young man’s thirst for foreign travel and an appreciation of the hospitality and historical and cultural wealth that I found there. I fell in love with Syria and ended up spending a memorable year in 1999/2000 studying Arabic at Damascus University, in flight from a dead-end job in London. And that is what brought me back to university, a doctorate in social anthropology and thence, eventually, to Keble.
In my research I have tried to get behind the headlines to understand how Muslims in the Middle East think of and practise their religion in their day-to-day lives. As an anthropologist,
my main method for doing that has been through long-
term ethnographic fieldwork – ‘deep hanging-out’ as it
has memorably been called, primarily in Syria’s rather freer neighbour, Lebanon. In two major bouts of field research in Beirut in 2003/4 and 2007/8, alongside shorter stays, I spent my time hanging out in mosques, sharia courts, Sufi circles and friends’ houses. Much tea was drunk; countless arguments over British foreign policy were endured, in the wake first of the
Iraq war and then Israel’s 2006 invasion and bombardment of Lebanon. Worse was to come, most awfully in Syria. Even now
I am surprised by the generosity of my interlocutors given the political tensions and continuous disasters in the region. But
they are convinced that Islam is woefully, if not wilfully poorly understood in the West, and that that needs addressing, and one can hardly disagree.
The media like to portray many contemporary varieties of Islam as ‘medieval’, out of time. But the direct access to scripture and resulting erosion of traditional structures of authority characteristic of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ depend on mass literacy and higher education, which have only come to the wider Middle East in the last century or so. In reaction, my first foray into studying Islam as a doctoral student focused on the super-modern issues of bioethics, and in particular artificial reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF). There is much emphasis placed on the importance of having children in the Middle East, and a corresponding demand for such techniques: at the time, Lebanon boasted one of the highest number of infertility clinics per capita in the world. But are they allowed in religious terms?
What is at stake is the sharia, essentially God’s right path (or paths) through life, legalistically imagined. There is a right and a wrong way to do things (and recommended, neutral and contemptible ones too). While God has provided us with clear guidance, in the form of the Quran and the example of his ultimate prophet, Muhammad, there is still much to be argued for in terms of their interpretation and how they might be extended to include the novelties that life continues to throw at us. As I found out, the consensus is that IVF is permissible for Muslims, at least for married couples. Not just that, but according to some religious authorities some of the more controversial techniques such as those using donor gametes - sperm and eggs – are also allowed. Here religious opinion is often far in advance of that of wider society.
an example of how Islam can ‘keep up with the times’, at least
in comparison with other religious traditions. Lebanon is not
of course a ‘Muslim country’: a civil republic, it has eighteen different official religious communities, twelve of them Christian. And it is home to a variety of approaches to Islam too: Sunni, Shi‘i, Druze, ‘Alawi and Isma‘ili. A core element of this religious multi-culturalism is the granting of exclusive jurisdiction over family law to religious courts (a source of intense dissatisfaction for Lebanon’s secularists and nationalists). Wanting next to understand how the sharia would fare when applied as state law, I thus sat for months on end watching family legal disputes in the distinct Sunni and Shi‘i ‘sharia court’ systems. Just as there may be many instances of Muslim scholars seemingly ahead of the times, there are of course also plenty of examples of how Muslim religious scholars fail to keep up with contemporary expectations, and the Lebanese sharia courts have a reputation for being resolutely old-fashioned, not to say heavily patriarchal, in their rulings.
How could the sharia look so flexible and responsive to popular demand in one setting, and so unsympathetic in another?
How could the sharia look so flexible and responsive to popular demand in one setting, and so unsympathetic in another? This is the thrust of my current work: to go beyond arguments as to whether Islam is essentially rigid and out of touch or on
the contrary actually flexible and responsive. It can be both.
It depends on the forces in play. The Islamic religious scholars who work as judges in the Lebanese courts certainly seemed
to find their work frustrating, as I found after months of sitting in smoke-filled rooms watching them struggle with mountains of paperwork and warring couples. Their impulse to help those before them was, many felt, handicapped by the constraints of bureaucratic procedure and tightly defined legal expectations of a civil state court system. ‘If only there were an Islamic state...’, some of them mused, it might work better.
The so-called Islamic state we are faced with in Syria and Iraq was not, I think, what they had in mind. But in any case it seems wishful thinking. Any attempt to institute a vision of the ideal, divine law in (necessarily bureaucratic) practice is vulnerable to criticism, and to being outflanked, on the left or the right, by scholars and religious activists outside of the establishment. Anthropology likes to imagine that its micro-historical studies, close to the ground, can tell us something about the bigger picture. The tensions between religious ideals and mundane practice that I saw in Lebanon led to dynamism, in the form
of the evolving careers of the religious professionals I studied. But on a grander scale, they underpin more dramatic historical processes too. What next? It is, sadly, hard to see where an anthropologist could be safely lodged in much of the Middle East right now. More work on the bigger picture perhaps.
Pictured, opposite, Mohammad Al Amine Mosque, Beirut, Lebanon.
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