Discipline and power: interpreting global Islam: a review essay

Extract

Clifford Geertz has noted recently that ‘more than any other single thing, it has been the rising tendency to ideologize faith in so much of the Muslim world that has made it increasingly hard to arrive at summary accounts of what is happening there’. This recognition has not deterred the emergence of a veritable flood of literature, scholarly or otherwise, much of which provides sweeping holistic accounts of ‘Islam’ and the West's current engagement with it. The difficulty Geertz highlights is, ironically, also the impetus that drives the current hunger for such knowledge at the popular, academic and policy levels: the recognition of Islam, in its multifarious manifestations, not as a stagnant and ritualistic historical artefact, but as the major component of cultural renaissance and prime vehicle of dissident political mobilisation in the contemporary Muslim world.