Religion in Middle East and North Africa Research Paper

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Christians and Jews were widely distributed throughout the Middle East and North Africa (Planhol 1997). Until the late 1940s in northern Iraq, for example, Sunni Arab Muslims formed a majority of the population in Mosul, with Jews living in both Mosul and surrounding agricultural communities. Shivi Turkomen tribes resided in outlying villages, as did communities of Monophysite, Assyrian, and Nestorian Christians. Likewise, Lebanon has 23 recognized Christian and Muslim religious sects, each with separate community identities. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were also thriving Jewish communities distributed widely throughout the region. Some of these— notably in Morocco—remained vital for decades after the declaration of Israel as a state in 1948 (Courbage and Fargues 1995).

Theologians and ideologues often highlight the distinctiveness of their respective faiths, but Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the region often share implicit background understandings and practices. Sacred spaces shared by all three faiths may be found primarily only in Jerusalem and nearby places such as Hebron/al-Khalil, but shared Muslim and Jewish places of regional pilgrimage dot the Moroccan landscape and are equally venerated by Muslims and Jews. Such shared shrines continue to play a vital role in popular belief and practice. Thus in North Africa, Muslim saint festivals (musims) and pilgrimages to regional shrines (ziyaras) are paralleled by festivals for Jewish saints (hillulas).

Variations in doctrine, religious practice, and traditions of shared memory also distinguish Muslim communities from one another. These include Sunni Muslims, the Shi a (or ‘sectarians,’ who comprise about 10 percent of Muslims worldwide and are further divided into numerous groups), and Ibadi Muslims of Oman and parts of Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria. The intellectual and educated elite often deny or downplay the significance of local, regional, and sectarian differences in faith and practice, but these practices often are powerfully linked to the local social order and continue to play a major role in the popular imagination.

‘Modernity’ in the form of uniform state schooling and mass communications often alters these practices, but does not erode them. Nonetheless, rising educational levels and the proliferation of communications media, including satellite television unrestrained by state authorities, are tilting the balance in favor of ideas and practices that can be explained, defended, and foregrounded in public.

2. Explaining Religious Diversity And Change

Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam is rich and varied in its creativity and cultural expression. It is a challenge for Muslim believers and scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to account for the variations of belief and practice as they have been expressed for over 1,400 years in richly diverse cultural and historical traditions. As a response to this complexity, some scholars dismiss as non-Islamic or as incorrect those practices they consider not in accord with ‘central’ Islamic truths, even though people who hold such beliefs consider themselves fully Muslim. Some deal with these issues by seeing ‘foundation’ texts at the core of each religious tradition—the Qur’an in the case of Islam—and then seeing how successive generations understand and articulate them. If such texts and ideas are too closely bound to their original settings, no matter how persuasive for their original audience, they risk failing to attract wider audiences. Such texts must remain relevant to the social and political contexts of succeeding generations. The risk of such an approach is to encourage the assumption that the ‘foundation’ text itself is unproblematic, making successive interpretations the equivalent of substituting values in a mathematical equation in order to perceive unity.

When first introduced in the late 1940s, the notion of ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ traditions offered one way of coming to terms with the universal and the particular in religious expression and practice. The Great Little tradition contrast rekindled an interest in how popular understandings of religion—the ‘little,’ localized, traditions—were related to elite, literary ones. It also encouraged attention to the specifics of who advocated or explained particular religious orientations and practices, whether they were influential in their own society or marginal, appealing primarily to a particular social group or category. In some settings, individuals claiming descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad were given precedence. The concept of the Great/Little tradition encouraged exploring the links among religious ideas and practices, authority, and influence.

Often, however, the concept was employed only to juxtapose statements of ‘essential’ Islamic principles, as elaborated in standard texts and by educated Muslims, with inventories of local religious practices. For example, the study of trance and possession states (called zar cults in the Sudan and East Africa), often indicative of the affective side of religious traditions, was often frequently relegated to the ‘little’ tradition side of the divide and attributed primarily to women. Yet such ideas and practices also shed light on ideas of the person and how both women and men in societies with such practices express and explore alternative social realities (Boddy 1989). Mosque-centered activities such as Friday prayers, almost the exclusive domain of men, often have been seen as part of the ‘great’ tradition. Women, who often predominate in visits to local shrines and in zar cults, are then seen as sustainers of ‘local’ traditions. This gendered division is made all the more plausible by the fact that until recent decades women had lower levels of education and mobility than men. An alternative explanation, however, is to see mosque-oriented and shrine-oriented practices as integrally complementary, and which must be ‘read’ together as a unit in order to understand religious practice (Tapper and Tapper 1987).

In North Africa, Hammoudi (1993) suggested the explanatory utility of linking the canonical Muslim sacrificial feast associated with the annual pilgrimage to Mecca with practices such as Bujlud, a carnival-like masquerade in Morocco’s Berber highlands that follows a few days after the canonical feast. Colonial ethnographers regarded the two events as separate, as do Muslim intellectuals. In the masquerade, a young male villager dons the skin of a sacrificial animal and assumes the character of Bujlud (‘the wearer of the skins’), and with his cohorts cavorts noisily through- out the village, sacrilegiously mocking established religious and social conventions, entering homes, and bantering obscenely with women. Hammoudi argues that the masquerade evokes the contradictions implicit in the cultural classifications that regulate ordinary behavior, including gender roles, directing caricature and self-directed irony against local social hierarchies, tradition, and innovation. The canonical Muslim sacrifice, on the other hand, embodies the ideal community. The canonical sacrifice and masquerade inherently conjoin ritual piety and impiety, embodying an ongoing contest over significance and interpretation in which existing and alternative social orders are embodied and intertwined.

3. Ritual And Belief In Morocco

In the late 1960s, Morocco became ‘good to think with’ for understanding religion in complex societies, just as the Trobriand Islands had earlier entered the anthropological canon for understanding exchange systems and India for understanding caste and stratification. The ethnographies of Morocco’s colonial era did not lend themselves to comparative studies or lead to disciplinary classics. The publication of Clifford Geertz’s Islam Obser ed (1971), originally a series of lectures delivered to historians of religion, marked a breakthrough in linking religious studies in general to the ethnographic study of specific cultural traditions. Geertz took for granted the unity of the Islamic tradition, but emphasized the highly divergent ways in time and space that it articulated with social experience. His point of departure was Islam as experienced, interpreted, and practiced from the fifteenth century to the present in Indonesia and Morocco, the two antipodes of the Muslim majority world. For Geertz, Islamic symbols and meanings are culturally defined and socially shared, like all other systems of meaning. If commonsense gives shared meaning to immediate practical experience, religion offers a higher and more general interpretive order. These two systems of meaning—commonsense and religion—are intricately intertwined, both shaped by historical experience and giving shape to it.

A key element of Geertz’s argument was to explore the constructed meanings of sainthood and Sufism (mysticism) in the two contrasting settings. In Morocco, individuals with highly varied attributes—reputations for piety, scholarship, miracle working, or other distinctions—were popularly imputed with saintly authority. Since the current Moroccan social order took hold in the fifteenth century, Geertz argued, the cultural order in which Moroccan ideas of saintly authority was sustained was characterized by a ‘strong man’ politics of zealous warriors, rulers, and saints enforcing their will and inducing clients to act on their behalf. Their authority was charismatic, based on personal dominance. In contrast, the Indonesian view of sainthood is hierarchical. Saints incrementally achieved prominence through years of meditation and Indonesia’s settled agricultural villages placed high value on cooperation and order.

In the contexts of both Indonesia and Morocco, the idea of saintly authority took significantly divergent forms because of the contrasting nexus of commonsense perceptions of the world and the different historically constructed senses of meaning through which Indonesians and Moroccans interpreted Islam. These commonsense perceptions and background understandings form the necessary point of departure for understanding religious belief, experience, and practice. Indeed, the perspectives of religion and commonsense are intertwined in a dynamic, often unstable, dialectic (Zein 1977).

Theologians and ‘common’ people interpret religious texts, including the ‘foundation’ texts of religious traditions such as the Qur’an, in multiple and contested ways. Thus, the most common term for saint in contemporary Morocco is ‘pious one’ (salih), although ‘marabout,’ the term used by Geertz and which has made its way into French and English usage, is also understood. ‘Pious one’ conveys the multivalence of Moroccan usage. For educated Moroccans, the term is reserved solely for individuals of outstanding piety, and many speak of saint, or maraboutic, cults as ‘preIslamic’ vestiges. For many other Moroccans, however, both in towns and in rural areas, the ‘pious ones,’ living or dead, are imputed with mystical powers, including the ability to secure positive outcomes for individuals and groups who have maintained a connection with them through gifts or donations to their descendants (Eickelman 1976). Moroccan monarchs and senior government officials continue publicly to visit the shrines of pious ones and make gifts toward their maintenance. Elsewhere in the Muslim world there is a similar interplay between different notions of piety, and there is a similar dialectic of ideas of sainthood among Jews of North African origin (Weingrod 1990).

The emphasis Geertz placed on the cultural dimension in understanding religious experience suggested an alternative to characterizing religious traditions in terms of an essential core prevalent in all places and for all historical periods. His approach instead stresses how systems of religious meaning and practice, like all cultural experience, are contested and dynamic, and therefore not reduced to a single, cohesive set of principles. Some conceptions of Islam are significantly intertwined with, although not limited to, the local social order. However, other conceptions are more universalistic and global, amenable to articulation with a wide range of contexts. These universalistic and particularistic conceptions are copresent and in dynamic tension with one another.

Geertz’s approach, like other efforts to understand religious expression and practice in Moroccan society, including Ernest Gellner’s Saints of the Atlas (1969, see also Gellner 1981) had significant implications for understanding religious expression in earlier historical periods and outside the Muslim majority world. For example, Brown (1981) notes that his understanding of the moral order of early Latin Christianity, the ‘lasting, urgent problems of any civilized community—friendship and protection, justice, power and mercy’—were in part inspired by ethnographies of contemporary North African saints. Similarly, Cornell (1998) shows how medieval Moroccan arguments on the nature of sainthood—cultural understanding of and debates among mystics in both urban and rural settings about concepts related to God’s love and authority from the eleventh through sixteenth centuries—contributed to the Sufi tradition elsewhere in the Muslim world. His argument also compares the North African experience with sainthood as understood and practiced in Europe in the same period. Writings on Judaism in North African and Middle Eastern societies likewise indicate a reemphasis on the cultural dimension and explore the significance of local cultural contexts (Deshen 1989, Goldberg 1996).

4. The Iranian Revolution And Religious Politics

The 1978–9 Iranian revolution was one of several major events that indicated the continued significance of religion in politics and public life, notwithstanding its neglect in most mid-twentieth century discussions concerning modernization and modernity. In Iran itself, the revolution led to the creation of a new, rapidly changing religious idiom for interpreting religious, social, and political events (Khosrokhavar 1997). The debates in Iran continue unabated over the form that an Islamic state should take and the role that religion should play in society, including gender relations (e.g., Mir-Hosseini 1999). Successive incremental decisions and the unanticipated outcomes of earlier ones meant that the revolution looked different in the decades after the event both to many of those who participated in it and to the majority of Iranians not even born when it happened. Some observers use the term ‘post-Islamism’ to describe Iranian society in the 1990s, emphasizing the significantly different way that many Iranians, including many clerics, began to argue publicly for a more limited role of religious institutions in Iranian politics and public life (Khosrokhavar and Roy 1999, Adelkhah 2000).

In spite of contemporaneous hopes for some and fears for others at the time of the Iranian revolution, it did not trigger similar political movements in other Muslim majority countries. It did, however, compel regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, both secular (including Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Algeria) and religiously oriented (including Morocco and Saudi Arabia) to become more attentive to popular understandings of social justice and religion in society. From the first decades of the twentieth century, new religious movements emerged that had distinctly modern political forms. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, founded in the late 1920s and regarded by the mid-twentieth century as Egypt’s only genuinely popular mass political movement, foreshadowed the growth of similar later Islamic movements. Distinctly modern in organizational form, with a clear hierarchy and (at least at the outset) formal criteria for membership, the Brotherhood’s leadership rested not with traditionally educated religious scholars but with those effective in organizing their followers and articulating their values.

By the 1960s, however, the Muslim Brotherhood and similar organizations looked conservative in contrast to the proliferation of movements advocating the Islamization of politics and society. These ‘Islamist’ movements ranged from small, radical groups such as the one responsible for the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in 1981 to larger ones sometimes organized like political parties, such as Hizbullah of Lebanon, the Virtue Party of Turkey, or the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria. Some of these Islamist movements had their origins as ‘spokesmen for the despised,’ and had Jewish and Christian analogues (Appleby 1997, Marty and Appleby 1995). In general, the influence of extremists, having taken off in the late 1960s, had waned by the 1990s (Kepel 2000). Most movements work within existing national boundaries, even if they sometimes receive external or transnational support. Some movements have advocated violence to achieve their goals, but others have been strong advocates of tolerance and civil society, and many movements have altered as they enter the mainstream of national political life.

5. Religion As System And Ideology

A distinguishing feature of the latter half of the twentieth century is the role of mass education and mass communications in changing how religious knowledge and practice are produced and understood in the Middle East. In the Arab world, for example, large numbers of people now have the level of literacy needed to follow religious and political debates from multiple sources and the command of formal language needed to participate effectively in public life. The religious lessons learned from state schooling may be regarded with skepticism, but like other aspects of state schooling, they inculcate the habits of thought and language needed to learn about and elaborate alternative views of the role of religion in society.

Ironically, the ideas of many radical Islamists mirror competing secular ideologies in form and structure. The writings of Sayyid Qutb, executed by Nasser’s Egypt in 1966, attracted a wide audience among white-collar workers, professionals, and students, the beneficiaries of modern education. In Arabic and in translation, Qutb’s writings continue to have widespread appeal because they offer ‘Islamic’ explanations for contemporary political and economic developments and for the perceived injustices of existing regimes. More contemporary religious ideologues, like Morocco’s ‘Abd al-Salam Yasin, argue that contemporary Muslim societies have been de-Islamized by imported ideologies and values. Yet the style and content of these writers, like others, imply an audience already familiar with the secular, imported ideologies against which they argue. Implicitly, they also convey a sense of Islam as an ideology and objectified system of meaning, which can be conveyed as one subject among others in schools, and in catechism-like pamphlets. In this sense, religion forms one of several systems of meaning in modern society, even as some believers argue that Islam is a ‘complete’ way of life.

The awareness of alternatives to immediate social circumstances is facilitated by the increased availability of contemporary forms of communication, ranging from the press and broadcast media to fax machines, audioand videocassettes, increasingly ubiquitous telephones, and the Internet. In an earlier era, state authorities easily regulated the media. By the end of the twentieth century, the top-down asymmetry of broadcast radio and television were reversed by newer media that are readily adaptive to horizontal communications and difficult for states effectively to control. These developments have contributed to the fragmentation of religious and political authority by allowing large numbers of people to participate in an increasingly public debate over the symbolic language of Islam (Eickelman and Anderson 1999). Combined with political change and the growth of diaspora communities, these developments indicate a changed social and cultural environment for religious expression and practice in which a mass and anonymous public has given way to one characterized by an increased multiplicity of horizontal relationships. The shift to a network society has created communities and communicative spaces in which large numbers of people, while not abandoning their ties of family and community, discover and create alternative ways of thinking about the role of the sacred in society and politics.

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