THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ISLAM pdf download

The Anthropology Of Islam Gabriele Marranci

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ISLAM

The Anthropology of Islam is a title that raises questions and certainly expectations.

What is the anthropology of Islam? Why anthropology instead of theology or history?

Why use the term Islam instead of Islams or Islam(s)? Why focus on Islam instead of Muslims?

Is there only one anthropology of Islam or can we speak of anthropologies of Islam, or even anthropologies of Islams?

How does the anthropology of Islam differ from, say, any other anthropology of religion?

How does the anthropology of Islam differ from the sociology of Islam, or Islamic studies, or Islamic anthropology?

Of course, I can add many other questions to those I have collected in the two years I worked on The Anthropology of Islam – some derived from genuine curiosity, others from healthy academic criticism and yet others from simple skeptical reactions.

All these questions have shaped, transformed and re-transformed the book itself.

Many of these questions will find answers in the chapters that will follow, in particular

Chapter 3. Nonetheless, I want to introduce some relevant points behind the reason for this book. To do so, I need to explain the phylogeny of this project.

When I was a university student in anthropology, with an interest in Muslim cultures, I found myself disoriented by the enormous amount of research and references on the topic of Islam and Muslims produced in the last twenty-five years.

Very soon, I discovered that these studies spread among different disciplines with different methodologies, aims, scopes and sometimes, indeed, political affiliations and agendas.

My anthropological vocation brought me to focus on the social scientific side of these studies, though I also enthusiastically read and studied historical and traditional Islamic studies works