This book explores some of the political and methodological directions that collectively lead to the repositioning of Islam in social science research as both an epistemic/ontological category and as a method.
Chapters by experts in the field explore research in the Islamic context vis-à-vis these two distinct yet somehow interrelated frames. The question being raised here is how Islam as socio-religious notion is related to Islam as a theoretical/methodological framework. Taking cues from the experience of contributors, this book also examines the question if current methodologies or frames of references are pluralized enough to accommodate the question of Muslims or could the scholars themselves create alternative directions around the dominant spaces. The book offers ethnographic studies of Muslim communities mostly in minority settings and engages with a number of issues researchers encounter when dealing with the lived or everyday Islam.
This book is essential reading for anyone engaged in the study of Muslims in the contemporary world. It will appeal to scholars of religious studies, studies of Islam in the West, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, human geography, and research methods.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Don’t We Really Need New Butterfly Nets?
2. Researching ‘Muslim Worlds’: Regions and Disciplines
3. Postcolonialism, Islam and Area Studies
4. Second Thoughts About the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life
5. Doing Ethnography in a Muslim context: Some Reflections
6. Question of Reason and ‘Thinking Class’ in Islam
7. Researching India’s Muslims: Identities, Methods, and Politics
8. Accommodating Fieldwork to Irreconcilable Equations of Citizenship, Authoritarianism, Poverty and Fear in Egypt
9. Thoughts from the Field: Methodological Considerations and Experiences in the Study of Islam at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
10. Ummah, Qaum, and Watan: Elite and Ordinary Constructions of Nationhood among Muslims of Contemporary India
11. Home-Making at the Field: Rethinking the Categories of Ethnographic Practices
12. The Evolution of Muslim Women’s Political Subjectivity in India: A Critical Reading in the Context of Muslim Personal Law
13. Islamic Hermeneutics in South Asia: The Intellectual Tradition of Vakkom Moulavi
14. Maritime Peripheries and Universal Connections: Reflections on Studying Islam in the Indian Ocean
15. Purogamana Asayakkār: ‘Progressive’ as an Ambivalent Social Category in Islamic Discourse in Kerala
About the Author :
M.H. Ilias is currently Professor and Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences at Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), India. His areas of research interest include Islam movements in South Asia, religion and state in the Gulf states, Hadrami migration on the Malabar Coast, South Asian migration to the Gulf region, religion and visual culture in West Asia, sociology of conflict, Gandhian philosophy, and Muslims and new media.
