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The Prophet's Pulpit

University of California Press

In recent years anthropologists have begun lifting their voices to dispel the impression of a conspiracy of silence as to how they obtain the data they transform into scholarship. Perhaps in reaction against the old-fashioned Indiana Jones image so suspiciously predisposed to adventure, treasure, intrigue, romance, and not incidentally the Middle East, once the field researcher returned to the somber groves of academe, the inclination was to draw a curtain over the often jumbled and unseemly raw materials of the craft. So, in reporting his or her findings an air of impersonal objectivity was adopted that feigned harmony with the muses heard by their colleagues confined to libraries and laboratories. Only at a safe distance from the lecturer's rostrum and certainly off the record of the Human Interest Area Files could one hear about the peculiar, sometimes very peculiar contextual factors that inevitably accompany the collection of such information and frequently color its interpretation.

Bronislaw Malinowski's posthumous field journal, entitled A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term , is usually recognized as the great milestone that has since inspired others to attend seriously to what William Butler Yeats called the "blood and bone shop" of their ethnographies. But instead of leaving such commentaries to the discretion of literary executors, it seems preferable to incorporate at least the barest rudiments of this backstage reality within the published work itself. Otherwise questions of credibility, perhaps even of ethics, may linger and distract unnecessarily. Indeed, the unbuttoned revelations confided to his personal diary by this founding father of functionalism were at times so greatly at variance with the impressions offered in his formal expositions as to suggest grounds forreassessing the latter in this new light. Since its appearance almost thirty years ago a minor genre has emerged, first at a trickle, now approaching a rising tide, that has sought to unveil the idiosyncratic dimensions of field research. Indeed, as it continues to advance, it has gone well beyond the initial resolve to compensate for past blind spots to inaugurate a stimulating new conception of anthropology itself. Sometimes referring to it as interpretive anthropology, its advocates emphasize the acceptance of "various sorts of hybridization" as they recognize a definition of culture inspired by contemporary theories of hermeneutics which cut at odd angles across older disciplinary boundaries.1 Such efforts are directed not only to determining the role that personalities play in the process but also, and more importantly, to exploring the theoretical and applied implications of everything that used to pass without elaboration as "participant observation."

But it was not only a realization of the great impact of individuality and serendipity upon field research that has encouraged this turn toward methodological transparency. It also derives from a fertile spillover from recent advances in philosophy, theology, psychology, and literary criticism that call into question the foundations of claims to objectivity in all the social sciences. Ernst Cassirer, a pioneer in this movement and almost an exact contemporary of Malinowski, stated the problem succinctly in terms of a logical premise: "If I put out the light of my own personal experience I cannot see and cannot judge of the experience of others."2 Some, inspired by recent developments in economic and political thought, have set out to define the subtle linkages between institutions, interests, and ideologies as subterranean influences on anthropological writing. In both cases, however, the first necessary step toward overcoming the distortions that these arguments warn against is to provide a sort of travel brochure about the journey before it begins. At a minimum it should identify the point of departure, the itinerary, the destination, and any important facts about the traveler that may be relevant to understanding the angle of vision. Some such information is contained in later chapters, but the protocol requires that a few preliminaries be given here.

My interest in the ethnography of Islamic preaching was first stimulated by Richard T. Antoun, a foremost specialist in Middle East anthropology who was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1977. With the help of several other teachers, notably Victor Turner and Stanley Tambiah, I was already immersed in the study of ritual systems and social structures. With the encouragement of Fazlur Rah-man, I was then attempting to fit these insights together with issues of religious authority in the Islamic tradition and particularly the Arab world.

But my ideas about how I might trace these patterns out on the ground were still embarrassingly vague. It was Antoun who guided me patiently, wisely, in the framing of the original project. In the process he also fanned an ember of curiosity about the often mentioned but virtually never examined role of the village mosque preacher into a beacon that would eventually illuminate aspects of this potentially pivotal figure at multiple levels of involvement.

All of this occurred, of course, before the Ayatollah Khomeini exploded into the world's headlines, before Islamic fundamentalism became a byword among policymakers and journalists, and shortly before Egypt sprang over a vast diplomatic abyss in a single bound by inaugurating the process that led to the separate peace with Israel. When I began preparing the project I quickly discovered that most specialists treated my concern for local Islamic preachers as a quaint, slightly irrelevant, slightly colorful choice. When I returned from the field in the fall of 1979, however, I found almost instantly that a marvelous reversal had taken place. Now all of a sudden Islamic preachers were a topic of wide interest and great vogue, counting among the matters to be reckoned with at the highest councils of responsible concern. I, of course, while I appreciated the vindication of my early inclination, only regretted the need to disclaim any part in effecting this overdue revision of priorities.

Nevertheless, having come to this issue in advance of the great rush to understand Islam as a global force, I had already come to realize how altogether overlooked these figures were in the existing literature. It both bewildered and befuddled me at the time to encounter appalling gaps and even more the gross disparity of chronological emphasis that marked the standard literature of Middle East/Islamic studies. It was far easier to find information on preachers in eighth-century Damascus or eleventh-century Baghdad, for instance, than on their successors in the pulpits of any Arab nation in the last fifty years. I was learning by default the prevailing biases of the academic world, soon to be denounced as "orientalism," with regard to this tradition which Antoun and many other pioneers were then beginning to change. It was evident that research interests tended to cluster around the two extremes of the exotic and the powerful. But my concern was to discover the structure and the character of local practice, the familiar, the current, and the representative behavior...