William R. Roff - Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning (RLE Economy of Middle East)

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
THE ECONOMY OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Volume 16

ISLAM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MEANING

ISLAM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MEANING

Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse

Edited by
WILLIAM R. ROFF

First published in 1987

This edition first published in 2015
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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1987 Social Science Research Council, New York

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ISBN: 978-1-138-78710-0 (Set)
eISBN: 978-1-315-74408-7 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-81838-5 (Volume 16)
eISBN: 978-1-315-74496-4 (Volume 16)

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Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning

COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF MUSLIM DISCOURSE

Edited by WILLIAM R. ROFF

CROOM HELM
London & Sydney

1987 Social Science Research Council, New York
Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row,
Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT

Croom Helm Australia, 4450 Waterloo Road,
North Ryde, 2113, New South Wales

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Islam and the political economy of meaning.
1. Islam and politics
I. Roff, William R.
297.1977 BP173.7

ISBN 0-7099-4248-6

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Billing & Sons Limited, Worcester.

Earlier versions of most of the chapters in this book, together with some not appearing here, were prepared for a meeting held in New York City in May, 1984, sponsored by the Joint Committees on South Asia and on Southeast Asia of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. We should like to thank these committees for their hospitality and the committee on South Asia for its support of two earlier meetings in 1979 and 1983 which similarly set out to explore the indigenous conceptual systems of Muslims.

A particular debt of gratitude is owed to David L. Szanton, of the Social Science Research Councils staff, whose intellectual contribution was quite as large as his administrative.

W.R.R.

Any book that draws on materials in six major Islamic languages Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Bengali, Malay, and Hausa, with some additional cognates such as Yoruba and Javanese faces considerable problems of transliteration. The system employed here, with as much consistency as possible, has been to use for Arabic that given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1972: Vol. 2, 18284), with other letters added to represent non-Arabic sounds in Persian, Urdu and Malay. Diacritics have been omitted, except in the Glossary, where they are given in full.

Arabic-derived terms occurring in languages other than Arabic are spelled in the way common in those languages (mallam rather than muallam, for example). So are personal (and some proper) names, which are given in locally preferred rather than artificially Arabicized forms (Usuman dan Fodio, and Abdurrahman, for example, rather than Uthman ibn Fudi, and Abd al-Rahman).

The essays in this book seek to address one central question: How may we understand the nature, impulse, and dynamic of Muslim social and political action? More specifically, what are the relationships, direct or dialectical, between the prescriptions and requirements of Islamic belief, socially reproduced (of being Muslim, in short), and the economic, political, and social circumstances of the lives of actual Muslims? In trying to answer this question, the essays have as a shared premiss the assumption that what Muslims say and therefore the analysis of Muslim discourse about such matters must have a central role in the enquiry.

In introducing the collection, however, which ranges very widely, from Nigeria and North Africa to Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia, and from the eighteenth century to the present, it might be as well to ask first a prior question. Why should we expect Muslims in such diverse contexts and from such different backgrounds to behave in ways shaped in any important, commonly identifiable fashion by an understanding of what it means to be Muslim, rather than, for example, by their shared peripheral relationship to the world capitalist order, by the demographics of rapid population increase, urban growth, and underemployment, or by statism and the rebirth-pangs of the post-colonial era? There can be little dispute that significant elements of a shared religious culture are in fact a feature of the social lives of Muslims from Dahomey to Doha and Dacca among them, for example, a sacred text and set of symbols, a vocabulary of moral suasion, the practical knowledge associated with Islamic educational and juridical institutions, and the sodalities of the Sufi orders. It is therefore reasonable to enquire how elements of this shared culture, reproduced and given meaning anew in local terms from the Nejd to Nigeria, shape responses to (and are themselves shaped by) the harsh or subtle facts of political and economic life. How are the real or supposed imperatives of being Muslim understood, and in what terms and by whom, and with what social implications are they expressed, conveyed, urged, argued, and acted upon?

Not all the contributors to this book would necessarily answer, or indeed address, these questions in the same way (and none, it must be emphasized, assumes a reified, essentialist Islam, divorced from real Muslims). What does distinguish them is a common recognition of the need to explore the reflexive relationships between Islamic beliefs, ideas, ideologies, institutional forms, and prescriptive roles, socially reproduced by given groups of Muslims, and the political, economic, and other salient conditions under which these and other specifically situated Muslims live. It is this attempt to understand how Muslim discourses about their lives are constituted, through the linking of symbolic or cultural analysis of what is said and done with analysis of the material and other conditions in which the saying and doing occur, that we intend when we refer to the political economy of meaning. As Eickelman notes, in the essay that begins the book, an adequate political economy of meaning must rest on a proper balance between attention to the communication and development of complex systems of knowledge and practice, and the ways in which these systems inform and are informed by configurations of political domination and economic relations. Our primary aim has been to strive for and so far as possible to exemplify this balance, or at the very least to draw attention to the need for it and to the means of attaining it.