Howard Burton - Religious Entrepreneurs?: A Conversation with Nile Green

Nile Green likes to talk about religious entrepreneurs, religious suppliers and terrains of exchange, when the rest of us speak of charismatic leaders, emerging sects and clashes of civilizations. What, exactly, is going on? Just some abstract, academic relabelling exercise?

Unlikely. Because Nile is hardly your standard ivory-tower type of historian, wilfully removed from life in the field. Instead, this dynamic UCLA historian of religion is a self-confessed inveterate traveler who consciously adopts the practices of a cultural anthropologist to illuminate his historical understanding.

Im interested in trying to apply the totality of anthropology: that everything is interconnected and cant be taken separately. This is naturally associated with the classical kind of fieldwork model of choosing a small village or some localized area that you can master, in order to see how everything is wrapped up together there: ideology, belief, ritual, daily work, marriage, kinship, and so forth.

As my research developed over the years, Ive attempted to make use of the real-life intellectual lessons Ive gained from interacting with people: staying in a town for months at a time or making repeated visits, forming relationships with people and observing how things work in the present so as to try to understand core principles of social life, human life.

Religion in the world, religion in the social world, became my speciality. Ive long been focused on trying to flesh out these core principles or processes and evaluate how they change over time, whether they repeat themselves or can be seen to be happening in different ways over timethis is all linked to my central motivation of trying to apply the lessons of the present to the past.

A different sort of historian, then, surely. But whats all this talk of so-called religious economy? Why the off-putting, clinical and somewhat precious-sounding vocabulary?

In the first place, as Nile explained to me, because this language necessarily leads us to regard religion as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon, transcending our naive notions of it being both well-defined and unchanging.

I didnt invent the notion of religious economy, but I think Im the first person to systematically apply it to the study of Islam. What Im trying to do with this model of religious economy is to effectively say, For meas a social historian and social scientistreligion belongs, and is developed, and has its life, in this world.

Religion is developed, exchanged, reshaped and reinvented through interactions between different people. Im trying to map who creates religion, and who consumes, or practices religion. Theres a dynamic between a production side and a consumption side, to use the analytical vocabulary of the religious economy model.

This model makes us realize that religion isnt as were often taught to conceive it. Religion isnt something that, in the case of Christianity, was invented by this fellow called Jesusor some Apostles, or a few significant people laterand then handed down, fully-formed, over the centuries.

Another thing that invoking the religious economy model naturally achieves, Nile assured me, is to immediately present the user with a richer, more descriptive vocabulary to gauge the diversity of religious experiences that might well elude a non-expert observer. This is, he maintains, particularly relevant when it comes to regarding Islam (his area of specialization) through traditional Western eyes.

In the West, were more familiar with, and have lived through, Christian history and Jewish history in various degrees. We have that richer vocabulary of description of, say, Orthodox Jews and Reformist Jews. Similarly for Christianity, we all know very well that there are Baptists and Methodists. We understand and appreciate all of that variety.

The difficulty with Islam is twofold. One difficulty is that there is a lack of familiarity and conceptual clarity. Perhaps we have an idea of Sunnis and Shiites, and some people might know that there are these guys called Sufis. But thats a pretty narrow range for upwards of a billion or more people.

The second problem with that paucity of vocabulary is that, since the 19th century, through the discourse of Islamic reform and Pan-Islamism, Muslims themselves have been invested in saying that we are one: one ummah, one global community. In other words, practicing Muslims themselves are invested in obscuring that very plurality.

But as I foresee it, there will be an increasing pluralization and fragmentation of Islamic authority, which is already going on in the world today.

Nile understands all too well that his religious economy model might be off-putting to many, both in and outside of academe. But in many ways that seems to be very much the point of the exercise.

In Terrains of Exchange, one of the things I expressly say is that this whole vocabulary functions as an anti-rhetoric, because I want to shake people out of thinking, This is an imam, this is a Sufi, this is a Muslim; and I know what they do. I want to create this kind of anti-rhetoric that makes people start afresh.

Its a conscious way of moving beyond this idea that we already know what imams are and we know what it is that they do. It also creates a level playing field for many readers who are trying to go that one step deeper with the study of Islam. Perhaps they now have some familiarity with terms like imam, Shiite, Sunni, Sufi or sheikh. I want to say that, in a sense, you can forget all of that. All of these people are religious suppliers: thats whats important.

Important for what, exactly? Well, to go beyond the stereotypes and get a deeper understanding of the past, present and maybe future of what is happening throughout the Islamic world and our own from Sufis to ISIS.

Nile is, after all, not just an expert on Islamic history, but a global historian, a scholar intent on detecting and analyzing processes and principles that apply to many different geographical and cultural regions simultaneously.

And his book, Terrains of Exchange, is not simply an account of how the Christian missionary movement affected the development of Islam in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is also about how modified forms of Islam that resulted from interactions with these missionaries were, in turn, repackaged and exported to places like Detroit, Michigan and Kobe, Japan.