Rezensiertes Werk: Hanafi El Siofi, Mona: Der Westen : ein Sodom und Gomorrah? Westliche Frauen und Männer im Fokus ägyptischer Musliminnen. - Sulzbach/Taunus : Helmer, 2009. - 212 S. ISBN: 978-3-89741-281-1
So much has been written in recent years on Muslims who consciously and consistently aim to be pious, moral, and disciplined that the vast majority of Muslims who – like most of humankind – are sometimes but not always pious, at times immoral, and often undisciplined have remained in the shadow of an image of Islam as a perfectionist project of self‐discipline. Taking the month of Ramadan, as a time of exceptional piety, as a starting‐point, this paper tries to account for the different views and experiences that young people of Muslim faith in a northern Egyptian village articulate, the models of action and subjectivity they have access to, and the contradictory outcomes that the Islamic revivalist ideal of perfection has for some of them.RésuméIl a tellement été question, ces dernières années, de musulmans consciemment et constamment soucieux d'être pieux, moraux et disciplinés que la grande majorité des musulmans, qui sont parfois pieux mais pas toujours, parfois immoraux et souvent indisciplinés, comme le reste de l'humanité, est restée dans l'ombre de cette image de l'islam comme projet d'autodiscipline perfectionniste. En prenant pour point de départ le Ramadan, période de piété particulière, l'auteur tente de rendre compte de différents points de vue exprimés par les jeunes musulmans d'un village du Nord de l'Égypte, des modèle d'action et de subjectivité qui leur sont ouverts et des résultats contradictoires que donne pour certains d'entre eux l'idéal de perfection portée par l'idée d'un renouveau islamique.
Imaginations, expectations, and motivations that propel the pursuit of migration Although contemporary migration in and from Africa can be understood as a continuation of earlier forms of interregional and international migration, current processes of migration seem to have taken on a new quality. This volume argues that one of the main reasons for this is the fact that local worlds are increasingly measured against a set of possibilities whose referents are global, not local. Due to this globalization of the personal and societal horizons of possibilities in Africa and elsewhere, in many contexts migration gains an almost inevitable attraction while, at the same time, actual migration becomes increasingly restricted. Based on detailed ethnographic accounts, the contributors to this volume focus on the imaginations, expectations, and motivations that propel the pursuit of migration. Decentring the focus of much of migration studies on the 'receiving societies', the volume foregrounds the subjective aspect of migration and explores the impact which the imagination and practice of migration have on the sociocultural conditions of the various local settings concerned.
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As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban planning, regional networks, imaginary spaces, and spiritual hierarchies alike. This importance of saintly places has, however, become increasingly complicated and troubled by reformist currents within Islam, on the one hand, and the emergence of modern archeology and anthropology, on the other. While they have often tended to posit 'the local' in opposition to 'the universal', in this volume islamologists, anthropologists, and sociologists offer new ways of thinking about the local, the place, and the conceptual landscapes and spaces of saints. In this, its eighth volume, the Yearbook for the Sociology of Islam looks at different sites and regions around the Muslim world (notably Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia) not as 'localized' versions of a universal Islam, but as constitutive of one particular outlook of the universalizing order of a world religion.
As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban planning, regional networks, imaginary spaces, and spiritual hierarchies alike. This importance of saintly places has, however, become increasingly complicated and troubled by reformist currents within Islam, on the one hand, and the emergence of modern archeology and anthropology, on the other. While they have often tended to posit 'the local' in opposition to 'the universal', in this volume islamologists, anthropologists, and sociologists offer new ways of thinking about the local, the place, and the conceptual landscapes and spaces of saints. In this, its eighth volume, the Yearbook for the Sociology of Islam looks at different sites and regions around the Muslim world (notably Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia) not as 'localized' versions of a universal Islam, but as constitutive of one particular outlook of the universalizing order of a world religion.
Shared Margins tells of writers, writing, and literary milieus in Alexandria, Egypt's second city. It de-centres cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, it offers a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, and their common grounds and lines of division.
Shared Margins tells of writers, writing, and literary milieus in Alexandria, Egypt's second city. It de-centres cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, it offers a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, and their common grounds and lines of division. Structured in two parts, Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination, and of a life-worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with the intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011. Literary writing, this book argues, has marginality as an at once enabling and limiting condition. It provides shared spaces of imaginary excess that may go beyond the taken-for-granted of a societal milieu, and yet are never unlimited. Literary imagination is part and parcel of such social conflicts and transformations, its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms, but rather one of open-ended complicity.