3 - Social Science Approaches to Understanding Religious Practice: The Special Case of the Hajj

Summary

For much of the 1980s, I was a member of an international Committee for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies, established under the joint auspices of the American Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. The focus of our interest was not “Islam” in some disembodied, essential and timeless sense, but Muslims, the social actors who, as believers, interpret, understand, enunciate, and enact all that “Islam” means to them in whatever time and place. Interpretatively, we were interested in trying to understand and employ indigenous conceptual systems rather than imposing on Muslim social behaviour Western analytical categories. Wilfred Cantwell Smith declared many years ago that “Anything that I say about Islam as a living faith is valid only in so far as Muslims can say ‘amen’ to it. … Where the encounter is between the academic tradition of the West and [Islam] the statement that is evolved must satisfy each of two traditions independently and transcend them both by satisfying both simultaneously”. The anthropologist Victor Turner (whose work is central to this essay) quoted at one point an earlier anthropologist, E. E. Evans Pritchard, who is said to have remarked that “it is all too easy, when translating the conceptions of other people into our own, to transplant our thought into theirs”, and Turner himself goes on to speak of the problems of, as well as the need for, making intelligible many of the “cryptic phenomena” of religion in societies other than our own. Counsels such as these are salutary, but not always easy to follow. What is important however, I assume, is to listen carefully to what people say, while attending with equally close attention to the texts according to which they claim to act.