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Islam and the Gendered Discourses of Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

Lila Abu-Lughod
Lila Abu-Lughod
Affiliation:
Teaches anthropology at New York University, 25 Waverly Place, New York, N.Y. 10003, U.S.A.
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On a bright day in January 1987, my host in the Awlad ʿAli bedouin community in Egypt in which I had been doing research invited me to accompany him on a con dolence call. He knew how enthusiastic I was about visiting people who stillcamped in traditional tents in the desert, and this set of families, he assured me, lived in a beautiful area. The group's patriarch had died twenty days ago, but my host had been too busy to go so only his younger brothers had paid their respects. He had just heard, though, that the bereaved family was upset he had not come himself. So we drove off in his car, with his two cowives in the back seat, stop ping at the market town nearby to buy a fat sheep to take with us. As they loaded the beast into his car, my host complained about how expensive sheep had be come. The sound of its bleating in the trunk reminded me of trips to weddings, when sheep are also obligatory gifts.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , May 1993 , pp. 187 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

References

NOTES

Author's note: An early version of this paper was presented at the conference on “Lament” at the University of Texas at Austin, April 1989. I am grateful to Steven Feld, the organizer, and to the other conference participants for questions that helped me reformulate the central arguments of the paper. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for IJMES and Nadia Abu-Zahra for their suggestions. The translations of the songs of loss would have been more wooden without Timothy Mitchell's good sugges tions. Transcriptions of these songs as well as all phrases and Arabic words approximate the Awlad ʿAli dialect. A Fulbright Award under the Islamic Civilization Program enabled me to complete in 1987 much of the research in Egypt on which this paper is based.

1 For a description of a funeral, see Abu-Lughod, Lila, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Be douin Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), 21Google Scholar.

2 For exceptions see Abu-Zahra, Nadia, “The Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Islamic Rituals,” Arab Historical Review for Ottoman Studies 3–4 (December 1991): 7–38Google Scholar; Lane, Edward, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London, 1842), 474Google Scholar; Wickett, Elizabeth, “‘For Our Destinies’: The Funerary Laments of Upper Egypt” (Ph.D. diss. in progress, University of Pennsylvania)Google Scholar. By contrast, the literature on laments in Greece is substantial, including the classic by Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar and more recently, Caraveli, Anna, “The Bitter Wounding: The Lament as Social Protest in Rural Greece,” in Gender and Power in Rural Greece, ed. Dubisch, Jill (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 169–94Google Scholar; Danforth, Loring and Tsiaras, Alexander, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton, N.J., 1982)Google Scholar; Seremetakis, C. Nadia, The Last Word (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar.

3 The literature on these issues is vast. For recent discussions, see Abu-Zahra, Nadia, “The Compara tive Study of Muslim Societies” and “The Rain Rituals as Rites of Spiritual Passage,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 20 (1988): 507–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Antoun, Richard, Muslim Preacher in the Modern World (Princeton, N.J., 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Asad, Talal, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” (Washington, D.C., 1986)Google Scholar; Boddy, Janice, Wombs and Alien Spirits (Madison, Wisc., 1990)Google Scholar; Holy, Ladislav, “Gender and Ritual in an Islamic Society: The Berti of Darfur,” Man, n.s., 23 (September 1988): 469–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tapper, Nancy and Tapper, Richard, “The Birth of the Prophet: Ritual and Gender in Turkish Islam,” Man, n.s., 22 (March 1987): 69–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a review of some earlier literature on the anthropology of Islam, see also Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Anthropology's Orient,” in Theory, Politics, and the Arab World: Critical Re sponses, ed. Sharabi, Hisham (New York, 1990), 81–131Google Scholar.

4 See Abu-Zahra, ”The Comparative Study of Muslim Societies” for discussion of burial practices in urban Egypt and rural Tunisia.

5 Caraveli, , “The Bitter Wounding,” 185Google Scholar, notes a similar antagonism between the church and women's lamentation in Greece.

6 Good examples are Gilsenan, Michael, Recognizing Islam (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Roff, William, ed., Is lam and the Political Economy of Meaning (Berkeley, Calif., 1989)Google Scholar. But see Abu-Zahra, “The Com parative Study of Muslim Societies” and “The Rain Rituals,” for criticism of anthropologists' lack of familiarity with the Islamic textual traditions that inform many local practices and Asad's, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” for a criticism of anthropologists’ tendencies to exaggerate local differences and to deny any universality to Islam by failing to acknowledge a common discursive tradition involv ing reference to the founding texts of the Qurʾan and sunna.

7 For evidence of the gendered nature of death rituals in an agricultural community in Egypt, see El-Aswad, El-Sayed, “DeathRituals in Rural Egyptian Society: A Symbolic Study,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 16 (1987): 205–41Google Scholar.

8 Abu-Lughod, cf. Veiled Sentiments.

9 For a more complex, subtle, and profoundly evocative reflection on the symbolism of life and death in a Moroccan community, see Pandolfo, Stefania, “‘The Angel of Death Replied’: Absence and Longing in a Moroccan Space” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1991)Google Scholar.

10 See Blackman, Winifred, The Fellāḥīn of Upper Egypt (London, 1927), 121Google Scholar, for a report of a simi lar belief in Upper Egypt.

11 See Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, chap. 4, for a discussion of this relationship between sexuality and fertility.

12 On the relationship between weddings and circumcisions, see Abu-Lughod, , Veiled Sentiments, 136Google Scholar; Crapanzano, Vincent, “Rite of Return: Circumcision in Morocco,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, Vol. 9, ed. Muensterberger, W. and Boyer, L. B. (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

13 Abu-Zahra has explored the social development (in Cairo and the Sahel of Tunisia) of the hadiths that condemn lamentation as makrūh (disliked) but not ḥarām (forbidden) in her “The Comparative Study of Muslim Societies.”

14 The place of saintly lineages, collectively known in the western desert as the mrābṭīn is complex. They are clients (euphemistically called “brothers”) of particular Awlad ʿAli tribes; at the same time, many of them are considered religious figures. All of the holy men whose shrines dot the western desert come from these groups. Healers who work by trancing at a ḥaḍra come only from these tribes. See Abu-Lughod, , Veiled Sentiments; Meeker, Michael, Literature and Violence in North Arabia (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; Peters, Emrys, The Bedouin of Cyrenaica (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar.

15 The refusals of corpses to let themselves be carried to the grave was also reported by Blackman, , The Fellāḥīn of Upper Egypt, 113Google Scholar, who was given a similar explanation.

16 Abu-Lughod, , Veiled Sentiments, 67–69Google Scholar.

17 The question of personal experience is especially thorny because of the problems of “authenticity” raised by the conventionality of laments, formulaic songs, and even the structure and content of every day narratives. I argue in “Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry,” in Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Lutz, Catherine and Abu-Lughod, Lila (New York, 1990), 24–45Google Scholar, for a strategy of analyzing discourses of sentiment as they are pragmatically deployed in social interactions rather than as reflections of inner states. Catherine Lutz and I show in “Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life” (ibid., 1–23) how modem western ideologies of emotion as natural and individual make the conventionality of sentiment trigger charges of artifice or inauthenticity.

18 Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, chap. 8.

19 Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Honor and the Sentiments of Loss in a Bedouin Society,” American Ethnologist 12 (1985): 245–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 I show in Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley, Calif., 1993)Google Scholar, chap.5, how their religious status is currently undergoing change due to greater influence of urban Islamists who condemn many of their religious practices.

21 I am grateful to Nadia Abu-Zahra (personal communication) for drawing my attention to women's participation in burial practices.