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Themes and Symbols in the Religious Lesson: A Jordanian Case Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

Richard T. Antoun
Richard T. Antoun
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Binghamton, P.O. Box 6000, Binghamton, N.Y. 13902, U.S.A.
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Extract

My interest in the religious lesson (dars) springs from field research on religious life in a Transjordanian village conducted intermittently over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1959 and culminating in a (1989) book on the Muslim preacher and the Islamic sermon (khuṭba). That book did not describe or analyze the dars, but it assumed that its content was distinctive and different from the khuṭba. It expounded practical rather than legal norms of behavior and provided useful information on day-to-day religious obligations, what constituted violations of mores, and the rituals of marriage, birth, and death, rather than conveying meaning through core images and metaphors. The assumption was that the sermon dealt mainly with messages of religious exhortation and the lesson dealt with the legal and ritual aspects of religion. I also assumed that the ethos of the dars allowed ritual freedom and a fair amount of give-and-take between preacher and audience, while the khuṭba was informed by an ethos of ritual order. In terms of rhetoric, I assumed that although the sermon often involved a “transformation of quality [imaginative] space” (the phrase is that of James Fernandez), the lesson did not. Finally, I assumed that the lesson emphasized the preacher's role as “home-town boy” (ibn al-balad) far more than the sermon did, as expressed, for instance, in its dependence on colloquial speech and minimal use of theological themes. The detailed description and analysis below has led me to reconsider these assumptions.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , November 1993 , pp. 607 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

Author's note: An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Workshop on Local Interpretations of Islamic Scripture at Washington University in St. Louis in June 1991. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the International Journal of Middle East Studies for their comments.

1 Antoun, Richard T., Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, N.J., 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Antoun, , Muslim Preacher, 98–101Google Scholar.

3 See Antoun, , Muslim Preacher, 71–74, 120–22Google Scholar. “Ethos” here means (following Honigmann, John J., Culture and Personality [New York, 1954], 42–43Google Scholar) “the emotional quality of socially patterned behavior…reflect[ing] the motivational state of the actor,” and more broadly (following Geertz, Clifford, “Ethos, World-View and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” Antioch Review 17, 4 [12 1957]: 421CrossRefGoogle Scholar), “the tone, character and quality of their [a people's] life, its moral and aesthetic style, and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects.”

4 See Fernandez, James, “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture,” Current Anthropology 115, 2 (June 1974): 119–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Antoun, , Muslim Preacher, chaps. 1, 3, and 9Google Scholar for analysis of the role of the preacher as culture broker and, more broadly, for the analysis of the social organization of tradition in Muslim and non-Muslim contexts. The gap in sophistication between the preacher and his audience has become far narrower than it was in 1959 when I began doing my research in Jordan, owing mainly to the explosion in international migration for education and work that accelerated in the 1970s.

6 See the foreword by Fischer, Michael M. J. and Abedi, Mehdi in A Clarification of QuestionsGoogle Scholar, a translation of Risāla Tawīḥ al-Masāʾil by Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, trans. Borujerdi, J. (1984)Google Scholar; Gaffney, Patrick, “Islamic Religious Instruction on the Edge of the Establishment: The Evening Lesson in Contemporary Egypt” (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 11 1991)Google Scholar for details.

7 During the years 1959–60 and 1965–67 I attended 38 lessons delivered by the preacher and prayer leader of Kufr al-Ma in the mosque; 16 in the first period, 21 in the second. Twenty-five of the 38 were delivered during the month of Ramadan and 14 were delivered on Friday before the congregational prayer; the remainder were delivered on weekdays after the midafternoon prayer. During the 1960s, when the data for this essay were collected, the social structure of the village was oriented to kinship and community loyalty: the village was divided roughly into three clan quarters, each clan subdivided into named patrilineages, approximately 79 percent of all villagers married within the village, and people tended to sort out their differences in the village guesthouses (mḍāfas) rather than the civil or religious courts. Almost 40 percent worked in agriculture-related occupations and another 20 percent as laborers or masons; most of the remainder were employed outside the village in the army or police (30%) but kept their families in the village. Roads were not paved, and only one bus a day made the round trip to Irbid, the nearest market town; see Antoun, , Arab Village (1972)Google Scholar and idem, Low-Key Politics (1979)Google Scholar for a more detailed description. Astonishing changes have occurred in the life of Jordanian villages since the middle 1970s, after the expansion of economic opportunities in the Arabian peninsula after the 1973 oil-pricing revolution: roads have been paved and thousands of automobiles and trucks ply them, villages have been electrified with a television in practically every home, and thousands of men have left not only the district but the country to work in the Arabian peninsula or go to school in Asia, Europe, or North America. The dars of this essay reflects the earlier rather than the later period

8 Because the mosque is a building in which events other than prayer take place, one cannot always impute an intense spirituality to all events that go on there.

9 See Antoun, , Muslim Preacher, 80–89Google Scholar, for the social implications of being a “son of the village“for the life of a Muslim preacher.

10 Recent scholarship on contemporary teaching in institutions of higher Islamic learning disagree about its ethos, some emphasizing the rote character of learning and others the possibility of give-and-take between teacher and student. See Eickelman's, DaleKnowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth Century Notable (Princeton, N.J., 1985)Google Scholar for the former view and Fischer's, MichaelIran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar, for the latter view. See also Gaffney's, Patrick “The Local Preacher and the Islamic Resurgence in Upper Egypt: An Anthropological Perspective,” in Religious Resurgence: Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, ed. Antoun, Richard and Hegland, Mary (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987)Google Scholar. In a more unsophisticated milieu—mosques in a middle-sized city in southern Egypt, more like our Jordanian case—Gaffney contrasts the sermons of two preachers, one of whom is more tolerant of discussion.

11 One should remember that my description of the dars in Jordan dates from the 1960s, Gaffney's of the dars in Egypt from the 1980s, and Fischer, and Abedi's, of the masāla-gūʾī in Iran probably from the 1970sGoogle Scholar. My description pertains to a peasant milieu in northern Jordan, Gaffney's to a middle-sized city in middle Egypt, and Fischer and Abedi's description is generalized for the country without distinguishing region or social type. These differences could be significant in determining differences in form and content of the dars and masāla-gūʾī.

12 See Antoun, , Muslim Preacher, 89–95Google Scholar, for a characterization of the preacher's sermons. Note, although the author attended only thirty-eight lessons, the list is longer because several lessons referred to more than one category, for example, ethical and theological, or ethical and religious history.

13 A11 Qurʾanic translations are those of Ali, Abdullah Yousuf, The Glorious Kuʾan (Libyan Arab Republic, 1973)Google Scholar.

14 At this point, a member of the lesson circle interrupted the preacher to ask about the possibility of his wife's visiting neighbors while he was in the market town.

15 I have treated the matter of the relationship of the ideal and pragmatic norms of modesty to the agricultural necessities of peasant life in a detailed essay, “On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: A Study in the Accommodation of Traditions,” American Anthropologist 70, 4 (08 1968):671–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 The end of Ramadan is the appropriate time to dispense supererogatory alms.

17 The sermon took place in the middle of the winter rainy season when the rains had not been abundant. Note here also the explicit connection, referred to earlier in Table 1, between immorality and drought.

18 One aids one's Muslim brother, if he is the oppressor, by restraining him from oppression.

19 See the Qurʾan, 85:22, 3:7, 31:41, and 43:4 for references to lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ and umm al-kitāb. The term, lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ, was used by the preacher to introduce a lesson on 8 January 1966. See also Fischer and Abedi's stimulating discussion of the multivocal symbolic implications of lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ and umm al-kitāb and, more generally, the significance of the written Qurʾan in relation to the oral, performative, dialogic Qurʾan in the tradition of Muslim Qurʾanic scholarship in Fischer, Michael M. J. and Abedi, Mehdi, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (Madison, Wisc., 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 3. The concept of logological (the logic of the word) analysis is discussed in Burke, Kenneth, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston, 1961)Google Scholar.

20 In a conversation (28 April 1991), my colleague, Fuad Khuri, pointed out that the problem of wealth as presented in the Qurʾan and many Traditions is not mainly in its making or keeping, but in its spending; I might add that the problem of its spending lies in the intentions that govern its distribution. Both of these points are illustrated in the following excerpt from Traditions of the Prophet, recited by the preacher in a lesson given on 26 February 1960:

There was a man to whom God granted learning but not wealth, he being sincere of intentions. He said, “If I had wealth I would expend it on good works.” His reward for both (learning and wealth) will be equal as a result of his intentions. There was another man to whom God granted wealth but not learning, he squandering his wealth without learning. He did not thereby through it [wealth] connect himself to the compassion of God or to the right [of salvation]. His is the most impure state. There was still another man to whom God granted neither wealth nor learning. He said, “If I had wealth I would expend it on good works,] he being sincere of intention. His sin for both [wealth and learning] are equal.

21 I have described and analyzed at some length the negative attitude toward politics, interpreted as “factionalism” (ḥizbiyya) and the focus on leadership in this Jordanian community and in other Muslim contexts (see Antoun, , Muslim Preacher, chap. 7Google Scholar).