This panel explores how creative practices and material objects serve as agents of expression, identity, and activism within Muslim communities globally. One paper focuses on ta’ziya production in Lucknow, India, highlighting the role of devotional objects in shaping Shi’i religious life and identity. Another paper discusses activism within the Claremont Main Road Mosque community in South Africa, challenging apartheid legacies and promoting solidarity with marginalized communities. A third examines the provision of religious educational services in Turkey, tailored specifically for conservative women, through fatwas provided by the Diyanet and its preachers. The final paper reevaluates the intellectual legacy of Muhammad ‘Abduh within modern Islamic reform movements, emphasizing his influences outside Salafism and his engagement with Sufism and practical philosophy. The panel aims to shed light on the multifaceted ways in which material culture, creative expression, and religious authority intersect to shape identities, activism, and reform within the global ummah.
The taʿziyas in South Asia are representations or replicas (shabih) of Imām Husayn’s tomb in Karbala. This paper will analyze the production of this Shiʿi devotional object, and innovations in materiality based on fieldwork conducted in Lucknow to uncover the type of materials used in making taʿziya and examine the backstory of taʿziya production. Innovations in the materiality of ephemeral Lakhnavi taʿziyas validate how makers are deluged with love and devotion towards the Ahl-e bait. The different types of materials and embellishments display an act of veneration or an outlet of devotion. This paper examines the devotional labour of taʿziya makers who belong to both Hindus and Muslim community backgrounds and where they situate themselves within the religious complex of Shiʿism in Lucknow in North India. Taking my lead from the conversation with makers and devotees and first-hand observation of the structure and functioning of this craft form; I aim to situate the taʿziya at the intersection between the aesthetic context of a craft form alongside its efficacy as a Shiʿa devotional object.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I contend that members of the Claremont Main Road Mosque community, in Cape Town, South Africa, live out an alternative mode of interreligious camaraderie, not simply tolerance of difference, but rather solidarity with oppressed communities. While interreligious relations are generally cordial in the city of Cape Town, there are moments of tension, especially in relation to the Zionist occupation of Palestinian lands, culture, and heritage. Through a scriptural lens, the mosque leadership opens up an ethics of interreligious action for Palestine with anti-Zionist Jews and Christians. In post-apartheid Cape Town, this praxis, I suggest, subverts a cultural normativity silencing forms of critique of the state of Israel in interreligious spaces. Consequently, Jews and Muslims in Cape Town side-step an orientalist fantasy, framing the conflict and occupation in Palestine on religious difference, and an interreligious anti-colonial politics for liberation is lived out.
This paper examines Turkey’s state-sponsored religious education for conservative women and its role in facilitating their individual-level ethical pursuits as Muslims. Focusing on Diyanet's presentation of the fatwa tradition as a bureaucratized “public service,” the administrative body overseeing religious affairs, it challenges the notion of Diyanet as a mere instrument of secular governance given ordinary Muslims' voluntary utilization of the fatwa. However, the paper simultaneously points out the partiality of the range of Diyanet’s Islamic authority, which springs from Turkey’s secularist past that allows for diverse interpretations of Islam to coexist. Through ethnographic data, the paper analyzes the agency of both fatwa seekers and state preachers revealed in interpersonal fatwa consultations. Illustrating how the interplay of bureaucratic structures and Islamic tradition formulates the agency of those involved in the Diyanet fatwa service, the paper delineates the range and modality of the authoritative state involvement in ordinary Muslims’ religious lives.
Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) is often portrayed a modernist Salafi reformer who sought to rationalise Sunni “orthodox” theology. This paper argues that such a characterisation is misleading: it operates with problematic notions of what constitutes “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” in Islam and fails to capture the intellectual complexity of ‘Abduh’s reformist oeuvre. This paper shifts the focus to his earliest mystical, philosophical and theological writings. While they are often dismissed as early intellectual formations without any further relevance for his reformist work later in his life, this paper argues that they are crucial to understanding ‘Abduh’s approach to Islamic reform. The paper reveals important continuities of certain concepts from his earlier to his later writings. His most prominent theological works and his Qur’an commentary, produced towards the end of his life, re-articulate ideas from his earliest mystical and philosophical writings in an idiom that appears more aligned with Sunni notions of orthodoxy.