Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam
Author(s)
Hamid el-Zein, Abdul
Abstract
In the course of intellectual history, Islam came to be understood as a unified religious tradition and, in common with other institutional religions, taken as a guide to its own understanding. The concept of Islam thus defined the nature of the subject matter and its appropriate modes of interpretation or explanation, but discoveries emergent within this framework have begun to contradict these premises. In order to reveal the significance and complexity of this problem, this review examines two apparently opposed positions on Islam: the “anthropological” and the “theological.” Five anthropological studies are taken to represent the internal variation within the anthropological perspective, while a general commentary suffices to describe the more standardized theological paradigm. The paper concludes that the logic of relations implies that neither Islam nor the notion of religion exists as a fixed autonomous form referring to positive content which can be reduced to universal and unchanging characteristics. Religion becomes an arbitrary category which as a unified and bounded form has no necessary existence. “Islam” as an analytical category dissolves as well.
