Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with certain aspects of transformation of "tribalism" - a phenomenon that has long formed and featured the social and political structures in Balochistan, accentuating specifically the role and significance of the genealogies of the Balochi tribes.

Paper long abstract:

The paper deals with certain aspects of transformation of "tribalism" - a phenomenon that has long formed and featured the social and political structures in Balochistan, accentuating specifically the role and significance of the genealogies of the Balochi tribes. In the Islamic environment of Balochistan, the traditional aspects of tribalism currently undergo major transformations - in some aspects completely vanishing - thus, creating a space for developing new manifestations of Baloch identity. Genealogies of the Balochi tribes appear as an important tool for maintaining the affiliation with both the religious and political figures of the past. Without a solid "shajaranamah" - genealogical tree - the members of tribe become vulnerable in facing the challenges of the above-mentioned transformations. Certain Balochi tribes possess century old genealogical trees attested and preserved in handwritten forms, meanwhile many other tribes under the competing circumstances over social and political statuses and authority feel free to "craft" fresh genealogies that present prominent religious figures, mainly from Sufi tradition, as ancestors.

The paper is based on materials of ethnographic fieldwork in Iranian Balochistan during 2018-2019.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a study of Twelver Shi'i Muslim rituals in Leipzig Germany. I focus on the ways Shi'i Muslims create rituals. The paper will specifically examine Muharram rituals through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). The research presents new questions of power and relationality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a study of Twelver Shi'i Muslim rituals in Leipzig Germany. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the ways Shi'i Muslims create rituals, both individually and in communal settings. The paper will specifically examine Muharram rituals through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). By investigating Muharram rituals as an object, rather than as a socio-cultural occurrence or event, the research presents new questions of power and relationality. Furthermore, OOO starts from a flat ontology, which opens up the space to consider both human and non-human components that emerge together as elements of the ritual. This post-humanist perspective challenges traditional dichotomies between subjects and objects, nature and culture, and local and global, which calls into question the ontological precepts of the anthropology of Islam.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore the dynamics of the construction and maintenance of female religious circles (halaqat) linked to Kuftariyya, a Sufi damascene network organized around Shaykh Ahmed Kuftaro (d.2004).The ethnographic material analyzed here is resulted of my fieldwork in Damascus (2009-2010).

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore the dynamics of the construction and maintenance of female religious circles (halaqat) linked to Kuftariyya, a Sufi damascene network organized around Shaykh Ahmed Kuftaro (d.2004),who was the Grand Mufti of Syria for 40 years. The stability of these halaqat is based on the charismatic relationship connecting the female religious authorities of each circle to her followers, as well as on their ability to manage the halaqat's routines according to Islamic values. In this particular combination of charismatic and bureaucratic relationships, power relations and hierarchical positions are created in the halaqat. In order to address this question, this presentation will focus on different rituals and everyday practices connected to the female halaqat, showing how notions of "example", "model", and "imitation" of their spiritual leaders are mobilised by their followers. The ethnographic material analyzed here is resulted of my fieldwork in Damascus,Syria, from 2009-2010.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation is an ethnographic analysis of the Sufi practice of edep/adab [beautiful conduct].It shows how young Sufi dervishes in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, practice ethical self-cultivation, through exercising their imaginations about constitutes the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad.

Paper long abstract:

Postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina has witnessed resurgence of Islamic practice resulting with different forms of relatedness to Bosnian Islamic tradition. These are challenging the existing Orthopraxy of the official Islamic Community. In this paper I show how young Naqshbandi dervishes are deploying tradition in order to establish continuity with their Sufi practices in post-Yugoslav Sarajevo. In doing so, they are creating a counter narrative to newer forms of more fundamentalist approaches to Islam, such as Salafism. I pay attention to how they exercise their imagination in constructing a modern discourse on embodying the Prophet's sunna through the old and polyvalent idiom of edep/adab [good / beautiful conduct].With this, my presentation analyses a novel, and neglected aspect of the role adab plays in constructing the Sufi "culture of belief" (Jonatan Meir 2012) in post-Yugoslav Sarajevo.

I show how such grass root practices are vying for re-introduction of Sufism into the mainstream Islam of the Islamic Community, as a part of the "discursive tradition" (Talal Asad 1986).

This presentation is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of the sanctuary (dargah) of Nova Sofala, Mozambique, in a vast transnational network of resources mobilized by the Al Qadriyah mosque, in Lisbon, exploring post-colonial continuities, Islamic normativities and religious subjectivities in the "peripheries of charisma".

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography in Portugal and Mozambique, this paper examines the transnational links that connect the congregation of the Al Qadriyah mosque, a small place of worship aligned with charismatic, sufi-inspired, Islam in the outskirts of Lisbon, with "places of power" located in Mozambique, where most of its congregation originates. It focuses, more specifically, on the dargah (the tomb of a Muslim saint) of Nova Sofala, near the Mozambican city of Beira, and explores the way in which this place has been historically constructed as a source of spiritual power and mobilized as a legitimizing element of charismatic muslimness. If, on the one hand, the dargah of Nova Sofala has played a central role in the intra-religious debates in Mozambique around the "correct" way of being Muslim, the controversies about its status and legitimacy also illuminate the relationship between Islam and the Mozambican (colonial and post-colonial) state apparatus, as well as the diasporic dynamics that shaped the implantation of a Muslim community in Portugal. In this study, ethnographic data on the pilgrimage to Nova Sofala, as it is exists today, intertwines with the memories of my interlocutors in Lisbon, elucidating the role of the dargah in the construction of their religious subjectivities. Thus, for many Muslims of the Al Qadriyah mosque, the dargah of Nova Sofala now appears as a remote anchor of a charismatic Islam that, in Portugal, continues to occupy an ultra-peripheral place, but also as a catalyst for an ambiguous relationship with the colonial past.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the connections between the shaping of religious subjectivity and the production of layers of belonging among members of the Gülen community in Brazil by analysing the performance of their religious ritual practices.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the connections between the shaping of religious subjectivity and the production of layers of belonging among members of the Gülen community in Brazil. It analyses the religious ritual practices that are performed by community members as part of their religious service (hizmet), understood as a means through which develop themselves, both intellectually and morally, and at the same time reform global society. Those religious ritual practices comprehend prayers, obligatory and optional, as well as various kinds of supplications. Members of the Gülen community in Brazil are participants of the Gülen Movement, named after the charismatic religious leader Fethullah Gülen, who was held responsible for the failed coup in Turkey by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After the failed coup and the ensuing crackdown on the Gülen Movement, religious rituals performed by members of the Gülen community in Brazil included supplications that asked God and Prophet Muhammad to help the Movement participants who were emprisioned as suspects in the attempted coup - and remain in prison - and also to save Turkey by putting the nation on the Movement's pathway. These inclusions to the religious ritual practices of community members correspond to the Movement's discourse on hizmet as a service to mankind; while also highlighting the connections between subjectivity and the production of senses of belonging, both to a religious community and an objectified nation, amidst participants. The data presented here were collected during ethnographic fieldwork with the Gülen community in Brazil between March 2015 and February 2020.