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    Caeiro Mesa 2013 Final Abstract

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    Alexander Sebastian Gorin
    This document summarizes a presentation about debates around regulating fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) in the Arab world. It makes two main arguments: 1) The narrative of "chaos" from multiple fatwas conflates different phenomena like discourse circulation, authority concepts, media impacts, and the politicization of fatwas. These phenomena have varying assumptions about speech, agency, and religion-politics relations. 2) Calls to regulate ifta' (the issuing of fatwas) assume a modern secular nation-state view that problematizes how fatwas inhabit spaces between legal, ethical and political. The narrative cannot be ignored as it shapes debates about threats, uprisings and institution reforms in

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    Caeiro Mesa 2013 Final Abstract

    Uploaded by

    Alexander Sebastian Gorin
    80 views1 page
    This document summarizes a presentation about debates around regulating fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) in the Arab world. It makes two main arguments: 1) The narrative of "chaos" from multiple fatwas conflates different phenomena like discourse circulation, authority concepts, media impacts, and the politicization of fatwas. These phenomena have varying assumptions about speech, agency, and religion-politics relations. 2) Calls to regulate ifta' (the issuing of fatwas) assume a modern secular nation-state view that problematizes how fatwas inhabit spaces between legal, ethical and political. The narrative cannot be ignored as it shapes debates about threats, uprisings and institution reforms in

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    This document summarizes a presentation about debates around regulating fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) in the Arab world. It makes two main arguments: 1) The narrative of "chaos" from multiple fatwas conflates different phenomena like discourse circulation, authority concepts, media impacts, and the politicization of fatwas. These phenomena have varying assumptions about speech, agency, and religion-politics relations. 2) Calls to regulate ifta' (the issuing of fatwas) assume a modern secular nation-state view that problematizes how fatwas inhabit spaces between legal, ethical and political. The narrative cannot be ignored as it shapes debates about threats, uprisings and institution reforms in

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    80 views1 page

    Caeiro Mesa 2013 Final Abstract

    Uploaded by

    Alexander Sebastian Gorin
    This document summarizes a presentation about debates around regulating fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) in the Arab world. It makes two main arguments: 1) The narrative of "chaos" from multiple fatwas conflates different phenomena like discourse circulation, authority concepts, media impacts, and the politicization of fatwas. These phenomena have varying assumptions about speech, agency, and religion-politics relations. 2) Calls to regulate ifta' (the issuing of fatwas) assume a modern secular nation-state view that problematizes how fatwas inhabit spaces between legal, ethical and political. The narrative cannot be ignored as it shapes debates about threats, uprisings and institution reforms in

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 1

    47

    th
    MESA Annual Meeting - October 10-13, 2013
    P-3313 AME: Religion, Media and Politics: Perspectives from Anthropology

    Performativity, Agency, Citizenship: Debating the Chaos of Fatwas in the Arab World
    Alexandre Caeiro (QFIS)

    The twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of calls for regulating ifta in the Muslim world. A
    specific diagnosis appears today to be almost universally shared: the multiplication of fatwas in the
    public sphere has led to a chaos, causing perplexity among believers and constituting one of the major
    quandaries facing the ummah. A wide range of solutions targeting the state, religious institutions, media
    practitioners, and the Muslim community have been proposed. The problem nevertheless seems so
    intractable that the question increasingly asked is not how to regulate the production of fatwas, but
    whether regulation is at all possible in todays media-saturated world. Drawing on a variety of sources
    (from the proceedings of international fiqh conferences to religious talk shows), and reading them in
    light of anthropological scholarship on media, religion and politics, this paper makes two main
    arguments that seek to complicate the narrative of chaos.
    First, it argues that the narrative conflates a number of different phenomena, including the reflexive
    circulation of discourse within publics, shifting conceptions of knowledge and authority, the impact of
    new media technologies, the logics of the marketplace, the politicization of the fatwa, the regulation of
    deviant juvenile religiosities... These phenomena, however, are governed by incommensurable sets of
    assumptions regarding the performativity of ethical speech, the agency of Muslim subjects, and the
    proper relation between religion and politics.
    Second, the paper proposes to see the urgency underlying current calls for regulating ifta as the result
    of a distinctively modern understanding of the functions of the fatwa itself. I argue that the discourse of
    chaos presupposes the secular temporality of the modern nation-state, and suggest that efforts to
    regulate the production of fatwas must ultimately be placed in the context of a secular imperative of
    clarity an imperative that continually problematizes the fatwa and its mode of inhabiting the
    interstitial spaces between the legal, the ethical, and the political.
    Despite these shortcomings, the narrative of chaos cannot be dismissed because it has become the basis
    of much public deliberation throughout the Arab world, shaping debates about the threat of
    international terrorism, the legitimacy of popular uprisings, or the reform of religious and educational
    institutions. In conclusion, I suggest how we might trace more precisely the performative effects of this
    discourse, the ambivalence of the media ecology upon which it depends, and the reconfiguration of
    pious subjectivity that it enables.

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