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In this paper, we consider anthropology's long and, at times, problematic engagement with the study of Islam and Muslim societies. Specifically, we reflect critically on ongoing anthropological debates about the relationship between Islam and politics and suggest new terms of analysis. Although we pay attention to the state and formal politics, involving various social actors and organizations, we are also interested in everyday politics and micropolitics, arenas where anthropology proves especially adept. It is at the intersection of these multiple levels and where the field of politics is constituted in practice that we situate the analytical focus of the anthropology of Islam and politics in this Special Issue of theJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.RésuméLes auteurs s'intéressent ici à la longue, et parfois problématique histoire, de l'étude de l'islam et des sociétés musulmanes par l'anthropologie. L'accent est mis plus précisément sur une réflexion critique relative aux débats anthropologiques actuels sur les liens entre islam et politique, et sur l'exploration de nouveaux termes d'analyse. Tout en prêtant de l'attention à l'État et aux institutions politiques, impliquant différents acteurs sociaux et organisations, nous nous intéressons également à la politique au quotidien et à la micropolitique, domaines dans lesquels l'anthropologie s'avère particulièrement compétente. C'est à l'intersection de ces multiples niveaux, et là où le champ du politique est constitué dans la pratique, que nous situons le point focal de l'analyse anthropologique de l'islam et du politique dans ce numéro spécial duJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Muslim entrepreneurs from Kerala, South India, are at the forefront of India's liberalizing economy, keen innovators who have adopted the business and labour practices of global capitalism in both Kerala and the Gulf. They are also heavily involved in both charity and politics through activity in Kerala's Muslim public life. They talk about their 'social mindedness' as a combination of piety and economic calculation, the two seen not as excluding but reinforcing each other. By promoting modern education among Muslims, entrepreneurs seek to promote economic development while also embedding economic practices within a framework of ethics and moral responsibilities deemed to be 'Islamic'. Inscribing business into the rhetoric of the 'common good' also legitimizes claims to leadership and political influence. Orientations towards self‐transformation through education, adoption of a 'systematic' lifestyle, and a generalized rationalization of practices have acquired wider currency amongst Muslims following the rise of reformist influence and are now mobilized to sustain novel forms of capital accumulation. At the same time, Islam is called upon to set moral and ethical boundaries for engagement with the neoliberal economy. Instrumentalist analyses cannot adequately explain the vast amounts of time and money which Muslim entrepreneurs put into innumerable 'social' projects, and neither 'political Islam' nor public pietism adequately captures the possibilities or motivations for engagement among contemporary reformist‐orientated Muslims.RésuméLes entrepreneurs musulmans de l'état indien du Kerala sont en première ligne dans l'économie indienne en voie de libéralisation. Ces innovateurs ont adopté les pratiques d'entreprise et de gestion de la main‐d'œuvre du capitalisme global, aussi bien dans le Kerala que dans le Golfe Persique. Ils sont également très engagés dans la bienfaisance et la politique, par leur activité dans la vie publique des musulmans du Kerala. Ils parlent de leur « esprit social » comme d'une combinaison de piété et de calcul économique, lesquelles sont perçues non pas comme mutuellement exclusives mais comme se renforçant mutuellement. En promouvant une éducation moderne des musulmans, ils tentent de favoriser le développement économique tout en plaçant leurs pratiques économiques dans un cadre d'éthique et de responsabilités morales considéré comme « islamique ». En inscrivant les affaires dans la rhétorique du « bien commun », ils légitiment du même coup leurs revendications de leadership et d'influence politique. L'orientation vers la transformation de soi par le biais de l'éducation, l'adoption d'un mode de vie « systématique » et une rationalisation généralisée des pratiques ont été largement adoptées parmi les musulmans sous l'effet de l'influence croissante des réformistes, et elles sont à présent mobilisées à l'appui de nouvelles formes d'accumulation de capital. Dans le même temps, on invoque l'islam pour fixer des limites morales et éthiques à l'engagement dans l'économie néolibérale. Les analyses instrumentalistes ne suffissent pas à expliquer la masse de temps et d'argent que les entrepreneurs musulmans consacrent à d'innombrables projets « sociaux ». Ni l'islam « politique » ni le piétisme public ne peuvent non plus rendre compte de façon adéquate des possibilités ou motivations d'engagement des musulmans réformistes contemporains.

AbstractThis paper critiques ethnographic tendencies to idealise and celebratesufi'traditionalism' as authentically South Asian. We perceive strong academic trends of frank distaste for reformism, which is then inaccurately—and dangerously buttressing Hindutva rhetoric—branded as going against the grain of South Asian society. This often goes along with (inaccurate) branding of all reformism as 'foreign inspired' orwah'habi. Kerala'sMujahids(Kerala Naduvathul Mujahideen [KNM]) are clearly part of universalistic trends and shared Islamic impulses towards purification. We acknowledge the importance to KNM of longstanding links to the Arab world, contemporary links to the Gulf, wider currents of Islamic reform (both global and Indian), while also showing how reformism has been producing itself locally since the mid-19th century. Reformist enthusiasm is part of Kerala-wide patterns discernable across all religious communities: 1920s and 1930s agitations for a break from the 19th century past; 1950s post-independence social activism; post 1980s religious revivalism. Kerala's Muslims (like Kerala Hindus and Christians) associate religious reformism with: a self-consciously 'modern' outlook; the promotion of education; rallying of support from the middle classes. There is a concomitant contemporary association of orthoprax traditionalism with 'backward', superstitious and un-modern practices, troped as being located in rural and low-status locations.

The authors in this volume discuss contemporary Islamic reformism in South Asia in some of its diverse historical orientations and geographical expressions, bringing us contemporary ethnographic perspectives against which to test claims about processes of reform and about trends such as 'Islamism' and 'global Islam'. The very use of terminology and categories is itself fraught with the dangers of bringing together what is actually substantially different under the same banner. While our authors have often found it necessary, perhaps for the sake of comparison or to help orient readers, to take on terms such as 'reformist' or 'Islamist', they are not using these as terms which imply identity—or even connection—between the groups so named, nor are they reifying such categories. In using such terms as shorthand to help identify specific projects, we are following broad definitions here in which 'Islamic modernism' refers to projects of change aiming to re-order Muslims' lifeworlds and institutional structures in dialogue with those produced under Western modernity; 'reformism' refers to projects whose specific focus is the bringing into line of religious beliefs and practices with the core foundations of Islam, by avoiding and purging out innovation, accretion and the intrusion of 'local custom'; and where 'Islamism' is a stronger position, which insists upon Islam as the heart of all institutions, practice and subjectivity—a privileging of Islam as the frame of reference by which to negotiate every issue of life; 'orthodoxy' is used according to its specific meaning in contexts in which individual authors work; the term may in some ethnographic locales refer to the orthodoxy of Islamist reform, while in others it is used to disparage those who do not heed the call for renewal and reform. 'Reformism' is particularly troublesome as a term, in that it covers broad trends stretching back at least 100 years, and encompassing a variety of positions which lay more or less stress upon specific aspects of processes of renewal; still, it is useful as a term in helping us to insist upon recognition of the differences between such projects and such contemporary obsessions as 'political Islam', 'Islamic fundamentalism' and so on. Authors here are generally following local usage in the ways in which they describe the movements discussed (thus, Kerala's Mujahid movement claims itself as part of a broaderIslahi—renewal—trend and is identified here as 'reformist').2But while broad terms are used, what the papers are actually involved in doing is addressing the issues of how specific groups deal with particular concerns. Thus, not, 'What do reformists think about secular education?', but, 'What do Kerala's Mujahids in the 2000s think? How has this shifted from the position taken in the 1940s? How does it differ from the contemporary position of opposing groups? And how is it informed by the wider socio-political climate of Kerala?' The papers here powerfully demonstrate the historical and geographical specificity of reform projects, whereas discourse structured through popular mainstream perspectives (such as 'clash of civilizations') ignores such embeddedness.

This article explores how members of an ex‐untouchable, 'backward' community of South India – the Izhavas of Kerala – represent and make sense of their entanglements within 'modernity'. Izhava narratives suggest ambivalence: while failure stories remain individualized, narrated in terms of bad luck or others' cheating, success stories are presented as exemplars of a twentieth‐century global master narrative of progress. We note many correspondences between this ex‐untouchable community's optimistic master narrative and another powerful and pervasive meta‐narrative – the global story of modernity as development, promoted by state government, reform movements, and development theorists alike. Life‐history narratives forcibly bring us – European interlocutors – into the same space as the tale‐tellers, speak of encounters between Indians and Europeans, and urge us to recognize that we live in 'one world'. Malayalis stake claims for equal participation in modernity's projects even as they point out ways in which coevalness is denied. This prompts us to suggest that narratives of modernity in India and the UK should occupy the same analytical space, contrary to moves to theorize multiple modernities. With our Malayali respondents, we are participating in a confabulation/confabrication of a shared story which appears to be one about the nature of global capitalism. Modernity produces dream and disillusionment, promising progress to all while delivering to a few. In its seemingly endless capacity for self‐regeneration and reinvention it is, as a phenomenon in global history, far from over. Even as theorists try to write it off as a moment past or a project failed, it still holds out its promises and provides a structuring framework for contemporary life‐stories.

Sabarimala – a South Indian all‐male pilgrimage to Ayyappan, a hyper‐male deity born from two male gods – plays a role in constructing male identities, at both external (social‐structural) and internal (psychological) levels. The pilgrimage draws creatively on relationships between two South Asian male figures: renouncer and householder, breaking down the opposition between transcendence and immanence to bring into everyday life a sense of transcendence specific to men. This also has masculine and heroic overtones, characterized by ascetic self‐denial and pain and by the identification of pilgrims with the deity and his perilous mountain‐forest journey. Pilgrimage bestows power as blessings from Ayyappan and as specifically masculine forms of spiritual, moral, and bodily strength, while acting as signifier of masculine superior purity and strength and of male responsibilities towards family welfare. Sabarimala merges individual men both with the hyper‐masculine deity and with a wider community of men: other male pilgrims, senior male gurus (teachers). This merger is both social and personal. A normal and universal sense of masculine ambivalence and self‐doubt has a specific local‐cultural resolution, when boys and men experience strengthening of the gendered ego through renunciatory self‐immersion in a 'greater masculine'. The ostensibly egalitarian devotional community is actually hierarchical: pilgrims surrender themselves to deity and guru, while equality and friendship between men can be celebrated and performed precisely because it is predicated upon a deeper sense of difference and hierarchy – gender – with woman as the absent and inferiorized other. Such segregated celebrations of masculinity work both towards masculinity's reproduction – through processes of 'remasculinization'– and in the limiting of masculinity to males.

This article discusses relationships between ritual change and out-migration in rural Kerala, south India, via ethnography of kuthiyottam, a sacrifice of human blood standing metonymically for full human sacrifice. Migration-in particular to the Gulf-has accelerated ongoing processes of commoditisation of ritual practices. While this has led to an overall democratisation of rituals, it has also heightened anxieties about the authenticity of ritual performances, leading to widespread and tense debates about what is 'traditional' and what is not. While low caste or new-moneyed sponsors do not have either the symbolic or practical capital necessary to conduct 'traditional' rituals, their ritual naiveté allows for an acceleration of processes of introduction of new styles and innovations. Migrants are thus veritable innovators, introducing new aesthetic forms and a novel sense of religiosity. But oppositions between `traditional'and 'new/modern', orthodoxy and heterodoxy, authentic and inauthentic, are clearly unsettled by the ritual performers themselves: here the emphasis is on creativity, aesthetic sense and the abilities to shift popular taste and introduce new artistic performances.

This article examines migration, styles of masculinity and male trajectories through the life‐cycle in Kerala, South India, in a region with a long history of high migration, most lately to the Persian Gulf states. Ethnography suggests that migration may be integrated into wider identity projects and form part of local subjectivities. The article considers four important local categories: the gulfan migrant, typically an immature unmarried male; the kallan, a self‐interested maximizer or individualistic anti‐social man; the pavam, an innocent good‐guy, generous to the point of self‐destruction; mature householder status, a successful, social, mature man holding substantial personal wealth, supporting many dependents and clients. Another theme to emerge is the relationship between masculinity and cash: migration appears as particularly relevant to masculinity in its enhanced relationship with money, an externalizable (detachable) form of masculine potency: maturity means being able to use such resources wisely.

In this paper, we explore some ways through which the adoption of specific consumption practices enables members of a South-Indian ex-untouchable community, Izhavas within Kerala, to objectify and redefine their self-perceived and other-perceived social position, and to concretize and make sense of their attempts to achieve generalized upward mobility. Located within individual, familial and group mobility strategies and developmental cycles, consumption assumes a long-term dimension, oriented towards present and future. Consumption practices also take on a normative aspect: youthful orientations towards transience and ephemerality should be replaced by a mature demeanour directed towards duration and permanency, and achievement of householder status. 'Householders' negotiate their paths through a complex consumer culture where values of transience and durability articulate with a local/foreign continuum. The labouring poor, whose consumption is severely limited, remain unable, in the eyes of the majority, to attain mature householder status. While Dalit castes withdraw into virtuosity in arenas such as fashion, labouring Izhavas struggle unsuccessfully to maintain distinction and join the mainstream.