Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This article analyses the reconfiguration of religious identity in the Druze community in Minas Gerais, south-eastern Brazil, which was formed by the arrival of immigrants from Lebanon in the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The immigrants created ethnic and religious institutions destined to maintain Druze identity and its Islamic character. However, the transmission of religious knowledge to the generations born in Brazil was fragmentary and imperfect. Nevertheless, Druze identity was maintained by many and completely recreated in the religious context of Catholicism and Spiritism, while the connection to Islam faded away. The analysis focuses on how religious authorities and the belief in reincarnation were the main elements that allowed continuity in religious identity together with the transformation of tradition.

Religious experience can be a tool for the constitution of social subjects, the construction of symbolic meanings and values, as well as for shaping the subjectivity and corporality of the faithful. An ethnographic account and analysis of the Sufi ritual, the darb al-shish, as it was performed in the zawiya (Sufi lodge) of shaykh Mahmud in Afrin, Syria, shows how religious experience allows the embodiment of capacities and dispositions that are lived as deriving from the sacred dimensions of existence, producing religious selves endowed with power that can be defined as charisma. The embodied charisma derived from the darb al-shish posed challenges to the power structures of the religious community in which it emerged. The analysis focuses on collective ritual performances as the main arena of incorporation of the various charismas of the disciples into the hierarchical structure of religious power and authority of the Sufi community. This approach to the ritual tackled the connection between religious experiences and the production of embodied forms of power, such as charisma, and posed the question of how religious codification deals with it.

The Arab community in Brazil comprises an estimated 4–6 million immigrants and their descendants and was created by an almost continuous flux of immigrants from the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) since the nineteenth century. While until the 1970s the Arab immigrants were Christians in their great majority, since the 1980s most immigrants from the Middle East are Muslims. The Muslim community in Brazil has about 1 million members today. The Muslim presence is almost exclusively urban, with important communities in São Paulo, Foz do Iguaçu, Curitiba, and, to a lesser extent, Rio de Janeiro. The vast majority of Muslims in Brazil are Arab Middle Eastern immigrants from Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories or their descendants. There are also some African immigrants (from Senegal and Nigeria) and a small but growing number of Brazilian converts without any Muslim or Arab ancestry. Arab Muslim communities and identities in Brazil are formed by very complex articulations between transnational and local interpretations and practices of Islam and Arab identities, which emerge and gain reality within the cultural and sociological framework of each locality. Therefore, this article aims to analyze the constitution of Muslim identities among Arabic-speaking immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, showing how the relation between Arab ethnicity and Muslim identity is shaped by processes that connect local, national, and transnational realities.

Cet article porte sur le rôle des formes de religiosité soufies dans le façonnement des subjectivités religieuses et dans l'inscription de l'islam dans le paysage urbain d'Alep. Dans la seconde ville de Syrie, les identités religieuses revêtent des dimensions civiques et politiques car elles sont constitutives de l'ordre social urbain local, qui contraste avec l'ordre politique et culturel laïc promu par l'État syrien. L'expression des subjectivités soufies dans la sphère publique s'opère par le biais de formes variées de performance morale, c'est-à-dire par l'affirmation publique de principes religieux incorporés en tant que cadres des pratiques sociales. Cette mobilisation continue de principes religieux incorporés par les soufis a pour effet de les inscrire dans les processus qui façonnent et constituent l'identité urbaine de la capitale du Nord en tant que paysage moral défini par l'islam.

Abstract
Tradition is a multifaceted concept and a term with contested meanings. It is usually understood as an unchanging collection of artefacts passed down from generation to generation, where continuity between past and present is expected and assumed. Scholarly studies, however, have shown that tradition is continuously produced and 'invented' in order to cope with the present and to imagine a possible future. The articles in this special issue explore different ways in which tradition is imagined, articulated and produced in different religious contexts, in which Islam serves as a focus for reference or contrast. They show that a specific Islamic tradition can undergo profound transformations to the point of losing its connection with Islam, both at the individual and at the social or communal levels.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One. Performing Rituals -- Chapter 1 Black Magic, Divination and Remedial Reproductive Agency in Northern Pakistan -- Chapter 2 Preparing for the Hajj in Contemporary Tunisia: Between Religious and Administrative Ritual -- Chapter 3 "There Used To Be Terrible Disbelief ": Mourning and Social Change in Northern Syria -- Chapter 4 Manifestations of Ashura Among Young British Shi 'is -- Chapter 5 The Ma'ruf: An Ethnography of Ritual (South Algeria) -- Chapter 6 The Sufi Ritual of the Darb al-shish and the Ethnography of Religious Experience -- Chapter 7 Preaching for Converts: Knowledge and Power in the Sunni Community in Rio de Janeiro -- Chapter 8 Worshipping the Martyr President: The Darih of Rafiq Hariri in Beirut -- Chapter 9 Staging the Authority of the Ulama: The Celebration of the Mawlid in Urban Syria -- Part Two. Contextualising Interactions -- Chapter 10 The Salafi and the Others: An Ethnography of Intracommunal Relations in French Islam -- Chapter 11 Describing Religious Practices among University Students: A Case Study from the University of Jordan, Amman -- Chapter 12 Referring to Islam in Mutual Teasing: Notes on an Encounter between Two Tanzanian Revivalists -- Chapter 13 Salafis as Shaykhs: Othering the Pious in Cairo -- Chapter 14 Ethics of Care, Politics of Solidarity: Islamic Charitable Organisations in Turkey -- Chapter 15 Making Shari'a Alive: Court Practice under an Ethnographic Lens -- Chapter 16 Referring to Islam as a Practice: Audiences, Relevancies and Language Games within the Egyptian Parliament -- Chapter 17 Contesting Public Images of 'Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910-78): Who is an Authentic Scholar? -- Part Three. The Ethnography of History -- Chapter 18 Possessed of Documents: Hybrid Laws and Translated Texts in the Hadhrami Diaspora -- About the Contributors -- Index

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Latino America in the Umma/ the Umma in Latino America -- Part I Reconsidering History -- Chapter 1 "De los Prohibidos": Mu slims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America -- Chapter 2 African Rebellion and Refuge on the Edge of Empire -- Chapter 3 Ethnic and Religious Identification among Muslim East Indians in Suriname (1898–1954) -- Part II Contemporary Cartographies -- Chapter 4 Institutionalizing Islam in Argentina: Comparing Community and Identity Configurations -- Chapter 5 Conversion, Revivalism, and Tradition: The Religious Dynamics of Mu slim Communities in Brazil -- Chapter 6 Guests of Islam: Conversion and the Institutionalization of Islam in Mexico -- Chapter 7 Cubans Searching for a New Faith in a New Context -- Chapter 8 Muslims in Martinique -- Chapter 9 Forming Islamic Religious Identity among Trinidadians in the Age of Social Networks -- Part III Islam Latina/o -- Chapter 10 Discovering a Historical Consciousness: The Creation of a US Latina/o Muslim Identity -- Chapter 11 Mapping Mu slim Communities in "Hispanicized" South Florida -- Chapter 12 Double-Edged Marginality and Agency: Latina Conversion to Islam -- Conclusion -- Contributors -- Index