ABSTRACT
As Leif Manger’s introductory essay makes plain, what the contributors to this volume are trying to understand and gloss is the relationship between what may be called prescriptive, universal (or global) ‘Islam’ and the social practice of particular, historically situated Muslim communities, all of which are by definition local. The primary goal must accordingly be to understand the social reproduction, in a great variety of local circumstances, of what is implied in ‘being Muslim’, and not the discovery of an essential ‘Islam’ alongside which local variations may be assessed or measured. That said, it is important to recognize that although our first concern as social scientists must be with the social actor, with particular Muslims in the thick of things, this cannot absolve us from the need to relate the discourses that accompany and orient the practice of Muslims to the texts and the received tradition, which together supply the fundament of anything that can claim to be Islamic.
