ABSTRACT
In attempts to account for ‘local Islam’ we immediately face profound theoretical challenges, since the double characterization of localities as ‘Islamic’ and Islam as ‘local’ tends to invite reifications of the empirical material at the base of our investigations. Not only do we easily fall into the trap of construing local life as so many ‘manifestations’ of an overall, generalized or essential entity labelled ‘Islam’, we also run the risk of reifying our geographical units of study, our localities, in little more than an arbitrary manner. As some contributors to this volume point out, either of these reifications may hamper our insights into what I take to be our subject matter: the study of localized sociocultural processes couched in idioms of ‘Islam’.
