What to Do with Ritual Texts

The study of Islamic ritual has suffered, in a sense, from either too much contact with reality or not enough. This is a too summary way of saying that the study of Islamic ritual has been hampered by estrangement between observation-based studies of Islamic ritual as it actually occurs in the world, and the text-based study of Islamic ritual as it has been prescribed, transmitted, and imagined in works of Islamic law (fiqh). The observation-based studies have been for the most part particularist – a description of Islam in “Fulanabad” which is juxtaposed to an imagined universal “Islam of Everywhere” (or of the “scholars” or of “the theologians” or of “the orthodox”) compared to which Fulanabad’s Islam is “unique.” Because of the ethnographers’ imagined dichotomy between the local and the hegemonic universal, anthropologists have seldom studied the “universal practices” of Islam, the so-called “Five Pillars” for example, but have focused on the demotic forms of religion – saint veneration, healing practices, spirit propitiation and exorcism, and the like. ¹