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Without Forgetting the Imam
Without Forgetting the Imam is an ethnographic study of the religious life of the Lebanese Shi'ites of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Muslim community outside of the Middle East. Based on four years of fieldwork, this book explores how the Lebanese who have emigrated, most in the past three decades, to the United States, have adapted to their new surroundings. Anthropologist Linda Walbridge delves into the ways in which politics and religion have converged as the Lebanese Shi'i community has remade its identity and accommodated itself to a new environment. She captures a broad picture of religious life within the realm of community living and within the mosques which have proliferated in Dearborn. Walbridge explains how Shi'ites, affected in one way or another by Islamic revivalism, have brought different notions of how their religion should be expressed and carried out in America. These differences are reflected in mosque rituals, social functions, sermons, and educational activities. She also explores how contemporary Middle Eastern politics and the religious leadership in Iran and Iraq influence the functioning of the mosques.
The Most Learned of the Shiʻa
The problem of who should succeed the Prophet has plagued the Islamic community since the time of his death. The Shiites have decided on a successor, but that does not solve who is the lawful marja (or grand ayatollah) of all the Shi'a.
The Christians of Pakistan
In May 1998, John Joseph, the first native Pakistani Catholic bishop, shot himself in front of the courthouse where a Christian had been sentenced to death for blasphemy. This book tells the story of the Christians in Pakistan, with Bishop Joseph as its centrepiece. It is an account of outcastes who sought hope through Christianity, but who now find themselves victims of a struggle to define Islam in Pakistan. The majority of Pakistani Christians are descendants of untouchables converted to Christianity in the late 19th century. In Pakistan a minority religion is linked with low status, perpetuating the Indian Hindu caste system even though the Muslim majority has disassociated itself from all things Hindu and Indian. The book also deals with enculturation in the Pakistani church, the rise of native clergy, conflicts between the local church and Rome, the rise of 'fundamentalist' Islam and the position of women in society and church.
The Thread of Muawiya: The Making of a Marja Taqlid
The marja's or grand ayatollahs are the scholars who sit at the pinnacle of the Shi'a religious hierarchy. Normally learned and reclusive men, they nonetheless wield enormous authority through their religious prestige and the funds generated by religious taxes. From their modest homes in the Shi'ite shrines cities of Iraq and Iran, their influence reaches across the Shi'a world carried by networks of sons, sons-in-law, students, and local clerics. This book reveals the process by which a handful of religious scholars become recognized as grand ayatollahs, the way their influence is exercised, and how they relate to other Shi'a clerics and to ordinary believers. Based on scores of interviews with Shi'a clerics, this book gives a detailed and human portrait of the inner world of the Shi'ite clerical hierarchy. The late Linda Walbridge was an anthropologist of religion specializing in minorities in the Islamic world. Her other works include Without Forgetting the Imam: Shi'ism in an American Community, The Most Learned of the Shi'a: The Institution of the Marja' Taqlid, and The Christians of Pakistan: The Passion of Bishop John Joseph.
God and Logic in Islam
This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement by more modern but far shallower forms of thought. However, the resources of this Islamic scholarly tradition remain an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism.
Muslim Voices and Lives in the Contemporary World
This book tells the stories of eleven remarkable people in the Islamic world, from a religious musician in Pakistan who sings the sufferings of the saints and hopes to bring reconciliation to his country, to the son of one of the greatest Shi'ite scholars of Iraq who was murdered trying to restore peace in his city.
Personal Encounters
This reader offers 31 original articles, each of which centers on the encounters between an anthropologist and a person from whom the anthropologist has learned something about another culture. In telling the stories of specific individuals, the anthropologist can address a current topic in anthropology by situating it vividly within the lives and worlds of people in a variety of cultural settings.
Personal Encounters
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