This article considers Jack Goody’s studies of Islam in their various contexts. It starts with a consideration of Goody’s comparative historico-anthropological studies of specific topics such as flowers, cuisine, and kinship and the family, and of his studies of wider range and broader import. It analyses the elements and main thrust of his historical approach, paying attention to the conception of comparativism he uses, placing these in the context of current debates on method. It then moves on to Islamic material (...) incorporated into these studies, and seeks to place them in the context of his work overall. Finally, the essay discusses works Goody devoted specifically to Islam and seeks to draw out the relationship between his views of Islamic history and of contemporary Islam and his comparative historical sociology of civilizations, and measures his more recent views of Islam against his overall approach. (shrink)

In the first part of this text, the author attempts to demonstrate that sacral kingship might, in anthropological terms, be regarded an Elementary Form of socio-political life; not an autonomous elementary form, but one falling under the category of rulership. The reference to the anthropological notion of Elementary Forms renders virtually irrelevant the rigidity with which categorical distinctions are made between polytheistic and monotheistic kingship, as well as any civilisational divisions that might be imagined between Orient and Occident. The second (...) part of the text provides an illustration of these presuppositions, the author taking several examples from the history of monarchy – both in the Western World and in the Arab World. (shrink)

This book is a ‘curated’ anthology of what the curator considers to be witnesses to the momentous events associated with the early, Paleo-Muslim phase of the em.

The all-too-human proclivity to short-sightedness colludes with political perspectives of the moment, to project a fragmentary image of the present instant into the essence of eternity, and to postu- late Islam as the trans-historical protoplasm in the life of all Muslims. I shall propose to you that this construal of Islam as a culture which in itself explains the affairs of Muslim collectivities and overdetermines their economies, societies, and non-religious cultures, is the fundamental element in the culture of misrecognition that (...) I am address- ing, the condition of possibility for valorising the trope of return. What I do intend to do is to return to the present point in time, and to try and understand why it is that misrecognition is so passionately willed; to probe the conditions for the exceptionalism attributed to Muslim peoples, which places them outside the remit of the historical and sociological understanding and relegates them to ethnological folklore, to consider why it is that I, like many others, have to waste so much of your time on matters that ought to be taken for granted. (shrink)