This paper explores the contemporary identity politics of the "melhafa" as a style of women’s dress in parts of southern Morocco where it is predominantly worn by Sahrawi Arab women. A dyed, long woven piece of cotton that is draped over the head and body, the melhafa has served as the quotidian garment for Muslim Arab women in Hassaniyya-speaking communities in parts of North and West Africa since the precolonial era. It blends artisanal West African methods of cloth dyeing with North African and Arab veiling customs. In the postcolonial period, the melhafa has been largely transformed from a hand-dyed product made by women to a mass-produced commercial good sold mainly by male merchants throughout the region. The sociopolitical implications of this style of dress have shifted as well, and the melhafa has been imbued with a variety of social meanings as a visual representation of Sahrawi cultural identity in areas where it is currently worn. Based on field data collected in Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria and Mauritania as part of a larger project on Sahrawi performance art, this paper examines Sahrawi women’s use of the melhafa as a strategy to promote the visibility of Sahrawis in areas of Morocco where they comprise an ethnic minority and to promote projects of cultural revival and political representation. Secondly, it explores reasons for the increasing popularity of the melhafa among non-Sahrawi Moroccans in southern regions of the country, where it has rapidly become a new dress style of choice due in part to its affordability compared to other forms of women's dress. This new trend has also diminished the garment's ability to serve as a discrete identity marker for Sahrawi women.

Recent studies reveal that Sufism underwent a reinvention in urban metropolitan areas. Julia Day Howell (2002) suggests how experiences of social and geographical mobility, exposure to global economic forces and increasingly cosmopolitan life experiences in the middle and upper classes in Indonesia generated new religious demands. A new style of „Neo-Sufism“ responds specifically to these new conditions of Indonesian urbanism. Patrick Haenni and Raphaël Voix (2007) argue how Maroccan bourgeoisie re-appropriates the sacred through Sufism by a re-composition of religious belief in New Age terms. By data collected through interviews and participant observations I argue that the popularity of Sufism in Beirut is a similar trend of re-Islamization in the cosmopolitan and hybrid middle and upper classes. Practitioners share a strong skepticism towards traditional institutions and for them Sufism as postmodern sacred is more part of a global trend than of local developments. What is not yet analyzed is how urban Sufism manages to assemble practitioners on the boundaries of formal religious and spiritual traditions without referring to traditional forms of hierarchy and authority. In this paper I argue that the practice of Sufism is mainly an everyday bodily experience providing direct access to the spiritual realm. With reference to studies by Richard Shusterman (2002) and Birgit Meyer (2009) I state that Sufism must be read as “aesthetic style“ facilitating a group oriented ethic and a feeling of belonging through sensual experiences. My research findings display that these groups create a form of solidarity which is inclusive of ethnic, religious and gender differences but at the same time exclusive to people with certain social and economic backgrounds. In this process of community formation it is not so much the knowledge of normative rules that matter but the materialization of religion, i.e. how religious statements are sensually experienced through different forms of mediation.

Shaykh Ahmad-i Jam (traditionally said to have lived between 1049-1141) was an important Sufi based in Khurasan, whose fame and the popularity of his burial site allowed his hereditary descendants to become important local notables in the region up to the present day. As with many Sufis, Ahmad’s hagiographers have used miracle stories as one of several ways in which to legitimize Ahmad’s status as a saint and to bring him the fame from which his family and shrine thrived. My presentation looks at how and why A?had’s earliest hagiographer, a disciple of his named Muhammad-i Ghaznavi, came to ascribe fantastic deeds to his spiritual master, a man he personally knew. Examining a number of under-utilized sources, notably the earliest sources devoted to Ahmad and his own writings on the topic of miracles, as well as building new ideas off the latest theory on biographic and hagiographic literature, I argue that in many cases, miracle stories were not just meant to be didactic tales modeling proper piety, nor should they only be seen as fitting the subject into a paradigm of sainthood. Rather, I argue that hagiographies were often meant to be entertaining and even funny, a literary device crafted to appeal to a less educated audience and those most in need of repentance, which in turn served to ensnare potential disciples so as to build the following around the saint.

Few studies have investigated the elements that served in constructing particular images of Muhammad, and the role of these images in the formation of the religious identity of the Muslims of the Maghreb and Andalus. Although there are dozens of inroads into this subject, this paper will explore a tradition unique to the Maghreb and Andalus where Muslims of this region sent letters with pilgrims to be read at Muhammad's graveside wherein they addressed him as a living person who has an omnipotent cosmic role, and where he is sought to intercede in the problems that preoccupied them in their daily lives. This practice that lasted from the 9th to the 16th centuries was performed by all spectrums of society such as kings, notables, laymen and more importantly by scholars who represented orthodoxy in many of its hegemonic aspects. The major questions that this paper will address are: Why did these epistles originate uniquely in Maghreb and Andalus? What role did they play in the religiosity of the people of the region? While answering these questions, this paper will discuss only two of the many elements that are thought to have created a conducive environment, in which these epistles emerged, namely the celebration of the Mawlid (the Prophet’s birthday) and the narratives of the pilgrims embodied in what is historically known as al-Ri?la il? ?aybah. Both of these customs, within a very complicated historical framework, knew a big surge in the period in which the practice of sending epistles to Muhammad flourished. No research has been conducted on these epistles, yet these writings strongly suggest a unique religious identity of the Muslims of this region worthy to be explored and studied.

If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white, Remember it's ruin to run from a fight: So take open order, lie down, and sit tight, And wait for supports like a soldier. Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . . When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, So-oldier ~of~ the Queen! Excerpt from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Young British Soldier” (1895) Of much less renown than his "The Jungle Book" and other children’s stories, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Young British Soldier” brings to bear the preoccupations of foreign intervention—past and present—in Afghanistan. However, rather than focus on romantic imaginings of Afghanistan and Afghans as able to repel numerous attempts at intervention and colonization by Western military forces, I will investigate it as a heterogeneous space of fertility and death, one in which certain deaths (and lives) matter and are “countable” for particular purposes – be they to declare progress in the War on Terror, to justify humanitarian aid, etc. Moreover, I will explore 19th century British travelogues and military accounts of officials stationed in Afghanistan. Whereas great tomes have been written on accounts by European Orientalists who set their sights upon the Arab Middle East, scant attention, if any, has been offered to the treatment of Afghanistan in nineteenth century Orientalist texts and the persistence of such characterizations over the centuries of Afghanistan as a site of foreign quagmire. In addition, I seek to excavate the persistence of the genre of Afghanistan travelogues to contemporary ones that continue to brand the country as a site to be traversed or passed through, one that is inherently unfriendly to foreign conquest, as resilient, and as a “place in between.” In this manner, I hope to explore broader questions for anthropology, as a discipline, and ethnography as method. Given the interrupted trajectory of the ethnographic study of Afghanistan from the anthropological research of the 1960s and 1970s (Olszewska, Anthropology of the Middle East, Spring 2012), how, then, does one pursue a renewed anthropology of post-2001 Afghanistan?