Between Political Economy and Islamic Studies: New Approaches to the Modern Middle East and North Africa
Panel VIII-21, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, October 8 at 01:30 pm
Panel Description
Scholarship under the rubric of political economy has become one of the most dynamic areas of Middle East studies. Our panel focuses on a persistent challenge in this subfield--how to engage with class, social relations, and material factors (i.e. the concerns of political economy) while providing serious analysis of religion.
In response, the panel seeks to bring together modes of analysis from political economy and Islamic studies to the study of the modern Middle East. The possibility of such a rapprochement may seem unlikely because the former has often defined itself in opposition to the latter. For example, in a telling remark in his 1975 review of Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West, historian Roger Owen refers to "the end of orientalism, the beginning of political economy." As this comment suggests, Owen posited that orientalism resulted from Islamic studies, or at least from Gibb and Bowen's version of it. In such studies, Islam is taken as a blueprint of Muslim societies, explaining everything from their urban form to political organization.
Today, however, critiques of orientalism are as likely to come from scholars focusing on the study of Islam (e.g. Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Wael Hallaq) as from those foregrounding the political economy of the region. Both of the two areas have become more sophisticated, leading us to take an interest in their separation and possible intersections. While political economic approaches take as their object of study Muslim societies, which are determined by social, political, technological, and economic factors, the near absence of religion in these studies seems puzzling. Similarly, the study of Islam, which has often focused on the neglected ethical drive behind religious practice, tends to downplay central political and economic factors that shape religious practice.
There is also an empirical aspect to this line of inquiry, since the archives and lived experiences of the modern Middle East and North Africa often reveal "Islam" and "political economy" to be more entangled than current scholarship may suggest. How should we conceive of discourses on awqaf that appeal to the economic benefits as well as the otherworldly rewards of these pious endowments? What about stark inequality and class differences between the members of a mosque-university who nonetheless produce a coherent and distinctive body of thought, apparently contradicting Marx's notion of a link between social position and ideas? Our panel will consider these and other examples.
Drawing on sources from the Tunisian National Archives, this paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of political economy analysis with regard to the 20th-century reform movement at the Zaytuna Mosque-University, the main institution of Islamic higher education in Tunisia and eastern Algeria. I frame the Zaytuna as an institution riven by internal fault lines between students and professors, themselves divided into separate “classes” (tabaqat), and between the Zaytuna’s main site in Tunis and the twenty-five branches located in provincial towns. Much of the movement for "reform" (islah) should be understood as a struggle over the distribution of resources among the Zaytuna’s different constituencies. Yet, diverging from a perspective that would restrict itself to such political economy analysis, I argue that key ideas of the reform movement cannot be inferred from material factors or social relations.
Waqf, wrote Marshall Hodgson, was the “material foundation” of Islamic society. These rent-yielding lands and buildings provided many of the services that the state now provides: from funding schools, mosques, hospitals, to providing bridges and water wells. Waqfs served many worldly advantages: they shielded property from seizing, fragmentation through inheritance, and possibly some taxes. Historians have used waqf documentation to better understand the political economy of places. Yet, as many studies of waqf note, waqfs were also crucially a way for founders to get closer to God. This ethical aspect of the waqf is notoriously difficult to study besides formulaic expressions found in waqf-deeds, especially in the legal and accounting documents that form the archive of historians. Using interviews and newspaper accounts of a mobilization against the expropriation of waqfs in the city center of Beirut, this presentation will highlight the way the ethical and religious fact of waqf come to matter in Muslims’ rejection of the planned expropriation. Concurrently, it demonstrates how the exemption of waqfs from expropriation reproduced the dispossession of small right-holders, like tenants, in the city-center and replacing them with the likes of Gucci. In conclusion, the paper suggests that keeping the political economic and the ethical/religious open and in tension without one over-determining the other allows us take seriously the work ethical and religious discourses do, without reducing them to their effectiveness in a fight against capitalism.
Based on recent archival work and the reading of laws and regulations, this presentation describes the regulatory framework of landownership in khedivial Egypt. I argue that the khedives created a new political economy in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the legal making of their domestic sovereignty was a slow process between 1800s-1880s, which used and transformed the earlier regulatory system that the Ottoman administration developed for the province of Egypt. The presentation focuses on the curious career of the taqsit (pl. taqasit), which ultimately served as an elite land title deed by the mid-century.
This paper examines the transnational career of the Sayyida Zaynab shrine located outside Damascus, as primarily Iranian pilgrims transformed Rawiya--a small village in the 1950s through the 70s into the shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab in the 80s until the present day. Marking the neglected connections between patriliny and patrimony in the transnational career of a waqf dhurri, a private religious charitable trust associated with the Sayyida Zaynab shrine, I draw out the involvements of the waqf in a portfolio of real estate development and service industry projects, ranging from a birth clinic to a cemetery. In this broader business portfolio of the waqf, I focus on the architectural expansion of the shrine funded through a series of donations from merchants who have found from West Africa to Pakistan. I want to suggest that the Mourtadhas as the mutawakkils of the Sayyida Zaynab shrine choreographed the transnational career of the Sayyida Zainab waqf and shrine. In the process, I argue, they transformed their patrimony to landed property tied to the only administratively independent waqf dhurri of Syria by politically leveraging their prophetic pedigree. Contested but never compromised until the Syrian conflict, the trans-imperial, -national, and trans-regional career of the Sayyida Zainab shrine under the trusteeship of the Damascene family provides us with a case study to rethink the place of patriliny in studies of genealogy more broadly. It furthermore prompts us to approach patronage as generative of kinship as well as property regimes.
