Isma'ili Modern: Globalization and Identity in a Muslim by Jonah Steinberg
By Jonah Steinberg
The Isma'ili Muslims, an immense sect of Shi'i Islam, shape a neighborhood that's fascinating in its deterritorialized social association. proficient by way of the richness of Isma'ili historical past, theories of transnationalism and globalization, and firsthand ethnographic fieldwork within the Himalayan areas of Tajikistan and Pakistan in addition to in Europe, Jonah Steinberg investigates Isma'ili Muslims and the improvement in their impressive and expansive twenty-first-century international structures.Led via a charismatic European-based hereditary Imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, international Isma'ili enterprises make on hand an unbelievable array of services--social, financial, political, and religious--to a few 3 to 5 million matters stretching from Afghanistan to England, from Pakistan to Tanzania. Steinberg argues that this elaborate and hugely built-in community permits a brand new form of shared identification and citizenship, person who is going well past the feel of group maintained through different diasporic populations. Of observe during this strategy is the swift assimilation within the postcolonial interval of once-isolated societies into the intensively centralized Isma'ili constitution. additionally impressive is the Isma'ilis' self-presentation, opposite to universal characterizations of Islam within the mass media, as a Muslim society that's widely sympathetic to capitalist structures, against fundamentalism, and enormously smooth in orientation. Steinberg's detailed trip into distant mountain areas highlights present day speedily moving meanings of citizenship, religion, and id and divulges their worldwide scale.
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Extra info for Isma'ili Modern: Globalization and Identity in a Muslim Community (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)
Example text
Tsing, whose earlier work focused on marginalized and remote Malaysian locali26 INTRODUCTION ties, explains her new method: “Following global connections out of Kalimantan, I found myself exploring other sites, including powerful centers of finance, science, and policy. But these, too, produce only fragments” (271). Aihwa Ong, in her important book Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999), explores diverse forms of transpacific connection between North America and East Asia.
How do people come to feel that they are part of the transnational community of Ismaʿilism? How do they gain a sense of belonging to it, and even of belonging to it more than to anything else? Such a process requires a ritual apparatus. Kertzer (1988) writes of the rituals that polities effect to inculcate loyalty and allegiance in their subjects. What I strive to locate are the corresponding semiotic mechanisms for transnational polity-building. The institutions, rituals, and interactions I describe are on some level the global network’s mechanisms for incorporating subjects, the ritual apparatus for imbuing subjects with loyalty and encouraging participation.
The Shiʿa opposed the Sunni notion of rule by consensus (ijmaʿ) of the community, because they believed that leadership should only be in the hands of the qualified, especially since leadership involved elucidation of the underlying truth of the religion. The criteria among the Shiʿa for the selection of qualified leaders were lineal; only the descendants of ʿAli were seen to be qualified to lead Islamic society. The question, then, revolved around who was in fact the rightful heir in the line of ʿAli.