Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives

By (author) El-Sayed el-Aswad

Not available to order

Publication date:

13 July 2012

Length of book:

248 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759121218

el-Aswad introduces the concepts of worldviews/cosmologies of Muslims, explaining that the different types of worldviews are not constructed solely by religious scholars or intellectual elite, but are latent in Islamic tradition, embedded in popular imagination, and triggered through people's everyday interaction in various countries and communities. He draws from a number of sources including in-depth interviews and participant observation as well as government documents and oral history. Through the perspectives of ethno-cosmology, emic interpretation of sacred tradition, modernity, folklore, geography, dream, imagination, hybridity, and identity transformation, he examines how culturally and religiously constructed images of the world influence the daily actions of people in various Muslim communities. The worldviews of Sunnis, Shi'as, and Sufis are covered in turn, and Muslims in the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and suburban Detroit are the focus. el-Aswad also discusses the effects of Western attempts at imposing its essentially secular worldview through the process of globalization and how cyberspace has promoted connectivity among Muslim communities and, especially in the United States, opened up unlimited options and new possibilities.

Acknowledgments
Notes on Transliteration and Translation
List of Figures
Introduction: Worldview, Geography, and Ideology
1. Muslim Worldviews: Unity and Diversity
2. The Worldview of the Sunni
3. The Esoteric Worldview of the Shi‘a
4. The Mystic Worldview of Sufism
5. Muslim Worldviews, Imagination, and the Dream World
6. Multiple Worldviews and Multiple Identities of the Muslim Diaspora
7. Conclusion
Glossary of Arabic Terms
Bibliography
Appendix: Muslim Code of Honor
Index
About the Author

This book’s approach is both novel and significant. El-Aswad rightly observes that Western scholarly and media attention to Islam represents it primarily as a political identity, obscuring both the religion’s internal diversity and its capacity to structure worldviews. As a treatment of the phenomenology of Muslim societies, devoted to understanding ‘the way ordinary people imagine their social world’ through ‘images, stories and legends,’ this book is a valuable and overdue corrective to such simplifying tendencies. Its cross-cultural, multi-sited analysis holds considerable promise for student readers and for scholars of the Muslim world.