Abstract
An apparent trend in the study of Islam and Muslims during the last decades is the growing interest in religious everyday life and ritual practice. Sometimes Islamic Studies are said to be too focused on politicization, extremism and migration, but contemporary studies to a growing extent also discuss 'lived religion' and 'vernacular religion' with the ambition to identify how individuals and smaller groups practice and understand their religion. These studies have provided important documentation of practices, methodological and theoretical discussions and a more complex view on texts and the uses of texts. But such an interest has a long history. This article presents one of the pioneers in the study of Muslim piety, Elizabeth Fernea, and points to the importance of early ethnography as a resource for the study of contemporary religion. Fernea's two-year stay in a Shiite small-town in Iraq generated fully-fledged descriptions of everyday piety as well as a unique account of a pilgrim tour to Karbala 1957. Its literary style immediately gave Guests of the Sheik a broad range of readers when it was published in 1965, but it took longer before it was established in academic literature. In her book, Fernea describes religious conditions in Iraq in the 1950s and the conflicts between the lives of the clans and the emerging urban middle class. In comparison to the chaos in Iraq since 2003 and the preceding decades of dictatorship, Fernea's study is a narrative from another Iraq.
| Originalsprog | Svensk |
|---|---|
| Tidsskrift | Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift |
| Vol/bind | 67 |
| Sider (fra-til) | 5-19 |
| Antal sider | 15 |
| ISSN | 0108-1993 |
| Status | Udgivet - 2018 |
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