Q&A: The Feeling of History
Posted on March 3, 2021
Through the Jewish-Muslim research Network, I spoke to Associate Professor Charles Hirschkind about his new book, ‘The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism and Andalusia’ (see video below).
Read about the book here:
‘In today’s world, the lines between Europe and the Middle East, between Christian Europeans and Muslim immigrants in their midst, seem to be hardening. Alarmist editorials compare the arrival of Muslim refugees with the “Muslim conquest of 711,” warning that Europe will be called on to defend its borders. Violence and paranoia are alive and well in Fortress Europe.
Against this xenophobic tendency, The Feeling of History examines the idea of Andalucismo—a modern tradition founded on the principle that contemporary Andalusia is connected in vitally important ways with medieval Islamic Iberia. Charles Hirschkind explores the works and lives of writers, thinkers, poets, artists, and activists, and he shows how, taken together, they constitute an Andalusian sensorium. Hirschkind also carefully traces the various itineraries of Andalucismo, from colonial and anticolonial efforts to contemporary movements supporting immigrant rights. The Feeling of History offers a nuanced view into the way people experience their own past, while also bearing witness to a philosophy of engaging the Middle East that experiments with alternative futures.’
Charles Hirschkind is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. His published works include, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia 2006), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (co-edited with David Scott, Stanford 2005), and The Feeling for History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago 2020).
Anthropology Is: Bendy Minds
Posted on May 13, 2020
The best anthropologists make their minds bendy – they try to warp their perspective of the world (how it works, how ‘society’ is organised, what ‘culture’ is) and explore these questions from another perspective (and in doing so, may allow their questions to radically change) Saba Mahmood had the bendiest of minds. She showed up white liberal neo-imperialist feminists and anthropologists who went into Middle Eastern nations and placed Muslim women (from a diverse range of locations) within their white, liberal conceptual frameworks. From their perspectives – if a Muslim woman was observant, she was oppressed. Accordingly, the less Islamic they were, the more ‘liberated’.
What’s the point of anthropology – understanding cultures and societies in their diversity – if you already know what’s good and bad for groups/individuals before hand? if you can just slot them into an oppression/liberation narrative? So Mahmood made her mind bendy – she went and researched a group of Muslim women in the ‘Women’s Mosque Movement’ in Cairo after the Egyptian Revolution. Mahmood saw how the way white liberal feminists understood ‘submission’ was, for this mosque movement, irrelevant. For the practitioners of this all women’s Mosque movement, ‘submission’ to Islamic values was not a oppressive, passive, docile and dogmatic act. Submission meant an active, intellectual and bodily moulding of the self in order to internalise Islamic values and practises until they emerged from the self and body without conscious effort. Submission was a form of empowerment. To understand this, Mahmood had to deconstruct dominant European conceptions of agency, the body and freedom and in turn see how such concepts, applied to the Mosque movement, concealed as opposed to revealed something of the culture which Mahmood was studying. Much Euro-American academia (and especially anthropology), if it doesn’t question itself (and its political agendas), can violently assimilate sociocultural difference to its own terms, hierarchies and views of the world.
The best anthropologists, like Saba Mahmood, endlessly question the terms through which they understand different social and cultural groups. Many Egyptian Islamic feminists disagreed with the Women’s Mosque Movement relation to submission, although that doesn’t discount the need to understand a multitude of perspectives on the matter of women’s diverse experiences of freedom and oppression.
Read Mahmood Cairo ethnography in her 2004 Politics of Piety.
florahastings.com 