Dale F. Eickelman

The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and its Social Reproduction

The study of education can be to complex societies what the study of religion has been to societies variously characterized by anthropologists as ‘simple,’ ‘cold’ or ‘elementary.’ Recognizing this potential, sociologists and social anthropologists have recently indicated a renewed interest in the study of how schooling, especially higher education, implicitly defines and transmits a culturally valued cognitive style, ‘a set of basic, deeply interiorized master-patterns’ of language and thought on the basis of which other patterns are subsequently acquired (Bourdieu 1967: 343; see also Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp 1971).

Is There an Islamic City? The Making of a Quarter in a Moroccan Town

Max Webers brief remarks on the nature of the Muslim city constitute a poignant example of what Bernard Lewis describes as the unfortunate division of labor which has pervaded the study of Islam: the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology and their successors have framed theoretical statements which were either elaborated or refuted by scholars more directly concerned with the Muslim world.

A Search for the Anthropology of Islam: Abdul Hamid El-Zein

“Zein,” as friends and colleagues knew him, practiced an interpretive anthropology that, like the writing of history, is a craft in which the best work is realized only after long years of field experience, study, and the development of concepts and themes through teaching and writing. Zeins sudden death on 13 August 1979 at the age of 44 cut short his work just as it began to achieve its fullest form. Zeins professional career was divided between two remarkably distinct periods. The first of these lasted for roughly the decade prior to 1966, during which he mastered the conventions of what might be called a standard, functionalist anthropology and applied them to ethnographic research in Egypt. The second period began in 1966 with his participation in the formative period of symbolic anthropology at the University of Chicago.

From Theocracy To Monarchy:Authority And Legitimacy In Inner Oman, 1935–1957

The twentieth-century Ibadi imamate of “inner” Oman (1913–1955) constituted one of the worlds last theocracies. In a demise unique for the mid-twentieth century, it became assimilated into one of the worlds last absolute monarchies. The 1955 shift from theocratic to dynastic rule met initially with the support, or at least the acquiescence, of most of the tribesmen and notables of the interior. This acquiescence at first appears surprising because the fundamentalist Islamic religious and political principles for which the imamate stood continued to be properly supported. One of these principles for Ibadis was that the imām, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Islamic community, should be the most qualified of available candidates and chosen by a consensus of the communitys religious men of learning and notables, a notion markedly at contrast with the ascriptive one of dynastic rule. Conflict between these two forms of rule is basic to much of Islamic political history and to that of pre-1970 Oman in particular.