Cochon

L’interdit antéislamique (E.B.) L’interdit qui frappe la consommation de la viande de porc est, en Afrique du Nord comme dans la plupart des pays du Proche Orient, largement antérieur à l’Islam. Les Egyptiens le connaissait et l’ont peut-être transmis aux Hébreux. De même les Phéniciens s’abstenaient de consommer de la viande de porc ou de son frère sauvage, le sanglier (Porphyre, de abstinentia, 1, 14). Au Maghreb, les Puniques respectèrent cet interdit qui avait peut-être des racines plus a..

Blonds (Berbères)

Contrairement à ce que suggère Pellat dans l’Encyclopédie de l’Islam (1960, p. 1208), l’existence de « berbères blonds » ne saurait être assimilée à un problème supplémentaire, rendant encore plus mystérieuse l’origine des Berbères, dont Gibbon disait déjà qu’elle était « enveloppée dans les ténèbres » (1985, t. II, p. 98). Ainsi que l’indique assez clairement Sergi (1901, p. 59), le problème ethnogénique posé par les « Blonds » est lié à celui de l’origine européenne des Lybiens, c’est-à-dir..

Blonds (Berbères)

Contrairement à ce que suggère Pellat dans l’Encyclopédie de l’Islam (1960, p. 1208), l’existence de « berbères blonds » ne saurait être assimilée à un problème supplémentaire, rendant encore plus mystérieuse l’origine des Berbères, dont Gibbon disait déjà qu’elle était « enveloppée dans les ténèbres » (1985, t. II, p. 98). Ainsi que l’indique assez clairement Sergi (1901, p. 59), le problème ethnogénique posé par les « Blonds » est lié à celui de l’origine européenne des Lybiens, c’est-à-dir..

Socio-economic voter profile and motives for Islamist support in Morocco

Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of electoral support for the Islamist Party in Morocco in the 2002 and 2007 elections. It differentiates between the clientelistic, grievance and horizontal network type of supporters. We disentangle these profiles empirically on the basis of the role of education, wealth and exclusion for Islamist votes. We find no evidence of the clientelistic profile, but a shift from grievance in 2002 to a horizontal network profile in 2007. World Values Survey individual level data are used as a robustness check, yielding similar results. Qualitative evidence on a changing mobilization pattern of the party between 2002 and 2007 supports our conclusions

Marriage “sharia style”: everyday practices of Islamic morality in England

The growing visibility of Islam in the public spaces of Western societies is often interpreted in the media as a sign of Muslim radicalisation. This article questions this postulate by examining the flourishing Muslim marriage industry in the UK. It argues that these ‘halal’ services, increasingly popular among the young generation of British Muslims, reflect the semantic shifting of categories away from the repertoire of Islamic jurisprudence to cultural and identity labels visible in public space. Informed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the British field of Islamic law, this article examines a Muslim speed-dating event, which took place in central London in 2013. It investigates how Islamic morality is maintained and negotiated in everyday social interactions rather than cultivated via discipline and the pursuit of virtuous dispositions. Using Goffman’s “frame analysis” and his interpretation of the social as a space of “performances” as well as recent anthropological reflections on “ordinary ethics” (Lambek) and “everyday Islam” (Schielke, Osella and Soares), it examines the potential for such practices to define the contours of a new public culture where difference is celebrated as a form of distinction

Concentration or representation : the struggle for popular sovereignty

There is a tension in the notion of popular sovereignty, and the notion of democracy associated with it, that is both older than our terms for these notions themselves and more fundamental than the apparently consensual way we tend to use them today. After a review of the competing conceptions of 'the people' that underlie two very different understandings of democracy, this article will defend what might be called a 'neo-Jacobin' commitment to popular sovereignty, understood as the formulation and imposition of a shared political will. A people's egalitarian capacity to concentrate both its collective intelligence and force, from this perspective, takes priority over concerns about how best to represent the full variety of positions and interests that differentiate and divide a community

Religious act, public space: reflections on some Geertzian concepts

This paper examines theoretical and methodological implications of Clifford Geertz's approach to religion as he formulated it in 'Religion as a cultural system' (Geertz 1966), where religion and culture seem to be defined as functional equivalents. The paper considers religious symbols in the public space, using two examples from contemporary reality - one being a certain expression spoken by the copilot of Egypt Air Flight 990, the other being the headscarf controversy in France - in order to explore how the anthropologist relates the microsituations he observes to an all-embracing contex