13. Modernity

Modernity is not a descriptive state of being, but rather an interval of time. There is no way to pinpoint the advent of modernity in the past, because modernity is constantly moving forward, changing with the now.

Calling a past society modern, or more modern than another past society, is only meaningful in relation to the society of now, the current society of the person giving out the labels. It is impossible to call one past society modern, and another one not modern, only more or less modern in relation to the now.

Since modernity encompasses all of now, this means that there are many current definitions of what modernity is and looks like. Thus, to even try to label a past society modern is to make a decision regarding which current vision of modernity one is using.

12. Fake Beards

11. Gold

Across this week's readings, one transformation that is apparent is the transformation in how one converts to Islam. That is, there is a transformation in how much conversion to Islam is not only a religious conversion, but a cultural conversion as well. In the early days of Islam, in order to convert to Islam, a person had to be symbolically adopted into an Arab tribe before he was permitted to recite the declaration of faith; Muslim was synonymous with Arab. Thus, Islam was monocultural: Muslim culture was Arab culture. Later, during the conquests, Islamization went hand-in-hand with Arabization. As areas came under Muslim rule, they invariably were incorporated into the Arabic cultural sphere, as social and political preference was given to early converts, all of whom were Arab. As such, Islamic practice in different regions of the Muslim lands would not have deviated very strongly from the practice of the Arabian heartland, or from the practice of any other region in the 'umma. Clearly, the Qur'an recited was the same across all Muslim lands, but presumably the practice of Islam was the same as well; thus, for example, Muslim clothing was a uniform aesthetic, and one could assume that one's style of dress would be unremarkable in both the Maghreb and the Hijaz.

(This is not to discount Persia, which while thoroughly Islamized, was never entirely Arabized; Persian remained the mother tongue for most Persians, and indeed many Arabs learned Persian themselves. However, Persia as a region was entirely Islamized, so that to describe someone as Persian also implicitly described that person as Muslim. This is the same experience as for Arabs: to describe someone as Arab also says that the person is Muslim. This is not the case for the peoples encountered in the readings this week.)

However, in this week's readings, different conversion narratives and Islamic cultures come into focus as the areas of Islamization expand, while those of Arabization do not. Both the Indian Ocean region and the Sahara desert region experienced Islamization, stemming from the activities of traveling merchants. This was already something new, as conversion to Islam previously had been a military experience, stemming from conquests in new lands; now, conversions were spurred by peaceful contact with commercial Muslims. These new converts generally lived in lands ruled by non-Muslims, outside the dar al-islam. Because of this, these communities had no official standard on which to base their Islamic practice and therefore had more opportunity to bring their own cultures and histories into their new religion. They were not subsumed by Islam, but rather were able to take it from a distance and incorporate the religious aspects, such as prayer, and the commercial, financial aspects of Islam into their communal identity, while retaining indigenous cultural practices, such as, notably, language and gender relations. Thus, Islamic practice became more differentiated across the varied Muslim communities of the world.

One of the first records of conversion to Islam in western Africa is that of the King of Takrur, who ruled a small area and "converted in the early 11th century and introduced Islam as the state religion" (Lydon 58). Presumably, his subjects were not yet Muslims when he declared the state religion, and so here is an early example of the shift in Muslim polities-- previously, the polity was declared Islamic due to its Muslim population which subjected itself to Islamic caliphal rule. Here, however, there is a Muslim ruler who is declaring the state Islamic while its people are not yet converted; conversion here is much more political, rather than cultural.

Ibn Battuta provides a wealth of evidence of a lack of Arabization in African Muslim lands. In a village called Taghaza, he derides the mosques, which are built "of rock salt with camel skin roofing" (30). In the land of the Massufa he notes that a Muslim there "derives his genealogy [not] from his father, but on the contrary, from his maternal uncle" (37). Additionally, ibn Battuta says that the Massufa are indeed good, observant Muslims, but their women do not adhere to modesty (37-38). All of the these examples of non-standard practice, according to ibn Battuta, demonstrate the local cultural practices which were retained in these regions even post-conversion. Islam here did not mean Arabization or a cultural shift.

In the Indian Ocean, convert populations were generally merchants who resided on the coasts. On the Indian coasts, these merchants tended to live in enclaves, although there is evidence of them "accommodating to a Hindu environment, e.g. abstaining from beef" (Risso 43). Here, these groups went the opposite of Arabization, not only rejecting the central Muslim culture but adopting aspects of a different foreign culture.

However, there are also numerous examples of Indian Ocean origin myths, in which Muslim communities living in the Indian Ocean region legitimized their Muslim lineage through stories of conversion. In these stories, an Arab, generally with a desirable lineage connected to the Prophet or a Companion, arrives in that location and performs a miracle that entices the local ruler to convert, which therefore ensures that the local population will follow suit. Thus, it places Islam in a local context, while still creating and maintaining a connection to the religious center.

10. Perfume

Chamberlain writes that our notions of public/private and formal/informal are derived from our Western experience (p.87).