Abstract
Smita Tewari Jassal. 2020. Islamic Conversation: Sohbet and Ethics in Contemporary Turkey. Oxon and New York: Routledge. x + 161 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. £39.99 (hardback —ISBN: 9781138391192).
Post 9/11, anthropologists have been particularly concerned with how Muslim subjects in particular societies, such as Egypt and Turkey, would reformulate their notions of agency, ethics and subjectivities in relation to such events. It is in this context that one should locate Smita Tewari Jassal’s ethnography. Based on her extensive fieldwork in neighbourhoods of Ankara, Turkey, from 2010 to 2016, Jassal reformulates what the notions of freedom, agency and subjectivity mean for her informants in an increasingly secular society. Due to increasing secularisation and decreasing religiosity, as anthropologists Nadia Fadil and Mayandi Fernando (2015) point out, there is a tendency to obscure certain forms of religious life in Islamic societies. The case of Turkey in Jassal’s work is a powerful reminder that such a view obscured certain forms of life from the public view of the state and citizens. It is also an invitation to rethink the notions of ‘popular Islam’ and ‘lived Islam’, as these terminologies have acquired different meanings at different periods.
The book is divided into six chapters excluding the introduction, and it is based on her intermittent fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2016 in Turkey. The ethnography is centred on the idea of sohbet, a discursive practice common in the neighbourhoods of Ankara, which is conventionally understood as the Sufis transmitting their knowledge to their followers, and as an imperative for ethical and moral actions amongst followers. The ethnography pushes us to rethink the informant’s notion of belongingness, tradition and virtues in a modern society with secular concerns. Do virtues attached to philanthropic activities such as that of zakat (alms-giving) (chapter 2) acquire new meanings in Turkey’s modern context? The bimodal feature of activities such as sohbet is to keep an individual away from isolation and to create closely knit communities while at the same time maintaining/creating neoliberal values. Chapter 2 is an experiment in rethinking the notion of zakat as one that goes beyond gifting or even charity; it could also mean for individuals to engage in entrepreneurial projects such as large-scale development projects, for instance, establishing charity organisations. The chapter talks about the underpinning meaning attached to the notion of zakat; for Jassal’s informants, involvement in zakat was not to reserve a seat in paradise as it became a tool for educational philanthropy and societal change. Jassal’s work also teaches us the instrumental role of tariqets (sufi orders) in Islamic societies. It shows how, with the overthrow of the tariqets after the Kemalist revolution in Turkey, one could understand how studying the physical space of shrines offers a limited understanding of people’s religiosity. Sohbet informs the minutiae of everyday life, from wajib (compulsory) prayers to sunna activities and other moral dispositions, including the capacity to distinguish what is halal (religiously permitted) and haram (forbidden) in particular situations. In other words, it leads to innovations in the most ordinary or obvious and extraordinary ways of considering charity as a passage to heaven. Jassal’s interlocutors attributed success to the replication of the Prophet’s teachings to one’s everyday life.
Chapter 3 is based on the case study of the charismatic Alevi living saint, Zohra Ana, whose followers attributed the sudden transformation of a low-income neighbourhood into a successful one, to the saint’s presence in the area. About the saintly presence of Zohra Ana, in people’s reading, the saint did not follow the conservative rules of a religious leader. Jassal’s interlocutors cultivated dispositions following Zohra Ana for mobility, socialisation, ‘ethics of sharing’ and everyday anxieties (p. 76), where they further viewed akhirah (hereafter) as an imagined space where only ‘proper’ dealings would happen. Jassal asks what goes into the making of a saint-like Zohra Ana through the practice of sohbet. Zohra Ana enjoys the bestowed authority of a miracle worker because of her claim to the lineage of Alevi saints, her authority deriving from her performative spells and strategies in dealing with the crowd/public and combining temporal and transcendental concerns with her techniques.
Chapter 4 discusses the significance of shrines and dreams in the Alevi Bektashi universe. It takes us to the centrality of dreams in Muslim lives, where dreams may lead/act upon individuals beyond the state’s disciplinary mechanisms; here, one can see how the dreams put pressure on the dreamers to engage in ethical and moral actions. Jassal further enquires as to what motifs bring people to the shrine, noting that women attendees most often visited shrines for the first time after seeing the saint in a dream. Dreams, in other words, prompted them to arrive at the shrines. Jassal’s interlocutors slept near the tomb as they expected to meet the saint in their dreams, and it is to these saints that people addressed their demands.
Jassal’s work also shows the terminologies common to numerous shrines worldwide and further locates the importance of studying shrines and their relation to the sacred geography of any city. In her study, a dream is a message that was not acted upon. Dreams must be effectively interpreted to distinguish between bad and good dreams. One of her core arguments is centred on the notion that religion creates power, in the sense that seeing the Prophet in one’s dreams is a legitimate source of authority. The bestowed authority that Zohra Ana enjoyed was because she transitioned from a normal individual to a saint as a result of the experience of seeing the Prophet in her dreams. Interpreting and acting upon dreams also had worldly consequences, such as improved family status (p. 103).
Chapter 5 talks about the genealogy of having lighthouses (dorms) in aid of creating devoted believers with dispositions suitable to both modernity and religion, who would restore ‘the power of Islam in Turkey’ (p. 121). Students often joined these dorms due to financial instabilities. The pedagogy taught in the dorms is so effective that one does not falter in one’s religious duties. During sohbet sessions, people select anecdotes from the Quran, which helps them learn and understand Islam. A sense of reciprocity is also framed in this context, where the moral imperative of returning or giving back to another is encouraged. Although Jassal talks about the new dimensions of ethics that emerged amongst informants in the context of the vast uncertainties in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, she does not build on how framing this distinct ethics of care would unfold in the everyday work that her informants undertake (p. 126). In other words, how, in this particular context, would the acts of gift and reciprocity not be in the sense of explicit giving or taking?
Chapter 6 brings forth a gendered understanding of two sites of religiosity—mosques and shrines—and an exploration of women’s preference for shrines over mosques. It also urges one to think about how individual women perceive freedom while doing pilgrimage; in most cases, although they had limited chances of entering mosques, they had the freedom to explore shrines. However, given this context, Jassal’s statement that norms the women follow are prescriptive and based on the Prophet’s examples comes into question: How do we consider the engagements with these norms considering that there is some freedom in terms of practice? It is evident that there is a gendered aspect to visiting shrines and mosques where shrines are seen as less holy than mosques. However, what is not very evident is how the attendees at the shrine would perceive the solutions that the saint provided.
Jassal’s ethnography has several moments where neo-liberalism is not at odds with individuals’ pious disposition. It is also a neat account of people’s expectations of ziyaret or visits to tombs of saints, when such microanalysis of culture and religion is often rare. Further, it is a solid account that shows how the structure of narrating dreams is as important as the revelation in itself as dreams become imperative to moral and ethical actions. It is also a response to the increasing marginalisation of Islamic knowledge and piety in a secular society where sohbet shapes one’s tendency to act, think and behave in an Islamic way. Jassal’s interviewees included relatively young, married, successful business people, teachers, among others. Finally, Jassal shows how both Sunnis and Alevis have multiple meanings of sohbet, where this particular discursive practice prescribes them to have two distinct modes of engagement with the public. A comparative sociology of sohbet with other cultural forms in different societies would help one to locate what is practical, unique and universal about it as a phenomenon. In this aspect, Jassal’s work would be taken forward. The book deserves much attention in terms of its ethnographic richness and should not be considered only as a venture in the anthropology of Islam and ethics; the concerns that the text addresses are of importance in the sub-discipline of the anthropology of religion.