Words in the Islamic Tradition

What constitutes a Muslim space? We might well expect to find characteristic Muslim patterns in a context like this where people have experienced the kind of cultural displacement, whether through migration to a largely non-Muslim area or, in the case of many African-American Muslims, through conversion, that places them in the kind of “borderland” likely to illuminate cultural processes and characteristic practices. Muslims are Muslim precisely in the sense that they are people who, across time and place, engage with what Talal Asad (1986) calls “a discursive tradition” created by interaction with sacred texts and with the history of that interaction.

A central theme that emerges in these essays is the individual and corporate recitation, display, and transmission of sacred words as a focus of Muslim worship and of moral behavior. Over and over, in context after context, we find elaborations of practice—in the very specific sense of ritual centered on sacred words—coupled with attempts to organize everyday life in the light of those words. If there is a recurrent visual clue to a Muslim presence in these multiple settings, it is above all those Arabic words, whether as documents—calligraphy on paper, objects, and buildings—or as talismans. The Arabic script alone has served historically as a constant visually perceived symbol of Islam (Grabar 1983: 29), often supplemented today by the images of the holy shrines at Mecca and Medina.

For a Muslim to feel at home or for a non-Muslim to recognize a Muslim space, the presence of certain spoken and written Arabic words is most telling. Even when they arrive in unknown places, familiar Arabic dicta greet Muslims from Arabia to China, from Detroit to Mali: “Bi’smi’llah” (In the name of Allah), “Al-hamdu’llah” (Praise to Allah), “Insha’llah” (If Allah wills). Now that Islamic symbols have become so much a part of public space, the Arabic name of Allah and other phrases leap out from billboards or vehicle decorations (Starrett 1992: 1–4). The photographs of calligraphy in a Muslim home in Canada and an African-American Muslim home in Philadelphia, below (figs. 10a-b and 14), depict a use of sacred words widespread among Muslims everywhere (Qureshi, McCloud, this volume). Public processions display moving “texts,” not in some abstract sense, but on the placards that are carried (Slyomovics, Schubel, Werbner, this volume).

And beyond the words, one encounters shared practice. The linkage between sacred word and practice is clear. Clifford Geertz has elaborated this point by noting that Islamic buildings are primarily spaces where the faithful engage with sacred words, whether in prayer (the mosque), education (the madrasa), or meditation (the khanaqah).^[5] Grabar, even while seeking to analyze a specific design feature of a class of mosques (the placement of tiled panels in mosques of Safavid Iran), again resorts, albeit tentatively, to the priority of practice:

In the Masjid-i Shah’s main dome seems to me to be an extraordinary attempt at symbolizing the Revelation not as the static and learned order of a Gothic portal or of a Byzantine church but as the dynamic and sensuous illumination of a faithful praying. The symbolism of the decoration is not inherent to the design but is the result of man’s prescribed action in the building. (Grabar 1983: 30)

In chapter 1, Gulzar Haider describes his own most recent designs as ones that circle back to this kind of inspiration.

That these enduring themes are evident, indeed thrown into high relief, in the context of today’s diaspora Muslims validates the emphasis on the importance of studying “border” populations, those living in contact with other peoples, for understanding enduring characteristic processes and themes. At the same time, and equally gratifying, it links what are often the most humble of communities, deprived of material resources and marginalized in relation to the surrounding cultures, to the great historic periods, studied by scholars like Grabar and constituting the pride of all Muslims, of the classical past.

These themes of the preeminence of sacred words and normatively enjoined practices as the core of cultural elaboration, transformation, and reproduction are evident in the entire collection of essays presented here, both those in the first section, which emphasize interaction among Muslims, and those in the second, which turn to interactions with the larger society.