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Muslim Preacher in the Modern World
A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective
By Richard T. Antoun PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09441-0
CHAPTER 1
The Social Organization of Tradition
In modern times Robert Redfield, M. N. Srinivas, and McKim Marriot were the first to write analytically about the process of "the social organization of tradition." The social organization of tradition is the process of constant interchange of cultural materials necessarily involving choice and interpretation between the self-styled "learned" (but also so styled by the common people) men and women of a society and the great majority of people whom Redfield designated as "folk" in earlier works and "peasants" in later works. This process usually involves some kind of accommodation between what the learned men ("literati" or "intelligensia" as Redfield called them) would like to see done or believed and what the great majority of people regarded as proper in deed and word. Redfield argued specifically that peasants were men of the countryside rooted in villages who had to take account of the city — its power, its marketplace, its beliefs, its style of life — and the kind of people it produced, gentry or townsmen. Redfield, perhaps unfortunately, stressed acceptance on the part of the folk at least at a normative level of a more "sophisticated" way of life and neglected investigating the numerous options and kinds of accommodation available to peasants including sheer juxtaposition of beliefs, revival, dissimulation, and outright defiance. Still, like most pioneers, Redfield's broadest formulations allowed and even pointed to the way for future analysis.
Although Redfield had designated the formalized, literate, and institutionalized views of the learned as the "great" tradition and the views of the folk as the "little" tradition, he defined the process of the social organization of tradition as a two-way flow of ideas. Srinivas and Marriot analyzed this two-way flow in terms of "parochialization" (by which ideas flowed from urban centers and were accepted and fixed in many "parochial" milieus [villages]) and "universalization," a flow of ideas from the villages and tribal encampments to the urban intellectual centers by which folk concepts were given the imprimateur of the sophisticates. Redfield's designations of the options of the folk, whether in terms of belief or action, resulted from his view that the transformation of "folk" society was caused by the urban revolution which had marked the turning point of the human career and the development of "civilization" — with which peasants had to come to terms intellectually as well as politically and economically. The city and its elite exercised moral guidance as well as political domination.
If Redfield emphasized the gap between the great and little traditions — and, therefore, the necessity of the social organization of tradition and the accommodation of traditions — he also emphasized (to the continuing good fortune of social anthropology and social anthropologists) the necessity of studying civilization from the bottom up. His interest in the "the little community" (1955) stemmed from his recognition of the importance of the study of simpler social units to facilitate the later study of the more complex; his recognition that most of the world still lived in peasant communities; and his view that the proper study of civilization — peasant villages were implicated in civilization as "part-societies" and "part-cultures" — was in vivo. That is, beliefs and actions ought to be analyzed in the flesh-and-blood context of family, work, neighborhood, and ceremonial life.
Redfield's focus on the organization of "tradition" presumed a structure of tradition, what might perhaps be described today as "culture structure" (i.e., persisting forms of ideas and cultural products together with arrangements for transmitting them). By "culture" he meant an organized body of conventional understandings or, phrased another way, learned, historically derived behavior.
The "social organization of tradition" directly implied a focus on linking institutions and roles, on linking between the great and little traditions — schools, temples, mystic orders, dramatic companies, mandarins, priests, mayors, traders, preachers, dons, and singers. Redfield did not in fact carry out a detailed study of such linking institutions and seemed to be more interested in the products of culture — the beliefs and the particular patterns of their accommodation and incorporation — than in the culture brokers themselves and their exercise of choice in the social organization of tradition. Anthropologists who followed Redfield did focus on linking institutions as well as patterns of belief and considered a variety of interest areas, such as J. Bennett's Northern Plainsmen (commerce and agriculture), J. Peacock's Rites of Modernization (drama), and, most important, M. Singer's When a Great Tradition Modernizes (religion and industry).
There is no question that the linker must exercise choice or, from another perspective, management, or from still another, manipulation, in choosing which aspects from the vast corpus of a particular great tradition to emphasize. For instance, in the Islamic case in dealing with marriage the preacher can emphasize either the first or the second clause in the key Quranic phrase on polygyny:
Marry of the women who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice (to so many) then one (only). (Surah 4, Verse 3, P)
Emphasis on the first clause emphasizes permissiveness as to plural marriage; emphasis on the second stresses restriction and, by implication, supports monogamy.
The linker must also interpret local custom and take some stance with respect to its particular components. For instance, what attitude does a Muslim preacher take to the home-town magician and his magic — simple acceptance and juxtaposition with Islamic ethics, or toleration with condescension or reinterpretation and integration into that ethic, or outright condemnation?
A satisfactory study of the social organization of tradition must have a dual emphasis, then: an emphasis on the cultural product — the art form, the set of religious beliefs, the dramatic presentation, the sermon text, the implicit attitudes governing marketplace behavior — as well as on the interpreter of that cultural product — the linker, keeper of the culture, or culture broker as he is variously termed. The following study of the Islamic sermon and the Muslim preacher pursues this dual perspective throughout with various emphases in particular chapters. It differs somewhat from the above-mentioned works in probing into the social organization of tradition in an in-depth case study of a single linker in a particular village milieu in one country. Although this restricted canvas precludes the systematic generalizations that might be gained from a controlled comparison or a cross-cultural investigation, it illuminates the working out of the process in a more detailed manner than a strictly comparative study would have allowed.
Although it may seem strange to say so, three decades after Redfield's work, we still know very little about the process by which the great religious traditions are passed on to believers in their respective communities. Studies of church organization, sectarian and theological differences, and religious law and ethics are numerous, but studies about the relationship of popular religion to the religion of the specialists — priests, rabbis, ministers, and 'ulema — are few. Although we know much about Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, we know relatively little about Christianization, Islamization, and Judaization. That relationship is mediated at the local level by a few key culture brokers such as parish priests, teachers, and jurisconsults. It is these figures who must accept, reject, reinterpret, or accommodate the diversity of local custom with the ordinances of religion, be they ritual, ethical, legal, or theological. How they do so remains obscure. Nowhere is this more the case than in the study of Islam.
The problem and the process is of wide scope in both time and space. Indeed, the social organization of tradition is a universal process found among all societies at all times once particular hinterland communities become linked to overarching political, economic, and religious structures and implicated in the concommitant processes of debt, politics, social control, and the quest for salvation. Therefore, the discussion that follows of culture brokers, the process of interpretation of tradition, and the constraints on that process exacted by the people of local communities, the state, and various hierarchies, will range cross-culturally and include examples from both the East and the West.
The Accommodation of Traditions: Perspectives of The Folk and the Culture Broker
Although the accommodation of traditions involves a constant and two-way interchange of cultural materials, the process has to contend with the often wide gap between popular and elite (even hinterland-rooted local elite) beliefs and styles of life. For instance, when I asked the prayer leader and preacher of Kufr al-Ma what the justifications/inducements for polygynous marriage were, he stated that there were three: lack of male heirs (from the first wife), barrenness and menopause, and disease and constant sickliness of the first wife. When I asked the same question of peasants from the same village they gave four answers: the need for labor power, conspicuous display (horses and women constituted a man's pride and joy), the desire for progeny, and hedonism or, as they put it, "the love of buttocks." The preacher and the peasants shared only one inducement/ justification, the desire for progeny.
Four examples, three from the United States and one from Jordan, illuminate the problem of the gap between great and little traditions and the necessity but also the difficulty of culture brokers bridging that gap. In the United States, discussion of religious or political great traditions or of religious little traditions and their relations with the political great tradition (that of the central government) must occur within the framework of a gradually developing pluralistic society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a society in which pluralism is mediated by law and constitutionally mandated in provisions for sectarian tolerance/separation of church and state. Such a society managed the gap between traditions and perhaps narrowed that gap somewhat in the process of assimilation, but it nowhere abolished it. Indeed, daily newspaper reports in all parts of the country in the last quarter of the twentieth century document the existence of that gap.
Sometimes the gap between great and little traditions may have a quite explicit spatial dimension. In Minneapolis it was reported that Roman Catholic opposition to adding an abortion clinic in the administrative offices of the Planned Parenthood Association of Minnesota had aroused vigorous protests. The newspaper report (New York Times, November 1976) stated that the plan to add a clinic "to terminate pregnancies in the first trimester" instigated picketing, stone-throwing, and graffiti on the walls of the administrative center. The protesters argued that residents have the right to decide how land in their neighborhood should be used. Said one protester, "I wouldn't care if it were in another section. I wouldn't picket there. We don't want the clinic in our neighborhood where our children will be exposed to it." Here, the gap between the national political and legal tradition (supporting abortion) and another great tradition, Roman Catholicism, is expressed in the demand for local spatial autonomy, that is, as a demand for the respect of a "little" tradition.
In 1969, another and perhaps more clear-cut instance of the gap between the state political and here, specifically administrative tradition, and a little religious tradition is the case of the Old Order Amish in southern Indiana. Indiana state law required the display of a triangular, red and orange emblem on all slow-moving vehicles. This law was applied to the buggies and wagons of the Old Order Amish. Many of them construed the red and orange reflector as a violation of their religious principles (the living of a simple life as Jesus Christ had led) and as representing the "mark of the beast" or "the sign of the devil" as maintained in the Book of Revelation (displaying the sign was interpreted as worshiping the devil and leading to damnation). In September of that year eight men were arrested for refusing to display the sign, and sixteen families were considering moving to another state such as Ohio where their religious beliefs would not conflict with state law. Over several months the Amish always chose imprisonment for twenty days rather than payment of the fine since they construed the latter as admission of guilt. Early in December, two Amish families left for Tennessee by boxcar. Their neighbors said that they were sorry to see them go since they were good farmers and provided employment for the non-Amish population in the district. A year before, fifty-one Amish had boarded a flight at Louisville for South America where they planned to resettle.
The former governor, Roger Branagin, who had introduced the emblem law had relaxed its enforcement, but the new governor, Edgar Whitcomb, proceeded to enforce it in July 1969. The Amish had indicated they would be willing to display an alternate (gray and white) emblem such as one used in Ohio. The American Civil Liberties Union suggested that the impasse could be resolved by an administrative ruling allowing an alternate emblem to be used. On December 6 Governor Whitcomb indicated he would support a change in the application of the emblem law that would alter the sign to make it acceptable to the Amish. The Indiana General Assembly had legislated the use of an emblem but left its shape and color to be determined by the Director of the Office of Traffic Safety. The Amish case illustrates the option of defiance by members of a local community; those who refused to compromise their religious principles went to jail or migrated. It also illustrated a possible accommodation when state law conflicts with religious beliefs — the exercise of adminstrative judgment to reconcile the two.
That this conflict between a religious little tradition and a political great tradition is not ephemeral is attested to by the fact that in July of 1984 Old Order Amish of New York were arrested for refusing to display the emblem for slow-moving vehicles. This time an administrative accommodation was worked out to deal with both the violation and the jail sentence. The Amish agreed to use gray, not orange, reflector tape, to hug the right side of the road, to stay off the roads at night and, if that was not possible, to mount a kerosene lantern with a red lens on the rear of their buggies. An ingenious administrative accommodation was worked out to deal with the jail sentence (of five days):
The sheriff brought the Amish to jail shortly before midnight on a Thursday. AU prisoners are automatically granted two days off their sentence for good behavior. And since prisoners who are to be released on weekends must be freed on the Friday before a weekend, the sheriff released the Amish in the early hours Friday morning. A five-day jail sentence was thus collapsed into but a few hours.
The contrast between the long conflict between the Amish and the State of Indiana and the "short and sweet" conflict between the Amish and the State of New York reflects, among other things, a different capacity in the critical skill of culture brokership.
A more dramatic example of defiance by the upholders of a little tradition against a great cultural tradition and its political allies is the West Virginia textbook case. According to a correspondent for the New York Times (October 1974), the opposition of parents in Kanawha County, West Virginia in the heart of the Appalachian coal fields to the introduction of certain textbooks by various school boards (actually, 325 books out of 96,000 volumes paid for by the school boards) took on such forms as prayer rallies, picketing, cursing from the pulpit of school board members, beating of newsmen, and attempted dynamiting of schools. This reaction indicated that something much more important than the introduction of textbooks was at stake. The city editor of one Charleston newspaper stated that "the books were only a symbol that many of the protesters are demonstrating against a changing world: short skirts, long hair, civil rights, nudity, dirty movies."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Muslim Preacher in the Modern World by Richard T. Antoun. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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