Alexander Dießner’s Reviews > Lived Islam: Colloquial Religion in a Cosmopolitan Tradition > Status Update

The imagine those other Muslims of whatever stripe as religious kin of single family in a way that a Christian or a Hindu is not and cannot ever be.

The relationships among Dialect, Cosmopolitan, and Koiné Islam have shifted over time and according to place but they remain the constituents of Lived Islam. The twentieth + twenty-first centuries have realigned these 3 features of Islam in what may at first seem to be a predictable privileging of the institutional forms of Islam since those institutions are now often allied with the power of the modern nation-state.

It is not too much to say that the history of Islamic religion can be written as a history of encounters between Vernacular Muslim pragmatists and Cosmopolitan Muslim idealists. Like Americans who go abroad and suddenly realize that they speak not English but American." many of these reformers have left home as Dialect Muslims and returned as Cosmopolitans.

There are, observably, objects symbols and practices that Muslims from diverse locales affirm to be central to Islam. The discourse that centers on these is at the heart of Muslim identity and practice. Yet the actual content of the texts, theology of the rituals and the set of practices, is less important practically than local understandings, the local appropriation, of these texts, rituals, and moral requirements.

The purpose of this book is to make explicit what most students of Islam know: that Islam is more various than references to Arabs or ulamā allow, that all Muslims create Islam, and that Islam in the world is fecund and diverse.

The purpose of this book is to make explicit what most students of Islam know: that Islam is more various than references to Arabs or ulamā allow, that all Muslims create Islam, and that Islam in the world is fecund and diverse.