Masayuki Akahori

Special Issue "Middle Eastern Ethnography Today: 'Islam' and Beyond"

iv+108、ISBN 9784909070203、SIAS Lectures 7

iv+108、ISBN 9784909070203、SIAS Lectures 7

iv+108、ISBN 9784909070203、SIAS Lectures 7

iv+84、ISBN 9784909070166、SIAS Lectures 5

iv+88、ISBN 9784909070173、SIAS Lectures 6

xi+445+xi頁、ISBN 9784812220184

vi+105 pp.

日本私立学校振興・共済事業団学術研究振興資金報告書、2009・2010年度

viii+216頁、ISBN9784324087060

ISBN 4324074275

Among ordinary Muslims in pre-modern times, saint veneration, which includes making wishes to God through saints' mediation, visiting saint tombs, and celebrating saints' anniversaries, was very popular in their daily life. Some intellectuals, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, have considered that saint veneration is an imported element and therefore non-Islamic beliefs and practices. However, it is clearly an integral part of the reality of Islam, which compromises the diversity of daily life with the unity of the world ruled by God. While the concern of Muslim intellectuals tends to concentrate on the logical and literal form of understanding the world, saints, with their visibility working as symbols, mediate invisible blessings or power of God to the people and make it possible to feel His greatness as real. In modern times, which is very unique in the point that most of the members of the society are literate, such kind of veneration has less appeal than before. A contemporary anthropology then should pay attention to the new forms of popular Islam including the consumption of religious commodities, images created by new media, the industry of religious tourism, and so forth, in addition to saint veneration.

This is a report concerning the field work undertaken in the Hamlet of Qisq al-Shamali, east of Aleppo in Syria. I conducted my research over there during the months of July and August, 1996, in cooperation with the archaeological research team. While the team concentrated upon the research of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic site of Tell Kosak Shamali at the village, I conducted interviews with the men of the village in order to clarify its history, to obtain information that could come in useful for archaeological research, and to explore the possibility of a general survey of the area on the basis of multi-disciplinary viewpoints. This is merely a preliminary report, because the time spent on my research was not long enough and because the cooperation is still underway. In this paper, the analysis of the social institutions, households, family names, descent groups, and oral traditions, led to the conclusion that the present village was founded in the not so distant past, presumably in the 19th century.

Among the Bedouin living in the Mediterranean coastal zone of the Egyptian Western Desert, a word 'faqih' (fgi in the dialect) denotes a distinguished religious person living and having lived with them in the desert. Based on anthropological fieldwork, this paper analyses how the Bedouin talk about and behave towards faqihs, which should give insight to the Bedouin's traditional practice of lslam.<br>Faqihs, both alive and dead, are frequently requested by the Bedouin to grant various kinds of wishes. Here two concepts, knowledge and grace, are crucial to understand the two different modes of being a faqih; living faqihs provide some religious services because they know Islam much better than the Bedouin; dead fagihs are thought to provide similar favors because they are given the grace of God as power to cause miracles on them and to be mediated to the Bedouin.<br>That faqih is usually a stranger coming from the outside of the desert is the third important point. In principle, Islamic knowledge is open to everyone and only God knows to whom He gives his grace. Therefore, faqihs' being privileged holders of such knowledge or grace is not normative but practical, which is highly convenient for the Bedouin's practice of Islam. As an articulate point to the God and to the Muslim community as a whole, faqihs create internal homogeneity among the Bedouin and facilitate their effective incorporation into the wider outside. An outsider living along with them is quite suitable to such a social position.<br>In Bedouin saint worship, it seems that two opposite polarities are at work; one is toward the assimilation of all the Muslims and the other is toward the differentiation; they have created a balance in the form of social articulation as faqih, which I may suggest is just a possible solution and that we would also find many other different balances in every socio-religious practice of Islam in the world.

In 1990 the electorate of the governorate of Marsa Matrouh in the Western Desert of Egypt chose four members of the ruling National Democratic Party as their representatives for the People's Assembly. However, the Bedouin forming the majority of the population explained that these were Bedouin representatives, nominated in the meetings of the tribal chiefs based on the consideration of fairness among the tribal groups in the district. This paper analyses the process of selecting candidates for the national election and its public acceptance. In particular, unusual appearance of strong rival candidates among the Bedouin in 1990 revealed the difference between rhetoric and political reality, given that every candidate claimed to have obtained the unanimous agreement of all the Bedouin before the election and even before the tribal meetings. The institutionalized setting of the national election and the strategic enterprises of the main actors including the candidates are all related to the discourse of"Bedouin democracy"which they advocate as being traditional and legitimate. The political process also serves to strengthen the distinctive social identity of the contemporary Bedouin, as symbolized in the TV images of the representatives appearing in the assembly hall in their traditional Bedouin robes.

This is an anthropological approach to the political actions of the Awlad Ali Bedouins in Egypt. Its purpose consists in finding some problematic points to be further studied in the process of selecting candidates among the Awlad Ali for the general election of the People's Assembly held in the end of November, 1990. The Awlad Ali are the Bedouins now mostly settled and living in the Governorate of Marsa Matrouh on the Mediterranean coast of the Western Desert. They are divided into five tribes (gabilas), and each tribe is into some sections ('a' ilas). During my stay in Egypt in 1988-1991, I visited the area many times and thereafter lived with the Awlad Ali in one of their villages for a year and half so as to do my fieldwork on them. This paper should be considered, therefore, as one of the studies on the tribal system of the Arab nomads, and the election of 1990 is taken up just as a case. The Governorate has two electoral districts, in both of which the number of representatives are two, so that four are to be elected in sum. As the Awlad Ali hold an absolute majority of the population of the area, they consider representatives of the Governorate as representatives of the Awlad Ali. Moreover, in order that those are representatives of the Awlad Ali as a whole, they say they all must reach an agreement on their candidacy. But reaching is so much difficult because of the lack of the established political institutions. Although they say as a rule that four of the five tribes share the seats and that the remaining one is to wait for its turn in the next occasion, the outcome of 1990 did not accord with this saying. The claim for the agreement of the tribes, nevertheless, has certain effects. The Awlad Ali people think of a candidate with the agreement as more legitimate and fair than those without it. So, if one gets the tribal agreement, he can take advantage of it tactically as a merit. The better one can pretend to have obtained an agreement of the tribes, the more easily he can win. The Awlad Ali also say that the agreement of the tribes on candidates should be reached through meetings of the 'umdas and the sheikhs, both of whom represent their tribal section against other sections. I myself attended some of the meetings held before the election and there found that the agreement was not reached positively but just accepted passively. As all of the meetings are locally held and not organized into larger ones, it is impossible in such conditions to gather up the will of each tribesman into united one. Therefore it must be considered that the Awlad Ali say the agreement is reached in the tribal meeting, not because it is actually done but because it should be ideally done. The 'umda and the sheikh are titles rather than posts, and not every section has both of them. There is no established organization to which they are belonging. Some of them, especially some living in Matrouh City, are rich and strong. They have relatively large influences over other 'umdas, sheikhs and other tribesmen. It is they who, in fact, play the power game among themselves, ratify candidates and lead the process of reaching (=accepting) an agreement of the Awlad Ali as a whole. They are powerful and behaving tactically so as to benefit themselves, but they still remain under the influence of the traditional norms. Here, norms work not as a burden on the individuals but just as a guideline along which people interact with one another. Behaving as a political unit, the Awlad Ali elected their representatives. The tribal system working on the normative basis was still effective and taken much seriouly in the process of decision making and agreement reaching. But it did not prevent anyone, candidates, the influential or any, from developing his own possibility. It just guided his way in harmony with others', if possible and favored. Those points are to be cleared in other case studies in different occasions.