Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives

This close look at Muslim worldviews argues for the importance of an overarching, universal worldview shared by Muslims in coexistence with local worldviews specific to particular societies, sects, and practices. Its cross-cultural approach makes it a wide-ranging and comprehensive work, while its ethnographic approach brings the importance of the local into salience. It is well written and readable and will be of interest to scholars of the Middle East and Islam, and religious and phenomenological studies, as well as serving as a useful introductory text to Muslim worldviews. -- Amy Evrard, Gettysburg College This book's approach is both novel and significant. El-Aswad rightly observes that Western scholarly and media attention to Islam represents it primarily as a political identity, obscuring both the religion's internal diversity and its capacity to structure worldviews. As a treatment of the phenomenology of Muslim societies, devoted to understanding 'the way ordinary people imagine their social world' through 'images, stories and legends,' this book is a valuable and overdue corrective to such simplifying tendencies. Its cross-cultural, multi-sited analysis holds considerable promise for student readers and for scholars of the Muslim world. -- Bruce Whitehouse, Lehigh University Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives is not going to be the final word on Islam as a global civilization, but it provides the worthwhile service of introducing how anthropologists and others might conceive of Islam (and by extension other cultural systems) as more than local, or as local and global at the same time. Anthropology Review Database