ひとつではないイスラーム(メモ)

People of the Book

People of the Book

Zachary Karabell People of the Bookから少しメモ。
“By the end of the sixteenth century, the reach of Islam was greater than it ever had been, and the call to prayer could be heard five times a day from Morocco to Java*1.”(p.180)


But while millions across continents identified themselves as Muslim, they did not form a cohesive community. In the second half of the twentieth century, as travel become safer, faster, and accessible to the masses, unprecedented numbers of Muslim became hajis and journeyed to Mecca. There, they were thrust into contact with Muslims from around the globe, and that experience connected them as few things did to a sense of an international Muslim community. But before the innovations of the industrial age, before the telegraph, radio, television, airplanes, and automobiles, few Muslims made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and few had contact with anyone outside their family and village. Some trading centers bustled with merchants from far-off places, and cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria in Egypt, Istanbul and Salonica in the eastern Mediterranean, and Zanzibar on the coast of East Africa were crazy quilts of languages, foreign dress, and multiple currencies. On the whole, however, while Islam spanned the globe, most Muslims had little in common.
That meant that, save for a shared knowledge of the opening verses of the Quran and a few Arabic words memorized for daily prayers, a camel merchant in Khartoum was almost alien to a fisherman in Java or mason in Konya as each was to a tailor in London or a count in Versailles. Even within the Ottoman Empire, there was no one Islam.(…) (pp.180-181)
また、「スーフィズム*2アモルファスな本質」;

While Sufism first emerged as mystical tradition, it also evolved into folk religion. Some Sufi lodges retained their mystical focus, and nurtured monasticism and meditation. Others, however, combined Muslim practices with whatever pre-Muslim traditions had existed before Islam took root. (…) In its many forms, Sufism became a grab bag of Islam and pre-Islamic traditions. (p.181)
イスラームは(基督教と同様に)ひとつではない。また、人々にとって、宗教は諸アイデンティティのうちのひとつにすぎない;

It is both familiar and convenient to talk of a “Muslim world” stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, but that has led to a widespread tendency to assume that Muslim historically had one cultural identity. Yes, there was a notion of an umma, of a Muslim community united in faith, just as there were vague notion of a Christendom united under banner of Christ. But like Christianity, Islam splintered into hundreds of rival sects, and whatever cohesion it might initially have promised evaporated. In both “Christendom” and the “house of Islam” (as Muslim have called their world), religion was one identity among many. And what that identity meant to the political social, or cultural life of any particular village, town, state, or society is beyond generalization. (pp.181-182)

See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080121/1200845306 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080915/1221504559

*1:実際は、ジャワよりももっと東、現在のフィリピン、ルソン島までは行っていただろう。

*2:スーフィズムについては、http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070418/1176869274 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070927/1190866367でも言及している。