Alternative Islams

A running theme throughout my studies and time in Egypt has been the notion of multiple “Islams” and the great diversity among Muslim communities. While diversity is a fact, it’s easier to understand diversity on the surface level as geographic location, language, or dress, than to grasp that diversity of Islam is also in the different experiences, meanings, and understandings of Muslim identity as expressed through their ritual practices.

As Geertz posits, ritual is a symbolic language and each symbol points to something beyond itself, into many levels of interpretation. For example, while some Muslim groups worship separately from the opposite sex as an expression of religious piety, at least one community (the Alevi) conducts worship without separation because they believe that God does not see physical bodies, only souls during worship. Different worship practices reflect different understandings of what is appropriate and 
sometimes even seemingly universal Islamic rites, like the hajj, have many interpretations. 

For this reason, the mulids in Egypt can be seen as a basic analogy for the diversity of understandings and expression of Islam in Muslim communities:

“A mulid is a festival characterized by a profound ambivalence of experience and ambiguity of meaning: a time and a space for countless different celebrations, some of which overlap and others that never meet. Each visitor makes his or her own mulid, depending on where he or she goes and what he or she does.” (Schielke, 539).

Similarly, Islamic rites and the Muslim identity among communities grow out of and are maintained by different cultural traditions. However, though understanding the cultural experience of each community is important, it is also important to look at Islam from above and remember that politics (the state, economic elites, etc.) and religion are intertwined.