Religious tradition, economic domination and political legitimacy : Morocco and Oman - article ; n°1 ; vol.29, pg 17-30

D.F. Eickelman

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Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée - Année 1980 - Volume 29 - Numéro 1 - Pages 17-30
The Oman sultanate, as it has been cut off from its neighbors and from western influence unto recent years, seems the right country for studymg the so-called traditional Islam. But, as soon as it is approached from an ethnographic and social historical point of view, the notion of tradition appears more complex than that can be extracted from religious texts and authorities. It is replaced by that of traditions where political and religious powers interfere. Although many ethnic groups and various religious identities coexist, Oman's religion is mainly the Ibadi Islam marked by an egalitarism convenient to the « tribe » organization and by the imamate leadership. The social organization and the religious rule were, however, influenced by involvement in maritime trade and dominions in East Africa. Sociological comparisons with Morocco enlight the complex relations which exist and have existed between religion, social organization, economic and political power.
Le sultanat d'Oman, une date récente ses voisins et des influences occidentales, apparaît comme le lieu privilégié d'une étude de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler l'Islam traditionnel. Or, dès les premières approches ethnographiques et socio-historiques, la notion de tradition s'éloigne d'une transmission par les textes et les autorités religieuses, pour faire place à des traditions dans lesquelles interfèrent pouvoir politique et religieux. L'Oman, quelle que soit la diversité des groupes ethniques qui l'habitent et la diversité de leurs appartenances religieuses, se rattache essentiellement à l'Islam Ibadite, dont les principes égalitaires semblent accordés à l'organisation « tribale » et qui consacre la prépondérance de l'imamat Toutefois, de longue date, le commerce maritime et le contrôle des comptoirs en Afrique de l'Est ont eu d'importantes répercussions sur l'organisation sociale et le pouvoir religieux. Quelques comparaisons avec le Maroc éclairent les rapports ici décrits entre la religion, l'organisation sociale et le pouvoir économique et politique (Rédaction).
14 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

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• Publié par: REVUE_DE_L-OCCIDENT_MUSULMAN_ET_DE_LA_MEDITERRANEE
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1980
• Nombre de lectures: 19
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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D.F. Eickelman
Religious tradition, economic domination and political legitimacy
: Morocco and Oman
In: Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, N°29, 1980. pp. 17-30.
Abstract
The Oman sultanate, as it has been cut off from its neighbors and from western influence unto recent years, seems the right
country for studymg the so-called traditional Islam. But, as soon as it is approached from an ethnographic and social historical
point of view, the notion of tradition appears more complex than that can be extracted from religious texts and authorities. It is
replaced by that of traditions where political and religious powers interfere. Although many ethnic groups and various religious
identities coexist, Oman's religion is mainly the Ibadi Islam marked by an egalitarism convenient to the « tribe » organization and
by the imamate leadership. The social organization and the religious rule were, however, influenced by involvement in maritime
trade and dominions in East Africa. Sociological comparisons with Morocco enlight the complex relations which exist and have
existed between religion, social organization, economic and political power.
Résumé
Le sultanat d'Oman, une date récente ses voisins et des influences occidentales, apparaît comme le lieu privilégié d'une étude de
ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler l'Islam traditionnel. Or, dès les premières approches ethnographiques et socio-historiques, la
notion de tradition s'éloigne d'une transmission par les textes et les autorités religieuses, pour faire place à des traditions dans
lesquelles interfèrent pouvoir politique et religieux. L'Oman, quelle que soit la diversité des groupes ethniques qui l'habitent et la
diversité de leurs appartenances religieuses, se rattache essentiellement à l'Islam Ibadite, dont les principes égalitaires semblent
accordés à l'organisation « tribale » et qui consacre la prépondérance de l'imamat Toutefois, de longue date, le commerce
maritime et le contrôle des comptoirs en Afrique de l'Est ont eu d'importantes répercussions sur l'organisation sociale et le
pouvoir religieux. Quelques comparaisons avec le Maroc éclairent les rapports ici décrits entre la religion, et
le pouvoir économique et politique (Rédaction).
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Eickelman D.F. Religious tradition, economic domination and political legitimacy : Morocco and Oman. In: Revue de l'Occident
musulman et de la Méditerranée, N°29, 1980. pp. 17-30.
doi : 10.3406/remmm.1980.1872
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/remmm_0035-1474_1980_num_29_1_1872RELIGIOUS TRADITION,
ECONOMIC DOMINATION AND POLITICAL LEGITIMACY
par D. F. EICKELMAN
Traditional Islam is the mainstream of Islam in history
and in politics. It may be, as the Modernists and Fundamenta
lists hold, that tradition is a distortion of the true Islam,
but the fact remains that traditional Islam has been domi
nant in the Middle East and even now divergent views are
distinguished by their opposition to tradition (Binder 1965 :
118-119).
This essay has two complementary goals. The first is to analyze what is known
presently of the relation between religious tradition and polity in Oman a country
which due to a combination of the will of its former Sultan and residual Western
imperial interests remained largely cut off from its neighbors and the outside world
until 1970. The second goal is critically to analyze the concept of "traditional" Islam
as it is used in the epigraph. In Binder's comment cited in the epigraph and in the
writings of a number of other scholars, Islamic tradition is seen concretely as a vessel
with specific form and content. The alternate approach advanced in this paper is to
consider tradition as an analytic notion which designates an ideological type with
specific relations to local social structures. If this approach is accepted, it follows that
what must be studied is not Islamic tradition but traditions as they are elaborated in
various sociohistorical contexts.
This paper considers two such contexts : Morocco and Oman. (1) The fact that
Oman's apparent isolation has been maintained until such a recent date makes it a
particularly appropriate locus for studying what Islamic tradition means. It also
provides a marked sociological contrast to Morocco, a country which was under
direct colonial domination for half a century, possessed a sizable community of
metropolitan expatriates, and was subject to direct European influences upon its
internal economic currents and politics for longer periods. It might be argued that
Oman was also subject to such pressures, but not with the same intensity of
European involvement as was the case for Morocco. The legacy of colonial ethnogra
phy in Morocco, an enterprise which just before and during the early years of the
Protectorate was intended as a prolegomenon to "scientific" colonial rule, has no
counterpart in the Sultanate of Oman, where British archives suggest a much less 18 D.F. EICKELMAN
substantial comprehension of the country's internal affairs (Peterson, 1978). Yet in
Morocco as well there is a strong current of "traditional" Islamic ideology which to a
large extent has not been effectively harnessed by the country's political parties and
which remains a significant, if not measurable, force among the "marginalized" rural
population (Hammoudi, 1979 ; Eickelman 1977, 1978). In the Moroccan case it can be
argued that the meaning of "tradition" has been shaped much more directly by
contact with the West than has been the case in Oman.
Critical discussion of what is meant by Islamic tradition is needed for both
analytical and practical reasons. Especially in recent years, a number of studies of
Islam have appeared which combine attention to textual analyses, a venerable tradi
tion in the study of Islam, with analysis of the ethnographic and social historical
contexts in which notions of Islam are developed, transmitted and reproduced (for
example, Geertz, 1968; Merad, 1967; Bujra, 1971; Gilsenan, 1973; Zein, 1974;
Eickelman, 1976, 1977, 1978; Hammoudi n.d.). Earlier studies of Islam, based
primarily upon either the study of key religious texts or of certain types of religious
experience (formal ritual or mysticism, for example), tended to concentrate upon the
search for an Islamic "essence." This earlier analytic tradition, still vigorous, in part
coincided with the ideological premise held by many Muslims that Islamic beliefs and
practices are unaffected by historical vicissitudes. In the context of this scholarly
tradition, such practices as maraboutism in North Africa (and equivalent popular
beliefs elsewhere) are dismissed as being non-Islamic or incorrect understandings of
Islam, even though those who hold such beliefs are considered to be Muslims. One
Muslim intellectual has gone so far as to acknowledge the prevalence of such beliefs
both now and in the past, but considers them to be perpetrated by charlatans and-
"spiritual delinquents" and accepted only by the ignorant (Rahman, 1968 : 185).
The ethnographic and social historical studies cited above implicitly suggest a
more complex notion of tradition than that which can be extracted from explicitly
religious texts. In most cases an integral part of these studies has been the analysis of
Islamic ideologies and practices in changing historical contexts and in the light of
comparable studies of Islam as locally received in other milieux. As a consequence,
the notion of an Islamic "essence" has been difficult to sustain. Although the studies
cited above differ widely from each other in analytic assumptions, in almost every
studied locale there are opposing conceptions of Islam. These opposing (or comple
mentary) conceptions of Islam are distinguished by greater and lesser degrees of
compromise with the social order. They are co-present and in dynamic tension with
each other. Some of these ideologies, such as those characteristic of "reformist" Islam,
tend to be explicit and more general in their implications, while others, including
what can be conveniently labelled as maraboutism in North Africa, remain largely
implicit and tied to particular social contexts. The co-presence of these alternative
ideologies, some of which are not formally elaborated, means that the strength of one
or another ideological form cannot be attributed solely to its relation to a specific
social context (Eickelman, 1977 : 3-7). In what is perhaps an extreme reaction to the
earlier analytic tradition which largely accepted the ideological premise held by many
Muslims of the immutability of "true" Islamic belief and practice, one critic has
suggested replacing the term Islam by islams, in order better to emphasize the MOROCCO AND OMAN 19
diversity and vibrancy of the religious tradition which he seeks to interpret and to
"essences" signal an analytic distance both from the Orientalist tradition of seeking
and from Islamic theological tenets (Zein, 1977).
Even if the notion of an Islamic essen