Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 17
2/2/2016
Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online
Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives
By: El-Sayed el-Aswad
Muslim Worldvies and Everyday Lives. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2012. 248pp. $85.00. ISBN: 0759121214.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Susanne Olsson, PhD
Södertörn University
Sweden
Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives examines how religiously constructed images of the world influence “ordinary” people’s everyday lives.
The book is divided into six main chapters with case-studies from Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain and the U.S., including informants from the Sunni,
Shi‘a, and Sufi sects. The material is mainly gathered ethnographically and the approach is a welcome contribution to contemporary studies on
Islam. As el-Aswad observes, many studies on Islam and Muslims are politically oriented and focus on ideology, while he makes a conscious
choice of separating “worldview” from “ideology”, focusing on ordinary Muslims and their everyday lives. Worldview relates to belief systems and
symbolic actions, while ideology is defined as related to more worldly orientated power. A worldview includes assumptions concerning how the
universe is structured, which may go largely unquestioned, and are often unsystematized. For example, it is manifested in images and stories as well
as beliefs, shared meanings and practices that render social life possible and plausible. The separation between ideology and worldview does not
mean that worldviews are apolitical since they may be of importance to grass-root activity. As a part of a larger trend among scholars of religion,
this approach to lived religion is an important contribution to the scholarship of religion in general, and illustrates how religion is apprehended and
practiced among ordinary people.
An overarching aim with Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives is to present insights to scholarship about Islam and Muslim societies and to
question the often derogatory misconceptions found in the global media discourse. El-Aswad is also critical of “New Orientalism” which he regards
as an ignorant approach to Islam, focusing violence; and he holds it responsible for what he perceives as the emerging conflict between the West
and Muslims, as it is seen as not only a fight against violent interpretations of Islam, but against Islam as a whole. El-Aswad, on the other hand
holds a view of Islam that appears as idealized when he argues that Islam never advocated terrorism. Islam is presented, as if it had agency, as
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