The continued vitality of Sufism as a living embodied postcolonial reality challenges the argument that Sufism has 'died' in recent times. Throughout India and Bangladesh, Sufi shrines exist in both the rural and urban areas, from the remotest wilderness to the modern Asian city, lying opposite banks and skyscrapers. This book illuminates the remarkable resilience of South Asian Sufi saints and their cults in the face of radical economic and political dislocations and breaks new ground in current research. It addresses the most recent debates on the encounter between Islam and modernity and presents important new comparative ethnographic material. Embodying Charisma re-examines some basic concepts in the sociology and anthropology of religion and the organization of religious movements.

This volume deals with historical and contemporary articulations of the relation of tension between the civilizing impetus of Muslim traditions, and modern forms, fields and techniques of power. These techniques are associated with the process of state-building, as well as with the related constraints of disciplining, normative cohesion, control of the territory and monitored social differentiation. The contributions conceptualize Muslim traditions as deriving their legitimacy, authority, as well as normative and organizing power from being embedded in the discourses and institutions of Islam, which constitute one major center within world history, by now also encompassing Muslim communities within Western societies.

In-depth ethnographical study of contemporary Sufi orders in Iran, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, as well as in the UK and US.

Mulids, festivals in honor of Muslim "friends of God," have been part of Muslim religious and cultural life for close to a thousand years. While many Egyptians see mulids as an expression of joy and love for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, many others see them as opposed to Islam, a sign of a backward mentality, a piece of folklore at best. What is it about a mulid that makes it a threat to Islam and modernity in the eyes of some, and an indication of pious devotion in the eyes of others? What makes the celebration of a saint’s festival appear in such dramatically different contours? The Perils of Joy offers a rich investigation, both historical and ethnographic, of conflicting and transforming attitudes toward festivals in contemporary Egypt. Schielke argues that mulids are characterized by a utopian momentum of the extraordinary that troubles the grand schemes of order and perfection that have become hegemonic in Egypt since the twentieth century. Not an opposition between state and civil society, nor a division between Islamists and secularists, but rather the competition between different perceptions of what makes up a complete life forms the central line of conflict in the contestation of festive culture.

" . . . will be of interest not only to those concerned with Pakistan and the new Muslim presence in Europe, but also to those interested in an anthropological study of religion." —Barbara Metcalf, University of California, Davis Pnina Werbner traces the development of a Sufi Naqshbandi order founded by a living saint, Zindapir, whose cult originated in Pakistan and has extended globally to Britain, Europe, the Middle East, and southern Africa. Drawing on 12 years of fieldwork in Pakistan and Great Britain, she elucidates the complex organization of Sufi orders as regional and transnational cults, and examines how such cults are manifested through ritual action and embodied in sacred mythology and global diasporas. A focus of the study is the key event in the order's annual ritual cycle, a celebration in which tens of thousands of people gather at the saint's lodge in Pakistan and in the streets of Britain. Werbner challenges accepted anthropological and sociological truths about Islam and modernity, and reflects on her own role as ethnographic observer. Pilgrims of Love is a major contribution to our understanding of disaporic Islamic practices, highlighting the vitality of Sufi orders in the postcolonial world.

Ma Anandamayi is generally regarded as the most important Hindu woman saint of the twentieth century. Venerated alternately as a guru and as an incarnation of God on earth, Ma had hundreds of thousands of devotees. Through the creation of a religious movement and a vast network of ashrams-unprecedented for a woman-Ma presented herself as an authority figure in a society where female gurus were not often recognized. Because of her widespread influence, Ma is one of the rare Hindu saints whose cult has outlived her. Today, her tomb is a place of veneration for those who knew her as well as new generations of her followers. By performing extensive fieldwork among Ma's current devotees, Orianne Aymard examines what happens to a cult after the death of its leader. Does it decline, stagnate, or grow? Or is it rather transformed into something else entirely? Aymard's work sheds new light not only on Hindu sainthood-and particularly female Hindu sainthood-but on the nature of charismatic religious leadership and devotion.