Can there be a Godly ethnography? Islamic anthropology, epistemic decolonization, and the ethnographic stance

Abstract

AbstractCan there be a Godly ethnography? This article explores how the epistemic entailments of this question trouble our taken‐for‐granted notions about what decolonizing anthropology demands. Disciplinary decolonization aims at more‐just futures through interrogating Eurocentric ways of knowing and approaching marginalized histories and perspectives as good to think with, not merely about. I argue that far from being a radical challenge, such decolonizing calls are internal to a secular liberal anthropology. The ethical norms they embed take paradigmatic form in the ethnographic stance and its imperative to take difference seriously as a way toward self‐transformation. This stance needs to itself be provincialized as belonging to secular traditions of critical inquiry and their attendant emancipatory politics. By contrast, a Godly ethnography, as put forth in the 1980s call for an “Islamic anthropology” by some Muslim scholars working within a broader Islamization of knowledge movement, is a more radical challenge to the discipline. Here, the study of human differences is oriented neither towards self‐determination nor solidarity but towards divine devotion. Indeed, Islamic anthropology's transcendent telos is difficult to reconcile with the secular ethic of “taking seriously” motivating call for epistemic decolonization. This difficulty necessitates more‐carefully disentangling the question of disciplinary decolonization from political liberation, asking what happens the day after epistemic decolonization.