The Ethical Substance of Salvation

Materiality and Religious Rejection of the World in a London Mosque

Bibliographic Data

ID4180841
AuthorsE Becker (0000-0001-7010-5957, EarthTech International (United States), corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume61
Issue1
Pages129-158
Publication date2020-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEuropean Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-9756 • E-ISSN: 1474-0583
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0003975620000053
OpenAlexW3039410233
LanguageEN
References cited63

Materiality has been largely left out of the study of Muslim life in Europe, and limited to an etic rather than emic approach. In this paper, I analyse a conservative London mosque community (the East London Mosque) that depends on the material--what I term "ethical substance"--to reinforce its ascetic rejection of the world. Drawing from five months of ethnographic research in this mosque, I examine three aspects of materiality--clothing, the mosque building, and technology--in order to explore how the community negotiates its position in the city at hand, as well as more broadly vis-à-vis modernity. The mosque emerges as a site of discursive-material tension where ethics and locale intersect, and where intention (niyya) matters more than the constitution of objects. It elucidates European modernity as broader than liberal democratic ideals (i.e. in a community stressing a returns towards, rather than away from, tradition

Aesthetics · Asceticism · Clothing · Constitution · Democracy · Emic and etic · Ethnography · Late modernity · Materiality (auditing) · Modernity · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Public Spaces through Art

Tools

Open DOI