Performing Islam - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2015

As the anti-immigration sentiment swells in France, cuisine becomes increasingly laden with nationalist discourse. In a post-9-11 European market, the halal label is lucrative, but also inflammatory. In this setting, pork, religiously forbidden to Jews and Muslims, is embedded in xenophobic concepts of nation, as well as in mainstream views of Franco-French identity. The pork restriction remains a primary tool for marking the Muslim Other. The Franco-Maghrebian comedy, a production starring actors of North African origin, thrives largely on this tension, promoting and teasing nationalism with pork humour. This article uses The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord to describe the relationship of pork humour to political practice in millennial France; contemporaneous events (such as the Bloc Identitaire anti-halal protests) also reflect and encourage a similar simplistic reading of Islam. After establishing pork humour in the Franco-Maghrebi features, it closely studies what Homi Bhabha would label a hybrid, Mohammed Dubois (Ona, 2013). Ona’s film contributes and yet subverts the pork-humour formula with a Franco-French protagonist who seeks to appear North African when eating a lamb eye, reversing the common pork-humour formula.

This research examines the sikiri dance of the Muslim Yao in Malawi and its contextual and performative associations with Islamic doctrines. Today the current state of sikiri is known to a certain extent, but its background still requires in-depth study. The evidence at hand, however, demonstrates that throughout history performing sikiri has caused controversies among various regional Islamic schools. This was mainly due to its accommodation of non-Islamic features, which in time have undergone some changes and, in case of the studied examples, even disappeared. Today’s sikiri dance nevertheless incorporates particular features that are reminiscent of Islamic ritual practice dhikr with respect to performance practice, form, context and embeddedness in Islam. The main aim of the research is therefore to investigate a potential kinship between present-day sikiri and dhikr in its most general sense. By doing so it also aims to draw attention to the dynamic quality of performative practices of Islam in the East African environment. The analysis is primarily based on empirical evidence that was obtained from a short fieldwork in Mangochi and Blantyre districts in Malawi.

Using Lilie Chouliarki’s questions regarding the ethical responsibilities of spectators towards visual suffering in our mediatized age as a start-off point, wherein she states, ‘the mediation between spectator and sufferer is a crucial political space because the relationship between the two of them maps on to distinct geopolitical territories that reflect the global distribution of power’, this article looks at a recently staged operatic performance in NYC about the story of Mukhtar Mai’s rape called Thumbprint, as well as the performative memoir I am Malala (2013) by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb. This article raises the following questions: is Thumbprint a ‘spectacular performance’? Does it reproduce the image of the ‘third-world woman as monolith’ – or did it allow for the figure of Mukhtaran (as she is sometimes called) to speak to the audience assembled at Baruch Performing Arts Center in ways that brought forth the historical context of Pakistani and US politics? Does Malala’s self-representation in her memoir, her staging of herself as the ‘voice’ of a Pakistani young woman, similarly exemplify the competing motives animating the spectacle of being placed in the center of a supposedly ‘universalist’ human rights discursive framework? How far do these two women’s performances of Self/Voicing (as presented in the theatre of the West) – force us to ask anew, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. To what extent do these two performative instances of ‘voicing the other’ call attention to the West’s ongoing obsession with ‘the cultural politics of recognition’, which, based on an ‘identity-based politics of visibility’, has dominated western liberal feminism since the end of the twentieth century, and been responsible for directing ‘public attention away from the regressive politics and growth of global capitalism’– and which in turn is implacably intertwined with the politics of US Empire in the twenty-first century? How do these two performances of individual women refusing victimhood feed, paradoxically, into a neo-liberal politics of redemption?

Gnawa musicians in Morocco conduct ceremonies to heal a variety of maladies, and they receive payment. However, the way the payment is rendered turns it into a spiritual investment. First, the ill person stakes the ceremony, which then becomes a joint venture between the troupe, the ritual healer, and the person requesting healing. The ceremony is to return blessing in the form of material benefits in addition to healing. The point is not to get rich, but to meet daily needs through honest work that benefits the community. This broader approach is possible due to the open space created and maintained by the Gnawa troupe I worked with, a situation mirrored by other groups across the country, but also contradicted by examples of exploitation and exclusion, a kind of ‘neo-liberal Gnawa healing’ that is, indeed, all too frequent. But still the alternative persists. What is its rationale? This article argues that in seeking a holistic approach to treatment, Gnawa healers perform important transformations on Islamic ideologies of the body, including a ‘complementary dualism’ that itself complements ‘antagonistically’ dualist Enlightenment ideologies.