Past Read Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation

Varisco, Daniel. Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Daniel Varisco's Islam Obscured (2005) was a surprise to me, given its publication year. I would have expected a work like this to be from the 80s or early 90s, during the heyday of postcolonialism and poststructuralism in the academy. In terms of analysis it seems clearly to derive from that generation, when postmodern thought and literary theory - filtered through Said's critiques of orientalism - distilled into a repetitive attack on the epistemological foundations of cultural anthropology. But 2005? Isn't this coming to the table rather late?

Varisco looks at the way that "Islam" as a subject has been approached in four main anthropological works: Geertz' Islam Observed (1968), Gellner's Muslim Society (1981), Fatima Mernissi's Beyond the Veil (1975) and Akbar Ahmed's Discovering Islam (1988). His analysis is not an intellectual history of the anthropology of Islam (which, admittedly, would have interested me more). Instead it is a rambling and often meandering discussion of the difficulty of doing anthropological work on "Islam" as a whole, and a reiteration of what historians and political scientists have been arguing since at least the early 90s: Islam is, perhaps, a misguided category of analysis to begin with, being too broad and encompassing too many pluralistic and divergent variants.