Fragile Conviction by Mathijs Pelkmans

Author:Mathijs Pelkmans [Pelkmans, Mathijs]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Asia, Central Asia, Religion, Religion; Politics & State
ISBN: 9781501708374
Google: DumTDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-03-14T22:26:21+00:00

Enchanting Stories

A Tablighi acquaintance who accompanied me on several interviews told me with a laugh: “As you see, it is not easy to interview dawatchis; they talk too much.”22 Most of my questions remained indeed unanswered, but listening to their stories was all the more revealing. So after I had joined this acquaintance on several dawats, he told others: “His approach to research is a bit unconventional. He rarely asks questions, he just listens to what people have to say.”

Stories are essential for meaningful living. In his book about Serbia in the early 1990s, Mattijs van de Port writes that he was struck by “everyone’s complete reliance on a story, a story that can give meaning, direction and purpose to (certain aspects of) life” (1998, 29). He refers to this as “narrated/narrating reality” (verhaalde werkelijkheid) a term that suggests the inseparability between the world and experience (1994, 50–56; 1998, 50–52). In other words, stories do more than reflect and refract the world; they also shape lived reality, and do so by engaging the listener as well as the speaker. Rane Willerslev suggests that stories can be “a ‘magical’ tool for ‘humanizing’ hunters” (2007, 165), and according to Susan Harding (1987) it is through talking and telling stories that evangelical Baptists convert others. Stories are an important part of what constitutes experience, and they are tools for convincing others and self of what is true, important, or right.

In the case of the Tablighis stories were important venues by which dawat success was produced. Marc Gaboriau writes that Tablighi literature “is always anxious to proclaim that the preaching tours obtained wonderful results” (2000, 136). Or as amir Nur Islam put it to our fellowship, during dawat one should talk only about religion (deen) and focus on the positive, rather than allow Satan-inspired (shaitan) negativity. Metcalf stresses the centrality of stories for the Tablighi movement, which “engage the listener, … not only intellectually but emotionally” (1993, 593) and aim to achieve “experiential, not intellectual understanding” (1996, 110).

This section tries to understand how, through stories, such emotional connections and experiential understandings are produced. According to Geertz (1973, 100) “There are at least three points where chaos—a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability—threatens to break in upon man.” His three points, or limits, are those pertaining to the mind, the body, and the soul, or in his words: “at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight.” These limits, which are obviously intertwined, also surfaced in stories told by Tablighis. The “limits of analytic capacity” resonated in stories that conveyed awe about the Creation and the occurrence of miracles. The “limits of power and endurance,” referring specifically to the body, were revealed in stories about addiction and sex. The key question about “moral insight” in 2010 concerned the episode of violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks that left everyone shocked. The stories refract and shape reality, but ultimately

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