Abstract
The Arab concept al-ghayb refers to the hidden, the unseen, the invisible. The term encompasses a range of important phenomena in Islam and in the everyday experiences of Muslims. The dominion of the unseen (alam al-ghayb) includes those parts of reality that cannot be seen simply because they are covered by other visible objects. It also refers to those phenomena that by their nature cannot be perceived (e.g. the face or throne of God, paradise, hell, the past, or the future), as well as those objects that are blocked from view by one’s perspective (Drieskens 2006; Mittermaier 2011; Suhr 2013). Al-ghayb is important to the notion of barzakh, the intermediary realm between life and death; to the issue of veiling; to visions of deceased saints or dreams about the Prophet Muhammad as well as to the uncontrollable powers of jinn, angels, magic, the evil eye, and omens (Pandolfo 1997; Rothenberg 2004; Khan (Cultural Anthropology, 21(6), 234-264, 2006); El-Zein 2009; Rytter (The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1), 46-63, 2010); Edgar 2011; Taneja (HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3), 139–65, 2013); Bubandt 2014a; Suhr (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 21(1), 96–112, 2015). The unseen, in other words, is in Islam infused with power and potential, but the lure of the territories of the unseen is also disturbing, troublesome, even dangerous. The seven contributions in this special issue trace invisibility as both wondrous potential and vexed problem in the lives of people in the modern Muslim world. They seek to enrich the study of Islam by discussing what it means to live with al-ghayb, and how this concept is reshaped through people’s experiences of the invisible in their lives. The contributions demonstrate how al-ghayb constitutes an entrenched, but also highly contested, part of Islamic experience. For the domain of al-ghayb evokes a series of paradoxical tensions. While al-ghayb is a marker of the unseen domains of reality, for the adept it signifies a supremely visible reality. Al-ghayb is also an all-determining locus of power; yet, due to its inaccessibility, it is often also a great source of indeterminacy in the lives of Muslims. While full of danger, al-ghayb is also a potential source of healing, protection, and resurrection. And lastly, while it is an all-determining omnipresence, al-ghayb nevertheless remains essentially unknowable, a consummate “Elsewhere” (Pandolfo 1997; Mittermaier (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(2), 247–265, 2012); Bubandt 2014b; Suhr (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 21(1), 96–112, 2015); Rytter (Ethnography, 17(2), 229-249, 2016). The special issue explores these paradoxes in order to make a broader contribution to the study of invisibility in social studies. It argues that a focus on the ambiguities of al-ghayb within Islam offers an analytical point of departure for a wider exploration of the sensual, existential, spiritual and political interfaces and contradictions of visibility and invisibility within other religious and secular traditions as well. To this end, the contributions trace the contradictory poetics and politics of the invisible, suggesting that the realm of al-ghayb constitutes an alternative methodological and analytical entry point into an investigation of the contemporary politics of the gaze. The study of al-ghayb, we propose, entails an important critique of conventional notions of modernity as the “empire of the gaze”.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bangstad, S. (2014). Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia. London: Zed Books.
Bandak, A. (2014). Of Rhythms and Refrains in Contemporary Damascus: Urban Space and Christian-Muslim Coexistence. Current Anthropology, 55, 248–261.
Beck, U. (2002). “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited” Theory. Culture & Society, 19(4), 39–55.
Berger, P. (Ed.). (1999). The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington: Ethics and Policy Center.
Bruinessen, M. V. (2007). In J. D. Howell (Ed.), Sufism and the Modern in Islam. London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd.
Bubandt, N. (1998). The Odour of Things: Smell and the Cultural Elaboration of Disgust in Eastern Indonesia. Ethnos, 63(1), 48–80.
Bubandt, N. (2006). Sorcery, Corruption, and the Dangers of Democracy in Indonesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(2), 413–431.
Bubandt, N. (2012). "A Psychology of Ghosts: The Regime of the Self and the Reinvention of Spirits in Indonesia and Beyond". Anthropological Forum 22(1):1-23.
Bubandt, N. (2014a). Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia. London: Routledge.
Bubandt, N. (2014b). The Empty Seashell. Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bubandt, N. (2016). "Book Symposium. When in Doubt...? A Reply". HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1):519-530.
Bubandt, N. (2017) From Head-hunter to Organ-thief: Verisimilitude, Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond. Oceania 87(1):38-57
Classen, C. (1993). Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures. London: Routledge.
Classen, C., Howes, D., & Synnott, A. (Eds.). (1994). Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge.
Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (2000). Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture, 12(2), 291–343.
Cooper, F., & Stoler, A. L. (Eds.). (1997). Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crary, J. (1992). Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Csordas, T. (Ed.). (2009). Transnational Transcendence. Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Davidson, Richard J., and Anne Harrington, eds. 2001. Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature. Oxford University Press.
Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Drieskens, B. (2006). Living with Djinns. Understanding and Dealing with the Invisible in Cairo. London: Saqi Books.
Edgar, I. (2011). The Dream in Islam: From Quranic Tradition to Jihadist Inspiration. New York: Berghahn Books.
Edgar, I., & Henig, D. (2010). Istikhara: The Guidance and Practice of Islamic Dream Incubation through Ethnographic Comparison. History and Anthropology, 21(3), 251–262.
Eileraas, K. (2003). Reframing the Colonial Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist Resistance. MLN, 118(4), 807–840.
El-Zein, A. (2009). Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Evans Pritchard, E. E. (1937). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon.
Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fadil, N. (2011). Not−/unveiling as an Ethical Practice. Feminist Review, 98, 83–109.
Feld, Steven. 2012. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Duke University Press.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Fernando, M. L. (2010). Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France. American Ethnologist, 37(1), 19–35.
Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Grimshaw, A. (2001). The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haraway, D. (1991). Primate Visions. In Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
Heelas, P., & Woodhead, L. (Eds.). (2005). The Spiritual Revolution. Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hervik, P. (2011). The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Neo-Nationalism, Neo-Racism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World. New York: Berghahn Books.
Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.
Holbraad, M., & Willerslev, R. (2007). Transcendental Perspectivism: Anonymous Viewpoints from Inner Asia. Inner Asia, 9(2), 329–345.
Horton, R. (1975). On the Rationality of Conversion. Part I. Africa, 45(3), 219–235.
Howes, D. (1991). Sensory Anthropology. In D. Howes (Ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (pp. 167–191). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Howes, D. (Ed.). (2004). Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. New York: Berg.
Howes, D., & Classen, C. (Eds.). (2013). Ways of the Senses: Understanding the Senses in Society. London: Routledge.
Irving, A. (2013). Into the Gloaming: A Montage of the Senses. In C. Suhr & R. Willerslev (Eds.), Transcultural Montage (pp. 76–95). New York: Berghahn.
Jacobs, M. F. (2008). The Riddle of Islam: American Images and Interpretations, 1945–1960. The MacMillan Center: Working Papers, YCIAS, 3, 90–100.
James, William. 1985[1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books.
Jay, M. (1993). Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jay, M., & Ramaswamy, S. (Eds.). (2014). Empires of Vision. A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kapferer, B. (Ed.). (2003). Beyond Rationalism. Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery. New York: Berghahn Books.
Kara, S., & Thain, A. (2014). Sonic Ethnographies: Leviathan and New Materialisms in Documentary. In H. Rogers (Ed.), Music and Sound in Documentary Film (pp. 186–198). New York: Routledge.
Khan, N. (2006). Of Children and Jinns: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship During Uncertain Times. Cultural Anthropology, 21(6), 234–264.
Kelly, S. D. (2005). Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty. In T. Carman & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (pp. 74–110). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Khawaja, I. (2011). Blikkene: Muslimskhedens synlighed, kropsliggørelse og forhandling. In M. H. Pedersen & M. Rytter (Eds.), Islam og muslimer i Danmark: Religion, identitet og sikkerhed efter 11. september 2001 (pp. 269–291). København: Museum Tusculanum.
Klausen, J. (2009). The Cartoons that Shook the World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kohn, E. (2013). How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. In Catherine Potter, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Levin, D. (Ed.). (1993). Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Levin, David, ed. 1999. Sites of Vision. The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
LiPuma, E. (2001). Encompassing Others. The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Louw, M. (2007). Everyday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia. London: Routledge.
Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Malinowski, B. (1935). Coral Gardens and their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (Vol. 2 volumes). New York: Routledge.
Marks, L. U. (2010). Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Martin, D. L. (2011). Curious Visions of Modernity. Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred. Cambridge: MIT Press.
McQuire, S. (1998). Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera. London: Sage Publications.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1997[1964]. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Alphonso Lingis, trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002[1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith, trans. New York: Routledge.
Meyer, B., & Pels, P. (Eds.). (2003). Magic and Modernity. Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mittermaier, A. (2011). Dreams that Matter. Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Mittermaier, A. (2012). Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of Self-cultivation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(2), 247–265.
Moors, A. (2009). The Dutch and the Face-Veil: The Politics of Discomfort. Social Anthropology, 17(4), 393–408.
Otto, R. (1923). The Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pandolfo, S. (1997). Impasse of the Angels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Poole, D. (1997). Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Robbins, J. (2004). The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33(1), 117–143.
Rothenberg, C. (2004). Spirits of Palestine: Gender, Society and Stories of the Jinn. Maryland: Lexington Press.
Rytter, M. (2010). In-Laws and Outlaws: Black Magic among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark. The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1), 46–63.
Rytter, M. (2013). Family Upheaval: Generation, Mobility and Relatedness among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Rytter, M. (2016). By the Beard of the Prophet. Imitation, Reflection, Imitation and World Transformation among Sufis in Denmark. Ethnography, 17(2), 229–249.
Rytter, M., & Pedersen, M. (2014). A Decade of Suspicion: Islam and Muslims in Denmark after 9/11. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(13), 2303–2321.
Said, Edward. 2003[1978]. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.
Seeger, A. (2004). Why Suyá Sing. A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Stoller, P. (1989). The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Stoller, P. (1997). Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Suhr, Christian. 2013. Descending with Angels: The Invisible in Danish Psychiatry and Islamic Exorcism. PhD-thesis and ethnographic documentary. Aarhus: Aarhus University.
Suhr, C. (2014). Brainwashed at School? Deprogramming the Secular among Young Neo-orthodox Muslims in Denmark. In M. Sedgwick (Ed.), Making European Muslims: Religious Socialization Among Young Muslims in Scandinavia and Western Europe (pp. 249–268). London: Routledge.
Suhr, C. (2015). The Failed Image and the Possessed: Examples of Invisibility in Visual Anthropology and Islam. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 21(1), 96–112.
Suhr, C., & Willerslev, R. (2012). Can Film Show the Invisible: The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking. Current Anthropology, 53(3), 282–301.
Taneja, A. V. (2013). Jinnealogy: Everyday life and Islamic Theology in Post-partition Delhi. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3), 139–165.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Bubandt N. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2012. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. HAU Masterclass Series 1.
Waltorp, Karen. 2017. “Digital Technologies, Dreams and Disconcertment in Anthropological Worldmaking”. In N. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irwing and J. Sjöberg (Eds.): Anthropological Futures: Researching Emergent and Uncertain Worlds. Bloomsbury Publishing. Pp. 101–116.
Werbner, P. (2009). Revisiting the UK Muslim Diasporic Public Sphere at a Time of Terror: From Local (Benign) Invisible Spaces to Seditious Conspiratorial Spaces and the ‘Failure of Multiculturalism’ Discourse. South Asian Diaspora, 1(1), 19–45.
West, H., & Sanders, T. (Eds.). (2003). Transparency and Conspiracy. Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham: Duke University Press.
Willerslev, R. (2009). To have the World at a Distance: Reconsidering the Significance of Vision for Social Anthropology. In C. Grassini (Ed.), Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards (pp. 23–46). London: Berghahn.
Wyschogrod, E. (2002). Language and Alterity in the Thought of Levinas. In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (pp. 188–205). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zizek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bubandt, N., Rytter, M. & Suhr, C. A second look at invisibility: Al-Ghayb, Islam, ethnography. Cont Islam 13, 1–16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0395-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0395-5