Biography
I took a B. A. in Oriental Studies and then a D. Phil. in Social Anthropology, both at Oxford University. A key personal influence was my tutor, Albert Hourani, who first encouraged me to become a social anthropologist (with a strong historical interest.) My doctoral research on Sufi Order in Cairo in 1964-66, focused on the nature of ‘miracles’, acts of grace, personal religious authority and group formation in a context of considerable state hostility and surveillance. I finished the D.Phil. in 1967 under the supervision of (later Sir) E.E. Evans-Pritchard. My wider interests in the sociology and anthropology of religion had begun in the mid-sixties, sparked by the reading of Max Weber as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of religion.
I spent some twenty months in 1971-72 in a large village in the ‘Akkar region of North Lebanon, the basis for a long period of reflection on different dimensions of violence, status, power, and narrative. During this period, I often participated in meetings and extended conversations with French colleagues in anthropology and history, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern studies. I also embarked in 1976 on the writing of a book about what it might mean as an anthropologist to say that I studied forms of Islam in the world. I had by then returned to England and a post at University College London, where I taught from 1973-1984 with a formative year as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study.
In 1984 I moved to a Chair at Magdalen College Oxford where I stayed eleven years, teaching and finishing my book on religion while trying to find the best way to frame my work on the Lebanon, a country by then in the middle of vicious wars. The invitation to come to NYU in 1995 to found essentially a new department in Middle Eastern Studies was too challenging to refuse.
That move, which coincided with publishing the study on violence and power, also made possible the launching of another new research project in 1999. I began to focus on the Hadhrami Arab diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, circling back to my first encounters with Hadhramis both in Aden and in the Hadhramaut in 1959-60. My special concern is with the study of law, inheritance, property and family over four or five generations in colonial and post-colonial contexts. I am also exploring the politics of imperial translations in Britain and China around the period 1880-1914.
Books
1973 Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1982 Recognizing Islam. London/New York: Croom Helm/Pantheon Press. (Reprinted 1900, 1993, 2000; revised edition 2005 by I. B. Tauris, London, 1996; republished electronically and in hardback by Routledge in a multi-volume Library of Islam and Politics)
1996 Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab society. London/Berkeley: I. B. Tauris/ University of California Press.
2007 Patterns of Islamic Legitimacy in Asia, Anthony Reid and Michael Gilsenan (eds.)
Articles
1967 ‘Some Factors in the Decline of the Sufi Orders of Egypt’. The Muslim World, LVII, pp.1 1-18.
1972 ‘Myth and History in the Study of African Religion’, Ranger and Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion, Heinemann, pp. 50-70.
1976a ‘Lying, Honour and Contradiction’, in Kapferer, B. (ed.), Transaction and Meaning, ASA Essays in Social Anthropology, Vol. 1, Philadelphia, ISHI Press, pp.191-219.
1976b ‘L’économic politique de la violence au Liban’. in Revue francaise des etudes méditerranéennes, Vol. 15, pp.1-14.
1977a ‘Against Patron-Client Relations’, in Gellner and Waterbury (eds.), Patrons and Clients, London: Duckworth, pp.1 67-85.
1977b ‘The problems in thinking about the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and educational situation of young rurals in the Arab World’, in Education and Development in the Arab Countries, UNESCO, PP.131-44.
1978 ‘In Search of Sadat’ (review article on the autobiography of Anwar al Sadat), New Left Review.
1980 ‘L’Islam populaire et l’état en Egypte’, for Annales: Economies, societés, civilisations.
1983a ‘A Modem Feudality? Land and Labour in North Lebanon since 1858’, in Tarif Kha!idi (ed.), Land Tenure in the Middle East, Beirut: American University of Beirut, pp.449-464.
1983b ‘Social Trends’ in Seale, P.(ed.) The Shaping of an Arab Statesman: Abd al-Hamid Sharaf and the Modern Arab World, London: Quartet Books, pp.225-237.
1984 ‘Developments in Religiosity and Mysticism’ in J. Waardenburg (ed.), The Dutch Handbook on Islam.
1985a ‘Law, arbitrariness and the power of the Lords of North Lebanon’, History and Anthropology, vol. 1, pp.381-400.
1985b ‘Memories of a colonial education’, MERIP Reports, no. 130, vol. 15, no. 2 (Feb.), pp.20-22.
I985c Imagined Cities of the East (Inaugural Lecture), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1985d ‘Trajectories of Contemporary Sufism’ in Ernest Geliner (ed.), Islamic Dilemmas: Reformers, Nationalists and Industrialization, Amsterdam: Mouton, pp.1 87-198.
1985e ‘Reflections on a village in time of war’, MERIP Reports, No. 133, vol. 15, no. 5 (June), pp.25-9.
1986a ‘From village to town?’ in K. Brown et al. (eds.), Middle Eastern Cities in Comparative Perspective, London: Ithaca Press, pp.213-224.
1986b ‘Domination as social practice, Critique of Anthropology, vol. VI, no. 1, (Spring), pp.17-37.
1987 ‘Sacred words in A. al-Shahi (ed.), The Diversity of the Muslim Community, London: Ithaca Press, pp.92-98.
1988a ‘State and popular Islam in Egypt’, in State and ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, F. Halliday and H. Alavi (eds.), London: Macmillan, pp.167-190. (trans. of Annales article above)
1988b ‘Apprehensions of Islam’, MERIP Reports, no. 152, vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer), 5 pp.
1989a ‘The country in the city, the city in the country; Beirut and ‘Akkar in pre-war Lebanon’, in K. Brown et al. (eds.), Urban Crises and Social Movements in the Middle East, Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, pp.115-130.
1989b ‘Word of Honour’ in Ralph Grillo (ed.), Social Anthropology and the Politics of Language (Sociological Review Monograph No. 36), London: Routledge, pp.193-221.
1990 ‘Very like a camel: the development of the anthropology of the Middle East’, in Richard Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional traditions in ethnographic writing, Scottish Academic Press/Smithsonian Institute, pp.222-239.
1991a ‘Patrimonialismus in Nordlibanon - Wilkurherrschaft, Entzauberung und Asthetik der Gewalt’, in Alf Ludtke (ed.), Herrschaft als soziale Praxis, Gottingen, pp.113- 139. (trans. of Critique article above)
1991b ‘A Personal Introduction’, in Alan Jones (ed.), Arabicus Felix: Essays in Honour of A.F.L. Beeston, Ithaca Press, pp.ii-vi.
1992a ‘Beirut: Imagined Pasts, Imagined Futures’, in Nabil Beyhum (ed.), Reconstruire Beyrouth, Lyon, pp.377-378.
1992b ‘Order and Disorder in a Lebanese Village’, in John Spagnolo (ed.), Studies in History: Essays in Honour of Albert Hourani, Ithaca Press.
1993 ‘Islam and “Jihad” in Joel Krieger ed., Oxford Companion to Politics of the World
1999 ‘Problems in the analysis of violence’. In J.Hannoyer (ed.), Guerres Civiles: Economies de la Violence, Dimensions de la C’ivilite. Paris/Beyrouth: Karthala/CERMOC, pp.105-122.
2000 ‘Signs of truth: Enchantment, modernity and the dreams of peasant women’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol.6, no.4 (December), pp.597-6 5.
2000 ‘The education of Edward Said’ (review article). New Left Review 4 Second Series. July/Aug. pp.152-158 .
2002 ‘On Conflict and Violence’, in Jeremy Clancy (ed.) Exotic No More: Anthropology on the front lines, University of Chicago Press, pp.99-113.
2003 ‘On being Arab in South-East Asia’ in London Review of Books, 25, 6, March 2003. pp 7-11.
2009 ‘Topics and Queries for a History of Arab Families and Inheritance in Southeast Asia: Some Preliminary Thoughts’ in Eric Tagliacozzo (ed.) Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement, and the Longue Duree’, Stanford UP/Nat.Univ.of SG Press, pp.199-234.
2010 Review and Introduction to Catalogue of the Holdings on the Hadhrami Diaspora in the National Library of Singapore (the catalogue is 300 pp. in length and incorporates documents from new collections of papers.)
2011 ‘Translating Colonial Fortunes: Dilemmas of Inheritance in Muslim and English Laws across a Nineteenth Century Diaspora’. In Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, pp.355-371 (Dec, 2011)
2012 ‘Possessed of Documents: Hybrid Laws and Translated Texts in the Hadhrami Diaspora’, in Dupret, B. et al. (eds) Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp.181-193.