Synopses & Reviews
The sacred calls that summon believers are the focus of this study of religion and power in Fez, Morocco. Focusing on how dissemination of the call through mass media has transformed understandings of piety and authority, Emilio Spadola details the new importance of once-marginal Sufi practices such as spirit trance and exorcism for ordinary believers, the state, and Islamist movements. The Calls of Islam offers new ethnographic perspectives on ritual, performance, and media in the Muslim world.
Review
"Combining historical and ethnographic data, Spadola develops a theoretically sophisticated reading of the mediation of social and spiritual relationships in Fez.... A compelling investigation of the changing dynamics of mystical presence and its relationship to multiple logics of compulsion and desire in Moroccan social life." --Gregory Starrett, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Indiana University Press Indiana University Press
Review
"Writing with great subtlety and insight, Spadola shows us how a technological imaginary has forcefully insinuated itself into the categories and practices of religious reformism in contemporary Morocco. An ethnographic and historical examination of Islamic ritual practices in the era of mass communication, The Calls of Islam provides a superb demonstration of anthropological analysis at its best. A major contribution to our understanding of the complicated nexus of religion, nationalism, and technology." --Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley
About the Author
Emilio Spadola is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Calls of Islam
1. Calls from the Unseen
2. Nationalizing the Call: Trance, Technology and Control
3. Our Master's Call
4. Summoning in Secret: Mute Letters and Veiled Writing
5. Rites of Reception
6. Trance-Nationalism; or the Call of Moroccan Islam
7. "To Eliminate the Ghostly Element between People:" The Call as Exorcism Epilogue: The Arab Spring, the Monarchy's Call