Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Note on transliteration
- Glossary of Khowar words used in text
- Map 1 Pakistan and neighbouring countries; shaded area corresponds to Chitral district
- Map 2 Chitral district
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Rowshan: Chitral village life
- 3 Emotions upside down: affection and Islam in present day Rowshan
- 4 The play of the mind: debating village Muslims
- 5 Mahfils and musicians: new Muslims in Markaz
- 6 Scholars and scoundrels: Rowshan's amulet-making ulama
- 7 To eat or not to eat? Ismaiʾlis and Sunnis in Rowshan
- 8 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - To eat or not to eat? Ismaiʾlis and Sunnis in Rowshan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Note on transliteration
- Glossary of Khowar words used in text
- Map 1 Pakistan and neighbouring countries; shaded area corresponds to Chitral district
- Map 2 Chitral district
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Rowshan: Chitral village life
- 3 Emotions upside down: affection and Islam in present day Rowshan
- 4 The play of the mind: debating village Muslims
- 5 Mahfils and musicians: new Muslims in Markaz
- 6 Scholars and scoundrels: Rowshan's amulet-making ulama
- 7 To eat or not to eat? Ismaiʾlis and Sunnis in Rowshan
- 8 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
As was seen in chapter 6, Rowshan people value the experience of emotion as a rational, educated, intellectual and articulated endowment of a person. Strong feelings are conceptualised by Rowshan people as dangerous: they have the potential to narrow minds and preclude rational thought and decision-making. And this is particularly significant for Chitral people, and for the broader arguments of this book, because decision-making in fraught and emotionally charged social contexts is such an important element of Muslim life in Chitral. This chapter too is concerned with emotions, but here I explore the ways in which strong feelings feature as a dimension of faith and spiritual experience for Rowshan people. I also ask where Rowshan people at times of heightened emotional experience conceptualise strong feelings as having their source. The ethnographic focus for this chapter are the multifaceted relations between Sunnis and Ismaiʾlis in the village.
As we have already seen, there are underlying tensions between Rowshan's Sunnis and Ismaiʾlis that manifest themselves especially in their conceptions of women and purdah, as well as in their thinking about religious education and the status and role of the Sunni dashmanan. Yet Ismaiʾlis and Sunnis also join together in the shared experience of the play of the mind and creative musical and intellectual performance, and the village is widely conceptualised by Rowshan people as a single moral unit.
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- Living IslamMuslim Religious Experience in Pakistan's North-West Frontier, pp. 193 - 238Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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