A gift, my grandmother used to say, is just a loan. And certainly in many parts of the world gifts, far from being merely free-will offerings, are what bind people together in relationships of felt indebtedness. As one traces the meaning and forms of gift-giving in the Middle East and North Africa, one appreciates that the lines along which gifts flow and the meanings that are attached to them are, like the traces of one’s passing, an indicator of the bonds of obligations formed. In a sense, the running imbalance of gifts thus underscores the nature of many social ties and their negotiation in this part of the world and with them a keener appreciation of how they inform the encounters that sustain the social order.

Even after the Arab Spring, it has been thought that Arab youth are not deeply invested in the political parties of North Africa. In fact, quite a few are affiliated with various parties but the reasons for their choices and the means by which the parties seek to attract them have been little explored. In this chapter, we look at the choices both male and female youngsters make in deciding whether to affiliate with one or another of the Moroccan political parties. Often, we see, it is less a matter of ideological attachment than social connection, less a way of showing philosophic solidarity than exploring personal identity. The repercussions of this, especially for the more fundamentalist parties and for the monarchy’s approach to them, demonstrate that the encounter with organized political attachment is often more subtle than the overt programs of the parties would seem to indicate.

Too often, Western encounters with the Islamic world commence with stereotypes and end with a renewed distance. Drawing from decades of experience studying the Muslim world, Lawrence Rosen challenges these narrow understandings. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Rosen shows the wide-ranging significance of Muslim art, culture, and law around the world. Exploring political, economic, and social encounters within and with the Muslim world across the eras, he considers a wide range of contexts – from fifteenth-century mosaics in Central Asia that reveal a complex understanding of mathematics to the political choices available to the youth of modern-day Morocco and Cairo. With in-depth analyses of art, law, and religion, and how they inform one another, Rosen develops a vibrant, nuanced portrait of the Islamic world. Drawing linkages across time, regions, and cultures, this is a significant anthropological study of the Islamic world from a seasoned scholar.

Clifford Geertz was undoubtedly the leading anthropologist of his generation, a broad-scale thinker whose influence extended far beyond his own discipline. His study of Islam in Indonesia, however, might appear not to have been reprised in his Moroccan work whereas, in fact, one could argue that it was. For in his study of the souk, the Moroccan bazaar, Geertz not only presented one of the most detailed and theoretically sophisticated studies of this form of economic structure but also showed how everyday Islamic assumptions and orientations suffuse that domain. In this sense, Geertz did do a study of Moroccan Islam, indeed one that demonstrates its connection to multiple domains of everyday life. In that sense, too, it is the encounters in this most important realm where religion lives and where it must be understood.

If the war in Afghanistan, even more than that in Iraq, was meant to win the hearts and minds of the locals so they would not sponsor the terrorists we were seeking to defeat, how were Western forces supposed to accomplish the task – or indeed, know when they had accomplished the task? The answer, at least initially, was what was called the Human Terrain project, which might as well have been called the anthropologists full employment scheme, as it sought to use anthropologists to guide Western forces in assessing local support. Coupled with the American administration’s naturalistic belief that once terror states were torn down democracy would spring up unaided, the project was a colossal failure. By tracing the assumptions that went into this particular encounter, we can, perhaps, more readily avoid such actions in the future.

Until recently it was thought that the mathematical solution to the formation of nonreplicating patterns that go on to infinity had not been solved before current advances in Western mathematics. But the discovery of such patterns at several Islamic religious sites prompts us to ask why it mattered to the Muslim artisans of that day to solve the mathematics and create such patterns. Just as Western cathedral art represented a cosmological view so, too, we may conjecture that to these Muslim craftsmen the representation of a world that is full of individual elements that relate to one another in unique ways replicates in the visual world what Allah has created for mankind in the world of social relations. By linking the art form and the mathematics to this broader social vision, we may be able to understand why the masters of that age chose to represent on the walls of their religious structures this particular cosmological pattern.

Too often, Western encounters with the Islamic world commence with stereotypes and end with a renewed distance. Drawing from decades of experience studying the Muslim world, Lawrence Rosen challenges these narrow understandings. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Rosen shows the wide-ranging significance of Muslim art, culture, and law around the world. Exploring political, economic, and social encounters within and with the Muslim world across the eras, he considers a wide range of contexts – from fifteenth-century mosaics in Central Asia that reveal a complex understanding of mathematics to the political choices available to the youth of modern-day Morocco and Cairo. With in-depth analyses of art, law, and religion, and how they inform one another, Rosen develops a vibrant, nuanced portrait of the Islamic world. Drawing linkages across time, regions, and cultures, this is a significant anthropological study of the Islamic world from a seasoned scholar.

Edward Said was known not only for his literary studies, his strong support for Palestinian identity, and his influential political commentary but for his criticism of Orientalist scholarship and its impact on the image of Muslims maintain by many Westerners. But for all his criticism of those scholars, it may be argued, however, that Said missed much about their work that should have been addressed. In this chapter, we consider the Orientalist romanticization of the Arabic language, their dismissal of actual Islamic law court decisions, and their emphasis on Arab stasis rather than their social fluidity and creativeness. If we paint a fuller picture of the Orientalists’ scholarship, we can understand both the strengths and weakness not only of their approach to the cultures of the region but where Said himself was able or unable to fulfill his own professed goals.

The rule of law, it has been said, is at best a vague concept and at worst a myth. Yet as one looks at any given society, it is a notion that takes on local meaning, in the Middle East and North Africa no less than elsewhere. In this chapter, it is suggested that there is a significant reality to the concept of the rule of law in Muslim nations but that much of that local meaning turns not on substantive rules or the formal organization of institutions so much as the procedures followed and the cultural presumption that inform the finding of facts. By tracing these features through concrete cases and related sources, we can see that Islamic concepts of the rule of law are mostly about process and the assessment of persons, rather than of material evidence and the structure of judicial power. As such, we can also see that when various Muslim cultures encounter one another and the legal systems of the West, some misunderstanding of why failing to appreciate that no cases are thought to be identical and that persons take precedence overs ‘facts’ can readily lead to misperception and misguided encounters.

Tribes are often seen as territorial, pugnacious, and collectivized. In fact, they are quite resilient, individualistic, and readily accepting of others’ practices. When one turns to the law, we can see these features at work in the Berber and Arab tribes of the Middle East, both currently and historically. By starting with the practices of the Berbers of North Africa and then comparing the features they exhibit in their customary law – both substantive and (more importantly) procedural – the similarities to Islamic law are striking. Moreover, it is suggested, this is not surprising, as much of the procedural aspects of classical and modern Islamic law developed out of the tribal background of the Prophet’s day and finds additional support in the precepts of sacred texts. Thus, the comparison of Berber tribal law and Islamic law underscores the continuity of Islamic law, one reasons why it could spread into diverse regions of the Middle East and North Africa so quickly, and why we need to see the spread of Islam not simply as having been carried by military conquest and economic contact but by a form of law that readily resonated with the tribes the new religion encountered.