Pucksoppet wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2020 8:35 pmWhat is the Muslim/Islamic equivalent of 'woolly pragmatic Anglicanism'? I hope there is one, because I get tired of Islamophobes pointing at the lunatic end of Islam and claiming it is mainstream. It would be nice to have a counter-example.
'Woolly pragmatic Anglicism' arises from the intersection of two forces, the official doctrine of the Anglican church, and the nature of modern English society, which (like much of the west) places strong emphasis on individualism, multiculturalism and tolerance. None of those things are functioning anything like perfectly, but they are constant underlying concepts in a way that they wouldn't be in places that are more culturally monolithic.
So the answer to your question will depend on exactly what you mean - the intersection of Islamic doctrine with modern British society, or the intersection of Islamic doctrine with whatever the local, contemporaneous culture happens to be in a given part of the world.
For the former, one only has to look at second-generation and onward Muslims and Britain. I know plenty of people my age and younger from Muslim families who hang out in the pub and get pissed (and weed seems to be commoner than amongst C of E kids), aren't too fussy about eating halal (though special diets are quite common amongst the younger folk anyway), and so on. They might do Ramadan some years, or only observe it in front of their families, or whatever. In general, my British Muslim friend's faith (or lack of it) affects my interactions with them about as much as anybody else's.
The latter I expect is extremely common on a global scale. There are, after all, nearly 2 billion Muslims worldwide, all across Africa, Europe and Asia. I can certainly tell you that amongst low-education, rural populations of Muslims the faith becomes highly syncretic, just as Christianity did in Europe. I suspect part of the difference is that the syncreticism was with the culture of those commanding the Christian Church, so a lot of those features got built-in doctrinally or at least culturally. The timings of Easter and Christmas are obvious, well-known examples.
So, for example, when I worked in Sulawesi in Indonesia, there was a Mosque in the village blasting out the call to prayer every morning, though its main effect seemed to be rousing the village cockerels rather than summoning the faithful. The young guys we worked with as forest guides used to just chuckle at it while we were off birdwatching ("that's my uncle this morning - his singing is sh.t"). They were pretending to their families that they were observing Ramadan, but would happily eat, drink and smoke as soon as we got away from the village. They also had a strong and entirely serious fear of the spirits in the forest which would call people's names in their friends' voices, causing people to get lost and go missing forever. For this reason they communicated with whistles only when in the forest - calling names was verboten, should the spirits learn them. Everyone in the village, even the stricter elders, would get pissed on home-made palm wine every now and again. The next village 10 minutes along the road was Balinese Hindu, with a different first language (Indonesian being only a lingua franca outside of the metropolitan elites) but there didn't seem to be any friction - folk knew each others' names and shopped in each others shops and stuff.
I worked in Guinea-Bissau last spring. As in a lot of West Africa, the national borders mean very little, but there are a lot of different tribes with different languages and religions. The area we worked in was dominated by Bissago people, whose main religion is something local and traditional and I think barely described, with Muslim Fula people running a lot of the businesses. The Fula seem to move a lot, as many were first generation immigrants from Guinea-Conakry or Mauritania. Some women chose to wear headscarves, but they might be doing so while cockle-picking in nothing else but a bra an a grass skirt, and then unselfconsciously remove the bra to breastfeed a kid.
My point is that the interpretation of Islam represented by people you might meet at work will generally be those of the richest, best-educated, urban and (from some countries) politically favoured, and are actually very unlikely to represent how the vast majority live. My expectation based on observations, rather than solid data, is that the really strict by-the-book kind of interpretations are likely to be a largely urban, middle- and upper-class phenomenon, borne of the interaction between the religious-political complex and holier-than-though oneupmanship. Note how, the further one gets from the nexus of Islam-as-politics in the middle east, the less extreme interpretations tend to be - there are exceptions, but at least some of those result from Saudi-exported Wahhabism.
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