Professor Morgan Clarke
Professor of Social Anthropology
Fellow of Keble College
Director of ISCA
Arabic-speaking Middle East; Islam; ethics and morality; religious authority; law and rules.
I am a social anthropologist interested in the anthropology of Islam, especially sharia (‘Islamic law’), and themes of law, ethics and authority more generally. I have done field research in the Middle East (Lebanon) and more recently in the UK.
Contact
Email: morgan.clarke@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1865 612364
Teaching and research interests
Islamic bioethics
My first major research project, funded by the ESRC, examined Islamic bioethics, in particular regarding assisted reproduction, through an engagement with Islamic legal specialists and medical practitioners in Lebanon. The resulting book, Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009), brings this material into conversation with the ‘new kinship’ studies in anthropology. Subsequently, together with colleagues at the University of Hamburg and elsewhere, I have reflected on the nature of Islamic bioethics as a novel assemblage of various forms of knowledge/power (Clarke et al. 2015).
Sharia within and without the state
My next project, funded by the British Academy and a Simon Research Fellowship, was an ethnography of sharia discourse more widely in Lebanon, focusing on the sharia (family law) courts and their relationship to non-state Islamic institutions. That involved fieldwork in both Sunni and Shi‘i contexts, including mosques, Sufi circles and the offices of major religious scholars. This work led to a second book, Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia Within and Without the State (CUP, 2018) and a series of publications on religious authority. I have an enduring interest in Shi‘i Islam, pursued through various collaborations, including a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies dedicated to ‘De-Centring Shi‘i Islam’ (Clarke and Künkler 2018).
Current research
In current research, funded by the John Fell Fund, I am collaborating with a colleague working in theology and Islamic legal studies, Ali-Reza Bhojani, to document the place of sharia norms in the everyday life of a Shi‘i Muslim community in the UK. We aim to understand how people in the community view religious rules in relation to other elements of Islamic ethical and devotional practice, and how they manage the tensions between them and other forms of social norms. We hope that in so doing we can help combat some of the misperceptions that surround sharia in wider British society.
This ethnographic study of religious rules in practice complements and informs my broader theoretical and comparative project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to develop new anthropological approaches to the study of explicit ethical rules. I have a number of recent and forthcoming publications in this area and have co-edited, with historian Emily Corran, a collection of essays on Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History (MUP, in press).
I welcome applications for doctoral research and other collaborations in any of these areas, and in the anthropology of Islam, law and ethics more generally. I also teach on the MSc and MPhil programmes in Social Anthropology and am closely involved in the teaching and administration of the undergraduate degrees in Human Sciences and Archaeology and Anthropology.
Current DPhil students
Selected publications
2018 Islam and law in Lebanon: sharia within and without the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2016 After the Ayatollah: routinisation and succession in the marja‘iyya of Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. Die Welt des Islams 56(2): 153-186.
2015 Legalism and the care of the self: shari‘ah discourse in contemporary Lebanon. In Paul Dresch and Judith Scheele (eds.), Legalism: rules and categories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2014 Cough sweets and angels: the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary in Sufi practice in Lebanon. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 20(3): 407-425.
2013 Integrity and commitment in the anthropology of Islam. In Magnus Marsden and Kostas Retsikas (eds.), Articulating Islam: anthropological approaches to Muslim worlds. New York: Springer.
2012 The judge as tragic hero: judicial ethics in Lebanon’s shari‘a courts. American Ethnologist 39(1): 106-121.
2011 (Co-authored with Marcia Inhorn.) Mutuality and immediacy between marja‘ and muqallid: evidence from male IVF patients in Shi‘i Lebanon. International Journal of Middle East Studies 43(3): 409-427.
2010 Neo-calligraphy: religious authority and media technology in contemporary Shiite Islam. Comparative Studies in Society and History 52(2): 351-383.
2009 Islam and new kinship: reproductive technology and the shariah in Lebanon. New York: Berghahn Books.
Publications
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Sharia
November 2020|Internet publication<a href=""></a> -
Social anthropology, ethnography, and the ordinary.
January 2019|Chapter|Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology Meets Anthropology and the Social Sciences -
Totality and infinity: sharia ethnography in Lebanon
January 2019|Chapter|The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology: Form, Duration, Difference -
Islam and Law in Lebanon Sharia within and without the State
June 2018|BookA dynamic account of the sharia in Lebanon as both state law and as personal ethics.Law -
De-centring Shiʿi Islam
January 2018|Journal article|British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies© 2017 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies In the introduction to this special issue, we make the case for ‘de-centring’ the study of Shiʿi Islam, conceptually, spatially and sociologically. After first noting the essentialization of Shiʿi identity within the contemporary public sphere, we question its spatialization within the modern world of nation-states and area studies, and contrast the physical and human geography of Shiʿi Islam. We then turn to the central theme of religious authority. Much of the study of modern Shiʿi Islam has (legitimately) focused on towering clerical figures and the institution of the marjaʿiyya, the summit of the religious hierarchy. We propose a number of ways in which this focus on the marjaʿiyya might be complicated, through attention to the diversity of forms it takes and the ways in which it is mediated. We point to the need for more bottom-up studies of Shiʿi authority as a complement to the dominant approach of a top-down perspective, as well as greater attention to contexts where the importance of the marjaʿiyya recedes into the background. We also call for further study of the large part of the Shiʿi population to whom the path towards religious authority was long closed off: women. -
Making a centre in the periphery: The legitimation of Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah’s Beirut Marjaʿiyya
January 2018|Journal article|British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies© 2017 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Lebanon’s Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (d.2010) enjoyed in his later years a high profile as a ‘source of emulation’ (marjaʿ al-taqlīd) for Twelver Shiʿa in Lebanon and beyond. That high profile stemmed in part from his close association with the Shiʿi Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation, and Hizballah in particular, but also from his avowedly ‘openminded’ (munfatiḥ) and frequently controversial Islamic legal positions. His supporters claimed that his independent, Beirut-based marjaʿiyya could be more relevant to the contemporary, cosmopolitan world than those of the traditional scholarly centres of Najaf and Qom. His detractors, however, challenged the scholarly credentials of a man who had left the seminary (ḥawza) at a relatively young age. In the context of the interest of this special issue in ‘de-centring’ our approaches to Shiʿi Islam, he thus represents a valuable case study of how knowledge and authority can be constituted at the margins by one who seeks to challenge the tradition’s status quo, and in particular the hold of the contemporary ḥawza establishment as represented by the schools of Najaf and Qom. In this article I concentrate on his attempts to legitimize his scholarly authority in particular, vital to his claim to the marjaʿiyya. -
De-Centring Shi‘i Islam: Special Issue of British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 45
October 2017|c-book -
The judge as tragic hero: Judicial ethics in Lebanon’s shari’a courts
January 2017|Chapter|Islamic Law in Practice© 2014 Mashood A. Baderin. In this article, I present ethnography of judicial practice in Lebanon’s shari’a courts and find a tension between the identity of the judges presiding as Islamic religious specialists and their identity as legal professionals. Just applying the rules of the Law is incompatible with true religious vocation, which demands personal engagement with the morally needy. But to ignore legal strictures is to be dismissed as a mere sermonizer. I find this case illustrative of a deeper tension between the use of rules and the disciplining of virtuous selves and argue for a new anthropology of rules to set alongside the new anthropology of ethics. -
Comment
December 2016|Journal article|Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute -
Donor human milk for Muslim infants in the UK.
November 2016|Journal article|Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal EdInfant Feeding, Neonatology
