Dr%20Morgan%20Clarke: List of publications

“Religious authority” remains a ubiquitous but controversial term of comparative analysis. In Islamic studies, authority is generally personified in the form of the ulama and most often viewed through Weber’s lens of charismatic, legal-rational, and traditional types of legitimate domination. Our particular interest, Twelver Shi‘i Islam, seems a paradigmatic case, where the relationship between “the Ayatollahs” and state power has dominated academic discussion since Khomeini. Through ethnography of a Shi‘i diaspora community in the UK, we argue for a radical shift in perspective: away from forms of clerical power and towards non-specialist uses of clerical authority as expert opinion. Far from such “epistemic” authority being opposed to ordinary agency, here they are inextricably linked. Inspirational work in the anthropology of Islam has understood ordinary Muslim experiences of authority in non-liberal ways, as (Foucauldian) ethical discipline and self-care. We maintain the need to transcend not only domination but discipline too, refocusing the comparison between (Shi‘i) Islamic legal and liberal thought, in the form of Raz’s classic “service conception” of authority. Both stress the rationality of following authoritative opinion and its role as reason and justification for individual action. Our ethnography of ordinary practice then shows the sheer diversity of ways that such epistemic authority can be taken up, including, but not limited to, projects of personal piety and adversarial community politics. In our context, as surely also in others, domination and discipline should thus be seen as potential uses of “religious” epistemic authority, rather than as its privileged form.

The recent anthropology of ethics has sought to look beyond rules to themes such as the cultivation of the virtuous self. Anthropology generally has grown impatient with what Bourdieu called ‘the fallacies of the rule’ as a key term for describing the social. But rules remain a crucial dimension of ethical practice in many contexts, including religious ones. This article focuses on British Muslim conceptions and practice of the religious rules of Islam in order to highlight the complexity, diversity, and subtlety of everyday practices of rule-following. Sticking to the rules, even in the non-Muslim majority setting of the UK, is important to many, although what it means to follow the rules and how to do so are not always straightforward. By going beyond stereotypes of ‘mere’ ‘rigid’ rules, blindly followed or boldly evaded, I demonstrate both the necessity and the possibility of a thicker description of religious rules.

The trip by Dominic Cummings, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's then right‐hand man, to Durham in April 2020, in seeming violation of the rules of social distancing he had helped put in place, led to intense media scrutiny and public outrage. That there might be ‘One rule for them, and one for the rest of us’ became a stick to beat the government with and arguably contributed to Cummings’ eventual departure from Downing Street. This article focuses on the defence he put forward at the time. Rather than breaking the rules, he had followed them, he argued, providing a series of justifications, one of which led to widespread ridicule, the rest being largely dismissed. Rules of social distancing and the public's compliance with them have been of global concern during the coronavirus pandemic. I argue that the Cummings incident shows both the complexity of ordinary notions of what it means to follow a rule, and a tendency for that complexity to be left undiscussed in both scientific and public debate – to all our detriment.

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.

This chapter contends that anthropology needs a fresh, more sophisticated approach to rules as a complement to what has become a thriving ‘anthropology of ethics’. That literature seeks to move beyond notions of ethics and morality as ‘codes of conduct’ and explore instead what Foucault calls ‘the care of the self’, that is, projects of virtuous self-fashioning. The neglect, even dismissal, of rules in these discussions comes despite the obvious ubiquity and importance of the use of rules as technologies of the self, as in dietary regimes. The chapter explores the use of rules in one ethical tradition, the Islamic sharīʿah, through ethnography from Lebanon. Thinking more carefully about the nature of rules—their ‘necessary suboptimality’ for instance—opens up promising avenues of ethnographic inquiry rather than the theoretical dead-end that recent anthropology has assumed.

This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Islam and the impact of reproductive technology on the global social imaginary.