“Young People are Seeking Their Fortune”: Islamic Life Courses, Sufi Ethics, and the Possibilities of Worldly Adab in Rural Aceh
This paper examines how rural Acehnese villagers engage Sufi texts and concepts in ways that entail different models of ethics than those common in popular piety and revivalist movements. Rather than emphasize the hereafter and a project of ethical striving geared towards minimizing worldly temptations, these practitioners draw on al-Ghazālī and the division between “this world” and “the hereafter” to develop a life-staged model in which the rightful pursuit of worldly blessings may make entertaining temptation incumbent upon a good Muslim. The paper asks whether it is useful to think of this reading of Sufi ethics in terms of adab.
Biography
Daniel Andrew Birchok is the William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He is an Anthropologist and Historian whose primary research explores how Islamic ritual and practice has served as a site for the production of public memory in twentieth- and twenty-first century Indonesia. His current book project, titled “The Pasts of Habib Abdurrahim: Sufism, Genealogy, and Traditionalist Islam in Late and PostColonial Indonesia,” examines how resolutely local Islamic actors, networks, and imaginaries have shaped the postcolonial Indian Ocean Islamic world. He is also the author of “Putting Habib Abdurrahim in His Place: Genealogy, Scale, and Islamization in Seunagan, Indonesia,” published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (2015), and “Women, Genealogical Inheritance, and Sufi Authority: The Female Saints of Seunagan, Indonesia,” forthcoming in Asian Studies Review.