Working on my paper I was periodically assailed by certain qualms and questions: What was I, a political scientist and an "Islamologist," doing in a panel of ‘anthropologists’: There was the double discomfiture of finding myself as a political theorist and an amateur cultural theorist wondering what I was doing amidst a panel of professional full blooded anthropologists: ‘real anthropologists in the flesh’ as a friend and colleague, himself an anthropologist, once remarked. I felt very much like an impostor: a pretender to the throne, that legendary and eternal ‘other’ that is the benchmark of the discipline. There was, to boot, this mysterious presence hovering in the silences left in the title of the panel: It was after all a panel dedicated to ‘field findings’, returning triumphant from the concrete sites of excavation to reinscribe a field with experienced articulations beyond the fuzzy imaginings that hitherto preoccupied it. What was my field that I should claim to share such a privileged venture? Was there not the fear that my own theoretical exploits into the domain of the scripted word may offer no more than something of that mild resistence to the mission of the cast? In delving into a literary resource, beyond my live human sources, was there not the danger that I might simply be the subversive element in a project, lurking in zones of the imagination that were effectively being transcended?

Was not my position as interpreter of the normative dimension in this quest somewhat emblematic of some real problems in the field in which my co-panelists were the experts? There is after all that unbridgeable distance between how people at a particular moment in a particular group actually live out their lives and the standards they know or feel they ought to abide. Simple yet stark, it is that perennial tension between norms and practice! Would not the particular topic I originally chose to explore, confining my role to some theoretical insights into an excerpted text, true the supremely privileged text in Muslim societies, would that not simply underline the paradoxical rift in these societies ? Was my role on this panel simply to serve to highlight the anomalies of writing culture? To embody the dissonances that are doubly reflected: from the contextual field to its observation posts?

I wondered how my co-panelists felt about me, if they ever stopped to consider what their odd co-panelist was doing in their midst, and how on earth she was going to fit her story in with theirs. Perhaps they were too busy with their field work and confronted with all its excitements to reflect on such discrepancies.. But as the time of the Meeting drew closer, and each panelist began to look over her shoulder to try to find a possible ground for touching base and tying the bits and pieces together to cohere round a more generative whole. Then the odd presence of an elusive and enigmatic alien on the panel may have come to their notice. I use these somewhat charged terms in light of the very nature of the abstract I had presented. Perhaps the request I received a few days ago from the Chair, was the nearest my co-panelists were coming to identify my discomfiture, which was duly becoming theirs as well. Kengfong, whose brainchild and idea this panel must have been, and who is acting as coordinator and organizer for it, finally contacted me after a prolonged silence to check on how things were going now that the D-Day was less than 3 weeks down the lane. Since I was tackling the normative aspect in the panel, was it possible to send my paper in advance to the other panelists to see how they could relate their field findings? It was clear from my abstract that mine was expected to be a highly abstract and philosophizing piece, and there was almost the belated realization that its tenor might not be altogether fitting for the occasion. Apart from my consternation at not having the tract ready, I sensed a certain relief that something of my own doubts were being reciprocated... that I was not alone in my sense of dislocation: and that at last the time has come, somewhat belatedly but hopefully not too late, to do something about the situation before the curtains rose.

As I turned to examine the sources of my own unease I distinguished between two aspects. One was the banal one of lagging behind my commitment: simply being aware of time running out and the work not done. There is little that can be done about that but to get on with what one can, and try to live out the futility of being panic-stricken. It was the other aspect of my self-examination however that promised to be the more fruitful experience. The discomfiture I was experiencing was not altogether ungrounded. There was good reason for feeling an outsider... and at this point of things, with the unintentional and casual lapse in intra-panel communication - very much of the loner outcast. The gaps in our backgrounds, training, approaches and experience were all very real. So too was the ‘objective’ distance in the problematic in the field we were exploring. Norms never sit all too easily in the world of practice, even if the normative is itself an ineluctable dimension of social praxis.. And the fact that I was trying to play out the confrontation between Muslim societies and Islamic sources, and explore the tensions between the distinction, even at this normative level, did not make things easier. The closer I came to the empirical setting and to the need to contextualize my interpretive initiative for a normative discourse at an anthropology panel, the more I found myself seeing things ‘through the eye of the anthropologist’, rather than the intuitive and amateur philosopher-theologian, or socio-theosopher, that I often tend towards. I was caught in an imaginary dialogue with my co-panelists, anticipating some of their findings, interpretations, and queries...and being drawn with every question more into a generative dialectic with the ethnographer’s field. Imperceptibly and ineluctably, I was beginning to experience textuality as a shaping socio-cultural field embodying a dialectic of interchangeable appropriations between meaning and action, norms and conduct, precepts and order. At the same time, I found that my understanding of the field of social praxis from which I knew my co-panelists would be emerging with all kinds of colorful details and narratives, with allegories, and metonyms, and metaphors, was indeed pretty much a rich textual field itself: as much as the context for enacting a normative discourse. I was in fact sitting on the wedge, feeling the distinct and affinate pulls of two energy fields that seemed to refer back to each other, at times reinforcing, at times, distracting, but always stimulating and thought provoking, and I felt that somehow this must be effect of the cross-streams that created their swirling eddies in that privileged zone identified by those who had been there before as ‘inter-textuality.’

In the meantime I have come across some very stimulating and suggestive literature, the kind of literature that never fails to inspire and set my mind chasing all kinds of new lines for framing a question, or deepening a quest, or some such analogy, or allegory, or stirring a memory ..all to the benefit of those reflections on the kind of discursive quest on which I am bound.

I became convinced that this sense of dislocation I was feeling can be productively developed to the advantage of the theme of our panel. To so however we will need to interact more intensively: to ‘interrogate’ each other, perhaps? To find out what each is doing: to ask questions and to invite, to instigate, to incite questions – to sensitize us to our own sensibilities .. and engage us through intimate dialogies that could help us articulate – in a community of scholarship (and fellowship) - the mystical and thought-provoking zone of sexuality that we are exploring: rather to see how far such articulation is possible, what directions it should take, what venues, grounds, and horizons it might open... where the constraints are - as well as the possibilities. To what extent can the discourse on sexuality be a universal discourse? How far can it feed on the tributary discourses? In what way might the search into Muslim zones of sexuality, perceived, imagined, articulated and embodied – at the experiential and conceptual – constitute a privileged point of departure to relating the particular to the universal, the individual to the general, the personal to the social, the inner to the outer, and the unicity to the diversity: For are we not ultimately taking sexuality as a window for grasping something of that wondrous complexity we identify with the ‘mystery of life’?

ADDENDUM

Mapping out the Sources and Hierarchies -

Grounding a Normative Sphere:

[Sexuality in the Muslim imaginaire and experience?]

The following registers the sequel of a hypothetical presentation at this point of my research and reflection on the theme: ‘Sexuality in Islam: Normative Perspectives’. As you see it differs in tone, emphasis, and scope from the original abstract where the focus there was exclusively on a thematic reading of the Qur’anic injunctions on adultery and slander - taken as launchers to the normative background for ‘gauging’/ articulating sexuality in contemporary Muslim societies. Now I am thinking of re-situating the proposed reading against a broader field, combining both a theoretical and historical dimension as the context for the philosophical overtures in which my original constructivist reading was embedded.

The paper as it progresses (– and stalls) tends to be shaping into 3 parts:

I. Cognitive. A theoretical framework introducing the main ideas and conceptual tools of analysis. This includes an introduction to such concepts as the ‘bearings of a culture’ and modal culture-types; the tawhidi paradigm; operational archetypes for sexuality in variable socio-cultural settings/ historical societies. Muslim societies are located in this cognitive framework.

II. Geneology. Mapping the normative framework in the Muslim setting identifies, classifies and distinguishes the historical sources. A concentricity of ‘imaginaires’ or socio-sexual imaginations ensues from a systemic rethinking of the sources. In this section our interpretative strategy creates/ sites a discursive opening for engaging the normative Muslim horizons at the interstices of the historical and the theoretical. The aim is to highlight the setting against which actual practices in specific communities take place.

III. Synthesis. In this section I would like to bring together the first two parts by applying the conceptual and theoretical insights to understanding specific constituencies against evolving praxis (= attitudes/conduct & beliefs, knowledge, understanding). The implementation is conceived on two levels: On a general level I relate the tentative archetypes of sexuality to the reality of shifting and overlapping contexts in contemporary Muslim societies - ‘context’ refers to communities of interpretation as well as to communities of practice. The different approaches to sexuality are also taken as competing grounds for contesting and affirming identity and affinity in the current politics of change (regionally/globally). The other level relates to specific normative sources and raises the imperative of challenging ‘conventional’ (=traditional & modern) Muslim attitudes and approaches in a bid to engage textuality on a higher and more authentic plane. Rethinking the boundaries of the moral life against the qur’anic injunctions on fornication and slander paves the way to a symbiotic articulation of sex as foundational in the deep ecology of the civic community in the [modal ]‘sane society.’