Review of David Kloos, Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia
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Review of David Kloos, Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN: 1049780691176642, pb, 240 pp. Quinn A. Clark 1 Published online: 12 August 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
David Kloos’ historical ethnography of the Indonesian region of Aceh (nicknamed Serambi Mekkah, or “Veranda of Mecca”) argues that “an important tension exists within the conceptual domain of religion between the fields of power and morality” (157–158). While some anthropologists of Islam and theorists of religious life have viewed the pious injunctions of religion as a means of wielding disciplinary power over ordinary adherents, Kloos argues that it is the other way around: Muslim life in Aceh provides an example of religious morality at odds with power, especially that of the state. For Kloos, it is not that religious life represents direct defiance to the structures of power and control (158). Instead, power’s intent to control is consistently put into tension with (religious) morality because religious agency enables the creative cooption of the discourses of power. The particular ends to which that agency is directed are irrelevant. The point is that it resists control and, thus, undermines disciplinary power. This concept of religious agency, “contingent on the continuous interaction between ordinary Muslims forces of normative Islam” (1), is the central concept of Kloos’ study. Kloos illustrates his case in Ch. 1 by historically tracing the process by which colonial and religious authorities produced a sense of Acehnese exceptionalism in the twentieth century. Ch. 3 argues that this reputation was not, as it turned out, determinative of Acehnese subjectivity but was instead appropriated at the village level. The overall argument of the book culminates in Ch. 5, in which religious agency is depicted mostly clearly. Four interlocutors in three different stages of life “actively selected and appropriated official moral discourses to make decisions, assess emotions, and justify behaviors” (157) as they discuss the role of sin in their lives. Consider Rahmat, who suggests that advanced age justifies an atypical attitude toward piety, or Ari, who offers
* Quinn A. Clark [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Religion Department, Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA
614
Q. A. Clark
various justifications for his marijuana use. Earlier anthropologists may have viewed their ambivalence or apparent inconsistencies as evidence of the instability or incoherence of a religious self produced by contradictory injunctions and disciplinary forces. Kloos’ study invites readers to consider how individuals integrate moral failure into a broader “life trajectory.” Consequently, the domain of religious agency is expanded, and the philosophical upshot is a new perspective on disciplinary power—not determinative of religious selfhood (of which piety is said to be an expression), but in tension with religious agency. The brilliance of Kloos’ fir
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