Pious disciplines and modern lives: The culture of Fiqh in the Turkish Islamic tradition (Germany)

“Pious Disciplines and Modern Lives” is a study based on ethnographic research in Istanbul and Berlin. Its chapters examine in different perspectives the interplay between the interpretation of Islam and the changing social context of Turkey and Germany in the second half of the 20th century. They are united in their focus on continuity and change in the Islamic tradition and in the accounts they give of religious Muslims using the Islamic tradition to ground their critique of contemporary society and develop criteria for leading a ‘good life.’ Against the background of dramatic social change, the actors in this study use Muslim practice to combine piety with the demands of contemporary modern life. In this modern context, Islamic practices—from the five-times daily prayer, to the insistence of performing everyday activities in a ‘Muslim way’, the participation in the Muslim public sphere, and the building of Muslim institutions—become constitutive elements of the hegemonic social project of Muslim communities.; In contrast to approaches that see Islam bound to a particular type of society, this study shows that it is the matrix of Muslim disciplines, woven into a heterogeneously constituted wider society, that provides the conditions for the continuing authority of the Islamic tradition, as it shapes both the social context and, over time, the subjectivity of Muslim practitioners. The study also shows how Muslim practitioners and the Islamic tradition itself are shaped by specific social contexts. The argument that the authority of Islamic moral reason depends on the hegemony of a diverse but nevertheless collective project has implications beyond the study of Islam. It suggests more generally that the long-term success of collective social projects hinges on their success to insert social disciplines into the lifeworld of followers that reinforce their commitment to a shared framework of reasoning.