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The academic study of Islamic ritual, interested scholars agree, has been sorely neglected. Particularly in the 1980s, a number of voices arose identifying and lamenting this lack. "Neither in terms of rich comparative study nor in terms of interpretive study of Muslim ritual on its own terms," wrote William GEAHAM in 1981, "do we have any really significant work to build upon."2 Although "Islam itself places great emphasis on ritual activities," wrote Frederick DENNY in 1985, "the systematic study of ritual within traditional Islamic studies has been recessive."3 Almost a decade after GRAHAM'S essay, Kevin RBINHAKT could still speak in 1990 of "a desiccating lack of studies ... of Islamic ritual life" by either Islamicists or historians of religion.4
It is also generally acknowledged that there has been a particular dearth of scholarship on the central rituals of normative Islam. Aside from research on the historical antecedents of various normative Islamic practices, philologically trained Islamicists have had very little to say on the subject of ritual. Although often historically informative, such studies contribute little to our understanding of such rituals within the context of Islamic belief and practice. While anthropologists and sociologists have paid some attention to Islamic ritual practice, their work has usually focused on "popular" or "folk" religion, often in areas geographically distant from the Middle Eastern heartland of the classical tradition; normative practices such as canonical prayer have received very little attention.5 Thus, the two forms of study have rarely coincided in content or context sufficiently to comment usefully on each other.
This imbalance in the study of Islamic ritual is not merely an artifact of philologists' disinterest in embodied practices or anthropologists' preference for practices that are locally specific and milieus far removed from the metropolitan centers of the pre-modern textual tradition. Rather, it reflects the resistance of central Islamic rituals to certain modes of analysis. Specifically, it results from these rites' perceived failure to yield to the process of decoding traditionally favored by cultural anthropologists and historians of religion. As John BOWEN writes in a study of canonical prayer: "Among the world's major religious rituals, surely the Islamic ritual of worship, the salât, has been one of the most intractable to anthropological analyses."6 In a similar vein, GEAHAM argues that...