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Fadwa El Guindi. By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam. Oxford: Berg Press, 2008. 203 pages. Paper $39.95.
Reviewed by Barbara Aswad
By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam explores the dynamics of Islam seldom discussed or emphasized in other studies of Islam. For this reason, the book is original and makes an important contribution to a subject often maligned or oversimplified in today's political context. The author's statements best describe the vision of the study. "One cannot understand Muslim life without understanding, not Islam's structure, but Islam's rhythm, how Muslims weave in and out, from ordinary space and time to sacred space and time, throughout the day, every month, throughout the year for a lifetime" (20). She states, "Thus we need to get beyond the recent global politics that include labels such as jihadist, Islamist, terrorist, veil, headscarf, honor killing, female genital mutilation, suicide bombing and much more" (161).
The author emphasizes that she wants to analyze Islam as a whole that is "creative, generative, flexible, and dynamic" (xi). She finds a special quality embedded in the culture. To achieve this she includes numerous disciplines: anthropology, history, literature, and religious studies. She includes different methodologies: cross-cultural comparisons, ethnographic studies, fieldwork, poetry, visual Islamic texts, and references to older texts from Biblical and Egyptological studies. This makes the study unique. The author also draws on her earlier studies, for example her previous extensive and enlightening study of the veil (2003).
The first section examines various studies of time and space cross-culturally and presents her theoretical base. She argues that Western time is chronological and cyclical, but that this is not true among other cultures, such as those of China and India. Using an example from her research among the Valley Zapotec of Mexico, she mentions a man who was upwardly mobile and rarely...