Content area
Full Text
Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States. Bill Maurer. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. 123 pp.
We owe to Bruno Latour articulation of the insight that modernity is not the partition point between a traditional past and a secular present, as it is commonly held to be. In fact, hybridity between the two forms may be modernity's key feature. Anthropological investigation into the everyday features of this hybridity has the potential to yield a richer palette with which we may depict the intersection of contemporaneous, seemingly contradictory worlds.
Bill Maurer's new book, Pious Property, is an inquiry into just such a phenomenon: the Islamic mortgage. It seeks to show "that Islamic mortgages... provide a window into an ongoing transformation in Muslim Americans' understanding of Islamic law and that this transformation has been spurred as much by American government and bureaucracy as by shari'a [Islamic law] scholarship or traditional religious interpretation" (p. 2). It has been "spurred" by U.S. bureaucracy because the growth of house-financing opportunities for Muslims is supported by government-backed home finance corporations (Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae) that have (largely) erroneously classified Muslims as immigrants. This investment reflects "the American preoccupation with property ownership as the cornerstone of citizenship" (p. 4).
"Islamic banking and finance is a growth sector in the world economy," reads the first sentence of the book, and therein lays the implied paradox: The heartbeat of finance is profit based on the...