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"In four brief chapters," writes Clifford Geertz in his preface, "I have attempted both to lay out a general framework for the comparative analysis of religion and to apply it to a study of the development of a supposedly single creed, Islam, in two quite contrasting civilizations, the Indonesian and the Moroccan."Mr. Geertz begins his argument by outlining the problem conceptually and providing an overview of the two countries. He then traces the evolution of their classical religious styles which, with disparate settings and unique histories, produced strikingly different spiritual climates. So in Morocco, the Islamic conception of life came to mean activism, moralism, and intense individuality, while in Indonesia the same concept emphasized aestheticism, inwardness, and the radical dissolution of personality. In order to assess the significance of these interesting developments, Mr. Geertz sets forth a series of theoretical observations concerning the social role of religion.
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ISLAM OBSERVED Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia Clifford Geertz The University of Chicago fress Chicago & London for Hilly THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London Copyright © 1968 by Yale University All rights reserved Phoenix Edition published 1971 Primed in the Unired Stares of America 99 98 97969594939291 9089 109 8 International Standard Book Number: 0-226-28511-1 Contents Preface I. Two Countries, Two Cultures 2• The Classical Styles v I 3. The Scripturalist Interlude 4. The Struggle for the Real Bibliographical Note Index M ap s Mo rocc o Indonesia 6 IO 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Preface "Bad poets borrow," T. S. Eliot has said, "good poets steal." I have tried in what foliows to be, in this respect anyway, a good poet, and to take what I have needed from certain others and make it shamelessly my own. But such thievery is in great part general and undefined, an almost unconscious process of selection, absorption, and reworking, so that after awhile one no longer quite knows where one's argument comes from, how much of it is his and how much is others'. One only knows, and that incom pletely, what the major intellectual influences upon his work have been, but to attach specific names to specific passages is ar bitrary or libelous. Let me, then, merely record that my approach to the comparative study of religion has been shaped by my re actions, as often rejecting as accepting, to the methods and con cepts of Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward Shils, Robert Bellah, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and their intellectual pres ence can be discerned, not always in forms of which they would approve, throughout the whole of this little book, as can that of the man whose ·genius made both their and my work possible, Max �Veber. The certification of fact is, of course, another mat ter: to the degree that references documentary to my substantive assertions can be given, they will be found in the bibliographical note at the end of the book. In four brief chapters-originally delivered as the Terry Foun dation Lectures on Religion and Science for 1967 at Yale Uni versity-! have attempted both to lay out a general framework for the comparative analysis of religion and to apply it to a study of the development of a supposedly single creed, Islam, in two quite contrasting civilizations, the Indonesian and the Moroccan. Merely to state such a program is to demonstrate a certain lack of grasp upon reality. What results can only be too abbreviated to be balanced and too speculative to be demonstrable. Two cultures over two