SOAS Research Online

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Abstract

Winner of American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize (2008). Living Islam is both a “classically” ethnographic and vividly fresh study of intellectual and moral life in Chitral that successfully highlights the cultural,intellectual and moral strategies Chitralis resort to in order to negotiate the stresses and challenges of modernization and the Islamist-inspired volatile political situation surrounding their region. What is remarkable is that Marsden manages to bring the ideas and self-representations of the Rowshanis out so plausibly and uncomplicatedly. While there are many studies of the Islamist challenge to traditional Muslim societies, few have looked beyond the national or state level and the urban milieu. By situating his work in small towns and villages in an ethnically and religiously diverse region, and by trying to understand and explain the ways in which rural people use their cultural resources to intellectually and morally engage with serious, and often dangerous and violent, geo-political phenomena, Marsden has produced a study that is not only relevant to anthropologists but also political scientists and those interested in political Islam.