Sanctified cosmology : maintaining Muslim identity with globalism

Abstract EN

The significance of religion in materialistically oriented globalism has been widely debated in anthropology and sociology.

Drawing on cross-cultural ethnography dealing with sanctity and invisibility or unseen domains of social life, the study explores how religiously constructed images of the world influence the daily actions of people in the two Muslim countries of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Muslim sanctified cosmology is not constructed solely by intellectuals ; rather, it is latent in Islamic tradition and embedded in the popular imagination awaiting to be triggered through people's everyday discourses.

By associating different aspects of life with the sacred, the religious cosmological order is expanded to encompass the secular or mundane and social ordering.

The belief in the sacred or divine "invisibility," al-ghaib, strengthens the visibility of Muslim cosmology and identity challenging the hegemony of global culture.

The cosmologies of Muslim societies are thus based not on evolutionary, materialistic, and separatist models that underlie Western global thought, but on spirituality, sanctification, unification, and creation.

Therefore, the emphases do not nullify secular engagements with reality.

This paper argues that it is the power of the imagined, internalized, and sanctified invisible through which people's daily actions can be understood as global lifeways are reinterpreted to fit the Islamic folk paradigm.