The Biblio Collective is a book club: it’s meant to be interactive, to foster a sense of community, and to be an opportunity to share ideas with each other. We look forward to learning from your reflections and criticisms of the chosen book—the more you bring to the table, the richer the conversation.
Register and Join Virtually Here
Meeting 8 of 8: An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon
Wed. March 30th at 7:30 pm CT
Read Prior: Chapter 6 & 7: Public Piety as Women’s Jihad & The Pious Modern Ideal and Its Gaps pages 204-232 (2 pages a day)
Join us every other Wednesday night from Dec. 22-Mar. 30th to discuss An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon by Lara Deeb.
Goals for reading An Enchanted Modern:
We are reading An Enchanted Modern to help us improve the ways we create Islamic culture and community in the United States. Learning about the ways that other Muslims—here: Lebanese women—think about and build community will help us compare our projects to other, more robust community projects. In addition, we hope to expand our ideas about the variety of ways that women play pivotal roles in Muslim community building. Learning about their world will expand our imagination about what is possible to build for our future.
Big-picture questions to keep in mind while reading:
how do Muslims in a different environment build community? how does it differ from my experience and expectations?
how do my understandings of big ideas like “tradition,” “modernity,” and “progress” shape my ideas around religious culture?
how do ideas about history shape religious culture?
how does the participation of these women differ from the community gender dynamics that I am familiar with?
We hope that our discussions will help us sharpen our efforts in forging Muslim community in the United States.
Purchasing the book: If you purchase a new copy, consider purchasing the book here - Sacred Roots will receive a small percentage from each purchase from our Bookshop.org page.
About the book:
Based on two years of ethnographic research in the southern suburbs of Beirut, An Enchanted Modern demonstrates that Islam and modernity are not merely compatible, but actually go hand-in-hand. This eloquent ethnographic portrayal of an Islamic community articulates how an alternative modernity, and specifically an enchanted modernity, may be constructed by Shi'I Muslims who consider themselves simultaneously deeply modern, cosmopolitan, and pious.
In this depiction of a Shi'I Muslim community in Beirut, Deeb examines the ways that individual and collective expressions and understandings of piety have been debated, contested, and reformulated.
Women take center stage in this process, a result of their visibility both within the community, and in relation to Western ideas that link the status of women to modernity. By emphasizing the ways notions of modernity and piety are lived, debated, and shaped by "everyday Islamists," this book underscores the inseparability of piety and politics in the lives of pious Muslims.