What is it about?
The article studies debates between Muslim legal theorists and theologians over the effect of wearing nail polish on ritual purity, explains why Muslims are so heavily invested in these debates and shows how secular accounts of ritual fail to understand its proper significance in the lives of Muslims.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The article contrasts secular thinking about religious rituals, which is influenced by Protestant thought in which ritual is regarded as superstitious, irrational and a form of false religion, with the role of ritual law in Islam. The lively debates over the effects of nail polish on ritual purity in Islam studied in the article show that ritual practices serve as a canvas on which philosophical and theological ideas about the nature of God's mercy, legal justice and human vulnerability are sketched out by Muslim scholars. Furthermore, contrary to popular accounts in which Salafi interpretations of Islamic scripture are said to be literalist and static, this article shows that Salafis often tend to be the ones most willing to introduce changes to Islamic ritual law.
Perspectives
The article is about an issue that affects the lives of millions of people several times a day, as shown by the popularity of this subject in online chat rooms, fatwa websites and Islamic tv shows. Because rituals of the body serve as the most sensory and intimate form of inhabiting an Islamic identity, debates over ritual law often involve passionately held views. Rather than dismissing such concerns as irrational or trivial, I wanted to show that they are related to some of the most profound ideas human beings entertain about the nature of God and the vulnerability of human beings and the role played by the body and its rituals in developing an understanding of the self.
Abdul Rahman Mustafa
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ritual and Rationality in Islam: A Case Study on Nail Polish, Islamic Law and Society, August 2020, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15685195-00260a09.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
