After subjectivity: a study of knowledge, ethics and art in Shia Islam
Creators: name: Blanch, Samuel
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2022

description: The Shia Muslim sits on the carpet in a darkened room bent over a pamphlet, carefully following the lines of a Ramadan supplication. He rocks to the pattern of the recitation. Tears flow, and later he will beat his breast in a communal lament to his martyred leaders. In a black designer sweatshirt, and with his hair styled like a football star, this seems the quintessential posture of a 'pious modernity'. Alongside the trappings of consumerism, this man forms himself as a pious subject whose bodily rectitude is as integral to his character as the dogma that he whispers. This focus on what Dietrich Jung and others have called 'Muslim subjectivities' has offered new insight into the plurality of forms of life in late modernity, and serves as this thesis' point of departure. But this thesis questions the descriptive power of subjectivity and its corollary, the idea that contemporary religious life is characterised by objectification. Through an ethnographic study of the transnational Shia community between Qom, Iran and Sydney, Australia, I explore the putative objects of contemporary Muslim life, and the utility of thinking of my interlocutors' form of life in terms of subjectivity. I do this by examining my interlocutors' relationships with a range of 'things'. Exploring Shia knowledge production in the Qom seminary and in Sydney's Saturday Islamic schools, I interrogate the putative object-ness of textbooks and curricula. I then examine the much-neglected Shia Muslim khums or 20 per cent tithe on yearly profit. I explore about the concrete operation of this money, the quintessential object of modern bureaucratic administration, in the hands of its givers, administrators and beneficiaries between Qom and Sydney. Finally, I consider the Iranian mural arts, and the photographic portfolio of a Sydney based artist. Through this broad range of things, and through a mixed methodology attentive to the materiality of Muslim practice, I find connections between persons and things that destabilise the subject and object ontology. Across this thesis, I ask three questions to parse out the particularity of person and thing relationships in the Shia community. I ask, firstly, is this thing indeed an object? Is this person a subject in relation to these things? Is this book, or this money, consumed by the Shia as an object? Secondly, I ask how else these persons and things might be described. I argue that even the most prosaic of things are more fruitfully understood as wasa'il or "means" (singular. wasila) for participation in a reality characterised by the spatial question of closeness to God. I show how an analysis oriented by subjectivity would miss my interlocutors' orientation, of both themselves and of things, towards closeness to God, where closeness is understood quite literally. A textbook, for example, is not simply available as a cognitive instrument because the text itself participates in that unfolding reality. And the khums is not a mere instrument: it is a means for achieving an ethical proximity to God already embodied in the money itself. Thirdly, I explore some of the methodological and broader theoretical implications of this discussion for the study of contemporary Islam.