Beyond Care – Reading the Qur’an as Religious Practices of Care
and (self-) control in Palestinian families of Political Prisoners and Martyrs

Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen – Denmark

 

Download paper

Framed by a concern with the consequences of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people on family relations and intimacy, this paper investigates how ‘care’ understood as a religious practice is enacted, negotiated and perceived contradictorily within families of Palestinian political prisoners and martyrs. The paper is thus concerned with the category of people considered to be the ‘primary care givers’ among beneficiaries’ families.  

Examining religious practices of care among these families is significant because the families of the national heroes are someone the entire Palestinian population cares about. And, within these families, family members are obliged to take financial and emotional care of each other in the absence of the husband or son due to his imprisonment or decease. According to public discourse in Palestine this is reflected in practice, but taking a closer look at family relations and practices of care display significant fractures in this ideal imaginary of family life.  

Since the Palestinian population is comprised of 97 %¹ Muslims, norms and values rooted in Islam underlie Palestinian social life. One such religious value and practice is the performance of care which in Islam plays a pivotal role, particularly with regards to caring for and about family and kin. I term the moral universe of obligation that frames practices of care for ‘an ethos of care’.

Regarding language as a social practice (Hanks 1995) this paper assumes that that the religious practice of reading the Qur’an is a way of performing care for self and others in families. Reading the Qur’an is believed to relieve tension, emotional and bodily distress as well as engendering patience [sabr]. 

Based on fieldwork in 2007 and 2008 in the West Bank among families of martyrs and political prisoners, the paper suggests that investigating the religious practice of reading the Qur’an illuminates fractures within the Palestinian ethos of care. One such fracture shows in the experiences of prisoners’ wives and martyrs’ widows’ of their family members’ supposed display of care by telling them to ‘read the Qur’an’  in order to alleviate the distress of enduring the absence of their husbands. But, to the women in question, these religious practices of care are perceived to display carelessness rather than care about their distress.  

Investigating the religious practice of reading the Qur’an therefore conveys not only the contested meanings of religious practices of care; a focus on religious, intersubjective practices of care provides us with a glimpse of how violent conflict that has become chronic (Henrik Vigh 2008) rather than temporary moulds the basic understanding of what it means to be a caring family in contemporary Palestine. 

 

References

Veena Das, Life and Words 2007: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press 

William F. Hanks 1995 Language and Communicative Practices. Series Critical Essays in Anthropology. M. Bloch, P. Bourdieu and JL Comaroff, eds. Boulder: Westview Press. 

Henrik Vigh 2008 Crisis and chronicity : anthropological perspectives on continuous conflict and decline In Ethnos ; vol. 73, no. 1