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Reviewed by:
  • Everyday Piety: Islam and Economy in Jordan by Sarah A. Tobin
  • Geoffrey Hughes
Sarah A. Tobin, Everyday Piety: Islam and Economy in Jordan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. 248 pp.

Everyday Piety explores the lives of middle-class, pious Muslims in Jordan's cosmopolitan capital of Amman. It comes at a time when Muslim lifeways continue to be discussed in popular media through a narrow security discourse that is often oblivious to the far more mundane practices that define the faith for the vast majority of its one billion-plus adherents. With its stated commitment to the "everyday," the book is well positioned to do the interesting work that so many of the more sensation-alistic titles cluttering the "Middle Eastern" section of a typical bookstore cannot. While it does engage (particularly in the conclusion) with broader political upheavals in the region like the Arab Spring, its primary concern is with an increasingly popular kind of Islamic piety that we might call lifestyle Islam or, to borrow a term from Asif Bayat (2007), "post-Islamism." Grounded as much in liberal rights discourses and consumer culture as it is in the foundational Islamic texts of the 7th to 10th centuries, this sort of spirituality is well-suited to the 21st century metropolis and will likely be with us well into the future. Sarah Tobin argues that economizing, neoliberalizing practices are increasingly merging with pietistic Islamic practices in places like Jordan, producing new forms of religiosity in the process. In doing so, Tobin contributes to the scholarly literature on both neoliberalism and Islam. The book is written in a lucid and engaging style that will make it a useful teaching tool in courses on Islam, the Middle East, and especially Jordan.

As an ethnographer, Tobin is to be commended for having captured a very particular world—one which will be immediately recognizable to those who have spent significant time with urban Jordan's pious Muslim middle class. This reviewer repeatedly found himself reliving experiences [End Page 293] from his own time in Jordan in vivid detail as he read the book—a sure sign of Tobin's skill as an observer and storyteller. Given the degree to which much of the region remains off limits to researchers and Arabic language students alike, the book's deep ethnographic engagement with Amman will likely make it an important read for the increasing number of westerners who avail themselves of the city's relative security and welcoming attitude towards foreigners. The level of access that Tobin has been able to negotiate through her ethnography, however, is far beyond that of the typical visitor to Amman. Aside from her impressive ability to move in intimate (and often off-limits) domestic spaces, she was able to arrange an internship with one of Jordan's major Islamic banks. One of the book's strongest points is this subtle, multi-sited research structure, which moves from the workplace to homes and other spaces of consumption. Yet it should be emphasized that this is still a holistic ethnographic engagement with one particular kind of urban, middle-class world—even if it is a world defined by a network of particular places distributed across the metropolitan landscape.

"Middle class" here should be understood not as an economic category, but rather as a moral and political one. Believing that one is middle class in this context has less to do with the balance in one's bank account and more to do with a certain kind of belief about one's citizenship. To note an oft remarked-upon shibboleth, if seeing a police officer makes you feel more safe, then you are probably "middle class" in this sense. This is what allows the category to encompass masses of people who make the equivalent of a few hundred dollars per month with the kind of people who belong to a gym that offers a "rooftop swimming pool…hairdressing, manicures and pedicures, even full waxing and massages" (16). These are people who "emphasize inclusiveness rather than 'internecine conflict, resurgent nationalism, and all sorts of bloody "othering"' (Schwedler 2010:555 as quoted in Tobin), particularly through practices of elite and exclusive consumerism" (38...

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