Murabitun Religious Conversion: Time, Depth, and Scale among Spain’s New Muslims

This article calls for a reworking of the concept of religious conversion, one that goes beyond the recent tendency to focus on temporality as the defining feature of religious change. This emphasis on time has led to a bifurcation of scholarship between work on rupture-oriented Christian conversion and on return-oriented Muslim reversion. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with Sufi Murabitun converts in southern Spain to illustrate the limits of these common temporal frames. I argue that the Murabitun hold a vision of conversion that combines temporal orientations toward both the past and the future, while also entwining temporality with particular uses of depth and scale in the service of a religious conversion that is both spiritual and political in nature. Specifically, the Murabitun prescribe slow, piecemeal changes to achieve radical ruptures, they privilege truth and purity over superficiality or simplistic change, and they envision conversion as a multi-scalar project that propels transformation from the individual, to the Spanish nation-state, to a global Islamic utopia. I suggest that a broadened conversion concept, one untethered to particular configurations of time, opens analytical space for bridging the divide between work on Christianity and Islam. In the process, I underscore how the current split between scholarship of different religions results from an initial desire on the part of anthropologists to take religious subjects seriously. The article thus points to the ironic danger of overreliance on emic categories for anthropological analysis more broadly.