Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This short book was a labor of love—love for an subject that would not let me go while I was in the middle of a larger research project on Islamic banking, alternative currencies, and the problem of money in social analysis. That subject is the Islamic mortgage contract, which captivated my imagination from the moment I was first introduced to it. Perhaps it was because I had recently taken out a mortgage for my own first house. Perhaps it was because Islamic mortgages opened my eyes to the array of contractual forms that structure and animate Islamic banking and helped me map out each kind of contract as a hypothetical way to finance real estate. There is something about the tangibility of real estate as an application of finance and property law that makes it easier to understand the complexities of those laws. Finance, after all, is highly abstract and complicated. Real estate, land, is solid material; it is the ground we walk on, the buildings we live in. At the same time, the Islamic mortgage dazzled me. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1999, 10, 11) writes that during fieldwork one is always expecting to be surprised. The record of fieldwork—the ethnographic text—attempts to recapture that sense of expectation. “An initial surprise becomes a suspension, a dazzle, and some kinds of ‘special knowledge’ are more likely to dazzle than others. One is held,” Strathern writes, “on the threshold of understanding.” I continued to be held on that threshold of understanding throughout my relationship with the Islamic mortgage. This book is a record of our relationship. It is also a record of the other important relationships that facilitated the project on which it is based. Research was supported by two grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, and I would like to express my deep thanks to Stephanie Platz, formerly at Russell Sage, for her intellectual encouragement and collegiality throughout the project, as well as a care- ful and critical reading of the entire manuscript. I would also like to thank Stephanie, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council for providing venues at which I was able to discuss this project with other scholars working on Islam in the United States in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Several colleagues have been indispensable. Karen Leonard continues to encourage my work by constantly bringing new sources and new ideas to my attention. I have benefited from conversations with Charles Hirschkind, Kathleen Moore, Saba Mahmood, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Nadine Naber, Annelise Riles, Gregory Starrett, and Kaushik Sunder Rajan. Anita Iannucci, Robert Newcomb, and Harold Dyck at the Center for Statistical Consulting at the University of California at Irvine provided some statistical guidance. I would also like to thank Mike Burton for discussions about the models in chapter 4. I thank Tom Boellstorff and Karen Hunt Ahmed for reading and providing comments on the entire manuscript. Thanks to Tom too for helping create the figures in chapter 3. I also owe a huge debt of thanks to Tasneem Siddiqui, who served as a research assistant for this project and conducted some of the interviews discussed in this book. Tasneem also read and commented on the entire manuscript, and I thank her for her good humor and critical eye. I would also like to thank Suzanne Nichols and two anonymous reviewers for useful critical commentary on the manuscript. I thank Genna Patacsil and Cindy Buck for their assistance with the copyediting and production of this volume. The project could not have been attempted, of course, without the generous participation of all those who agreed to be interviewed and who helped me muddle through the field of home financing, Islamic or otherwise . It goes without saying that all errors or inconsistencies in what follows are my responsibility alone and that the opinions presented here do not reflect those of any funding agency, company, or other agent besides myself. Little of the material presented here will be surprising to those in the field of Islamic home finance. Following the conventions of anthropological writing and ethics protocols, I have made interviewees and conversation partners anonymous and disguised the identities of two companies whose applicant pools I examine in some detail in chapters 3, 4, and 5. I also disguise these companies’ identities whenever they come up in interviews or conversations. I know in advance that the effort to disguise some identities will probably fail for readers familiar with the field, but I...