Cont Islam

DOI 10.1007/s11562-017-0395-5

A second look at invisibility: Al-Ghayb,

Islam, ethnography

Nils Bubandt 1 & Mikkel Rytter 1 & Christian Suhr 1

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Abstract The Arab concept al-ghayb refers to the hidden, the unseen, the invisible.
The term encompasses a range of important phenomena in Islam and in the
everyday experiences of Muslims. The dominion of the unseen (alam al-ghayb)
includes those parts of reality that cannot be seen simply because they are covered
by other visible objects. It also refers to those phenomena that by their nature cannot be
perceived (e.g. the face or throne of God, paradise, hell, the past, or the future), as well
as those objects that are blocked from view by one’s perspective (Drieskens 2006;
Mittermaier 2011; Suhr 2013). Al-ghayb is important to the notion of barzakh, the
intermediary realm between life and death; to the issue of veiling; to visions of deceased
saints or dreams about the Prophet Muhammad as well as to the uncontrollable powers
of jinn, angels, magic, the evil eye, and omens (Pandolfo 1997; Rothenberg 2004; Khan
(Cultural Anthropology, 21(6), 234-264, 2006); El-Zein 2009; Rytter (The Journal of
Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1), 46-63, 2010); Edgar 2011; Taneja (HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3), 139–65, 2013); Bubandt 2014a; Suhr (Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Society, 21(1), 96–112, 2015). The unseen, in other words,
is in Islam infused with power and potential, but the lure of the territories of the unseen
is also disturbing, troublesome, even dangerous. The seven contributions in this special
issue trace invisibility as both wondrous potential and vexed problem in the lives of
people in the modern Muslim world. They seek to enrich the study of Islam by
discussing what it means to live with al-ghayb, and how this concept is reshaped
through people’s experiences of the invisible in their lives. The contributions demon-
strate how al-ghayb constitutes an entrenched, but also highly contested, part of Islamic
experience. For the domain of al-ghayb evokes a series of paradoxical tensions. While
al-ghayb is a marker of the unseen domains of reality, for the adept it signifies a
supremely visible reality. Al-ghayb is also an all-determining locus of power; yet, due
to its inaccessibility, it is often also a great source of indeterminacy in the lives of

* Nils Bubandt
bubandt@cas.au.dk

1
Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
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Muslims. While full of danger, al-ghayb is also a potential source of healing, protection,
and resurrection. And lastly, while it is an all-determining omnipresence, al-ghayb
nevertheless remains essentially unknowable, a consummate BElsewhere^ (Pandolfo
1997; Mittermaier (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(2), 247–265,
2012); Bubandt 2014b; Suhr (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 21(1), 96–
112, 2015); Rytter (Ethnography, 17(2), 229-249, 2016). The special issue explores
these paradoxes in order to make a broader contribution to the study of invisibility in
social studies. It argues that a focus on the ambiguities of al-ghayb within Islam offers
an analytical point of departure for a wider exploration of the sensual, existential,
spiritual and political interfaces and contradictions of visibility and invisibility within
other religious and secular traditions as well. To this end, the contributions trace the
contradictory poetics and politics of the invisible, suggesting that the realm of al-ghayb
constitutes an alternative methodological and analytical entry point into an investigation
of the contemporary politics of the gaze. The study of al-ghayb, we propose,
entails an important critique of conventional notions of modernity as the Bempire of the
gaze^.

Keywords Anthropology of Islam . Islamic mysticism . Paradox . Visibility

Invisibility and the modern empire of the gaze

We live, it is often said, in an empire of the gaze (Levin 1993; Jay and Ramaswamy 2014). A
by now well-established body of theory claims that visibility, surveillance, and transparency
are not only key metaphors in modern politics, but that they are also central to the arsenal of
political technologies through which the modern world is governed (Foucault 1995), built on
a long philosophical tradition that has granted supremacy to vision over the other senses. As
the theorists of the empire of the gaze correctly point out, the hegemony of vision has a long
genealogy in Western philosophy. Since antiquity, sight has been regarded as the purest and
most trustworthy of the senses, a privileged position that allowed vision to become the basis
for modern empirical science (Crary, 1992; Levin 1999). In a number of ways the logic that
links vision to knowledge has become naturalized and infused within everyday language.
Words such as Boverview,^ Binsight,^ Bperspective,^ and Binspection^ convince us on a
daily basis that Bseeing^ is Bknowing^ (Fabian 1983; Grimshaw 2001). Vision is key, it
seems, in politics, science, surveillance, in electronic media, and in the leisure economy
(McQuire 1998; Urry 2002). Apparently vision also lies at the heart of male domination and
colonialism (Poole 1997; Eileraas 2003). The modern world, so the story goes, is optically
powered.
The argument presented in this special issue is that while the above account of the
hegemony of vision captures what is undoubtedly a central feature of life and power in the
contemporary world, its portrayal of the visual basis for the hegemony in global modernity is
oddly skewed and partial. As a result, it is also ultimately wrong. For where does the account
of political and scientific ocular-centrism leave the invisible and the unseen? The invisible, it
would seem to follow from the conventional account outlined above, is outside power, and
as a result irrelevant to life in the contemporary world. This, we argue, is incorrect. An
account of the hegemony of vision that fails to attend to the realm of the invisible is flawed
because it – by omitting the beliefs, powers, doubts and Binsights^ that attend the invisible
Cont Islam

and that destabilize the very distinction between visibility and invisibility – ends up believing
too much in vision as a vehicle of Enlightenment thought and modern rational power. An
analysis of regimes of ocular power that fails to attend to their tension-filled entanglements
with invisibility ultimately falls epistemologically prey to the very regimes of power it seeks
to criticize.
The contributions to this special issue demonstrate that invisibility is not merely that
which is excluded from the hegemony of vision. Rather, the unseen haunts, affects, and
co-produces the visible world in multiple ways. The ethnographic analyses presented
here probe the ambivalent sensibilities and frayed powers that transcend the border
between visibility and invisibility in the contemporary world. They explore how forms
of invisibility challenge the predominantly visual vocabulary of anthropology and other
social sciences, and they suggest the need to rethink, methodologically and theoreti-
cally, the ways in which invisibility and visibility co-constitute each other.
We are not the first to challenge the often-repeated culture-critical portrayals of the
hegemony of vision. As Martin Jay (1993) points out, poststructuralist theory revolved
around a deep suspicion of the historical link between vision and modernity. Not only
was visuality intimately implicated in the formation of panoptic power in the West,
ocular-centrism also became the basis for Western expansion into and domination over
its colonies (Jay and Ramaswamy 2014). In response to this hegemony of vision, a
wide range of disciplines within the arts and humanities began exploring the other
senses. Within anthropology, the Banthropology of the senses^ fielded a call to abandon
an ocular-centric outlook and to democratize the senses by exploring sound, taste,
smell, and touch as alternative modes of knowing and experiencing the world (Stoller
1989, 1997; Howes 1991; Howes 2004; Classen 1993; Classen et al., 1994; Howes and
Classen 2013). This produced numerous fascinating studies of the diverse ways in
which human beings inhabit and organize their worlds through the senses (Seeger
2004; Hirschkind 2006; Feld 2012; Bandak 2014; Kara and Thain 2014). But the
approach also holds a double danger. Firstly, the anthropological study of other senses
elsewhere seems to suggest these as alternatives of sorts, offering what Jacques Derrida
(1982: 27) calls Ba false exit^ from the Western hegemony of vision, an exit that
downplays the internal tensions and paradoxes of all the senses (Bubandt 1998).
Secondly, the exploration of the senses otherwise and elsewhere often rests on a
stereotypical account of vision in modernity that takes its hegemony for granted.
Both are problematic, because they presuppose what Bruno Latour (1993) calls a Bgreat
divide theory^ between the West and the rest, a theory that is blind to the numerous
areas where the hegemony of vision is co-produced in conjunction with the invisible,
where it breaks down under its own weight, or where the power of vision is challenged
by counter-visions (Mirzoeff 2011; Suhr and Willerslev 2012; Irving 2013). Visibility,
we suggest, is constantly produced, interpellated, and challenged by its relation to the
realm of the invisible. For this reason, we need to take a second look, as it were, at the
alleged hegemony of visibility and its hidden accomplice, the invisible.

The ambiguities of vision

No hegemony is without its tensions, as postcolonial studies taught us some time

ago (Cooper and Stoler 1997). The same is true, so we argue, for the hegemony of
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vision. The ethnographic case-studies of this special issue explore what David
Martin has called the Brepressed heterogeneity^ of the modern empire of vision
(Martin 2011: xvi). One aspect of this repressed heterogeneity is the fact that vision
is not only central to the language and project of Brational^ modernity, but is equally
important to a range of religious practices and mystical experiences (Davidson and
Harrington 2001; Willerslev 2009; Mittermaier 2011; Viveiros de Castro 2012).
Visions are what visionaries have, whether they are standard-bearers for a disen-
chanted Enlightenment or for mystical religion. The ability to have visions, to see
what lies hidden, is central to many mystical religious experiences of the invisible
realm. Capturing the mysterium tremendum that lies at the heart of the numinous in
most monotheistic religions is often a visual event, an intimate seeing–feeling of the
numinous (Otto 1923; James 1985).
This special issue focusses on such mystical visions of an invisible reality because
these visions of the invisible point to a double repression. Mystical visions challenge
not only the monopoly of modern science and rationality on visuality, they also often
challenge the authority of the very religion from which they grew. To give an example,
Christianity is a religion based on a strong Bspiritual optics,^ in which seeing God is
central to orthodox theology. At the same time, as Martin Jay (1993: 13) points out,
claims by mystics about their visions of God have historically been treated with
suspicion and hostility by theological authorities for Bdiverting our minds from more
spiritual concerns^ (ibid.). In Christianity, in other words, Bthe power of the optical^ is
imbued with a strong sense of ambivalence.
The question of whether vision provides access to God is a vexed one with which
many religious traditions struggle. And this religious question of God’s relation to sight
is far from waning historically. If anything, Bvisionary^ forms of religion are on the rise
on a global scale in the wake of global desecularization (Berger 1999), the spiritual
revolution (Heelas and Woodhead 2005), and the resurgence of charismatic Christianity
(Robbins 2004), mystical Islam, and neo-orthodox Islamic movements such as
Salafism (Pandolfo 1997; Bruinessen and Howell 2007; Edgar 2011; Mittermaier
2011). Visions, and the question of what unseen reality such visions can reveal, are
as political and as politically fraught today as they have ever been. The contributions to
this special issue show how analysis of the politics and poetics of invisibility provides a
way of rethinking contemporary processes of secularization and enchantment.
Vision also harbors a repressed heterogeneity in a second and broader sense, namely
one that points to the phenomenology of the relation between our senses and reality. To
see something may provide a degree of clarity yet also always alerts us to things that we
cannot see. In this sense, seeing is always haunted by the unseen. Indeed, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1997, 2002) suggests that the visible cannot be seen independently of
the invisible, since the invisible provides the necessary ground against which things
stand out as visible (Kelly 2005; Holbraad and Willerslev 2007). A similar argument
has been made by Emmanuel Levinas, who describes how people’s perception of one
another is predicated upon what he calls the Binvisible face^—a form of irreducible
otherness that lies beyond perception and representation (Wyschogrod 2002: 191; Suhr
and Willerslev 2012). Levinas (1979: 244–45) argues that we are ethically and exis-
tentially obliged to preserve the invisibility of the other, since we need otherness to
sustain ourselves. These philosophical interventions point towards an understanding of
the visible and the invisible, not as a dichotomy, but rather as two concomitant poles on
Cont Islam

a continuous scale. The contributions to this special issue explore the political, reli-
gious, and existential dimensions of this ambivalent scale. They do so by focusing on
the relationship between the visible and the invisible in Islam, as quintessentially
captured by the Islamic concept of al-ghayb.

Seven contributions, three themes

Amira Mittermaier’s article describes the role of invisible and spiritual forces in the
Egyptian uprising, and how a particular video recording of a neon-colored ghostly
horseman in the midst of political demonstrations gave rise to debates about whether
the revolution was driven by human, divine, or demonic forces. Maria Louw, in her
contribution, also describes the unexpected and even unwanted piercing of the invisible
into people’s ordinary lives. Set in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, among Muslims who
consider themselves to be at the margins of the Muslim world and hence only
Bsuperficially Islamized,^ Louw’s contribution describes how the haunting of religious
dream omens transforms people’s choices and self-perceptions.
The affective presence of the invisible also plays a decisive role among the Danish
Pakistani Sufis described in the article by Mikkel Rytter, but in this case the devotees
are strongly desiring, longing for these experiences of the invisible. Rytter describes
how these Sufis in Denmark congregate around what is claimed to be one of the last
remaining hairs of the Prophet Muhammad, and how such material traces can be
vehicles of devotion in an increasingly Islamophobic Europe for cultivating experi-
ences of being close to the divine. Paulo Pinto’s article shows how, in a similar way, a
Sufi order or tariqa in pre-civil war Syria attempts to establish direct experiences of
the invisible world of God. Yet here they use a roundabout technique that is remi-
niscent of negative theology, gradually revealing the divine through mystification
and concealment. Such roundabout techniques are not necessary for the hidden Sufis
reported by the Pakistani informants in Ida Sofie Matzen’s article. While these hidden
Sufis are invisible to normal human beings, al-ghayb is the level of reality through
which they govern the world, from the smallest social events to global geopolitics,
according to the law of God.
This emphasis on al-ghayb as a source of power is shared by the Indonesian
exorcist, Kyai Muzakkin, described by Nils Bubandt. Kyai Muzakkin runs a
boarding school for the invisible spirits that he previously excorcized from mentally
disturbed patients. Under pressure from modernists as well as from orthodox
Muslims who are equally critical of traditional healing, the Kyai Muzakkin legiti-
mizes his practice by consistently portraying the spirits of the invisible realm (alam
gaib, Indonesian) as resources and tools akin to modern technology. While the
healer in Bubandt’s paper draws heavily on traditional Islam for his engagement
with the modern world, Christian Suhr describes the work of a Muslim healer in
Denmark who specializes in exorcising jinn spirits and who advocates a strict
separation between the domain of humans and the realm of al-ghayb. Nevertheless,
this produces a number of ethical and epistemological dilemmas for the healer, who
in order to heal also has to see into the invisible interior of his patients, while
simultaneously guarding against the dangers associated with all forays into the
domain of al-ghayb.
 Cont Islam

Three contradictions in particular are highlighted by the articles: 1) the fraught

relationship between invisibility and hypervisibility in specific political contexts,
particularly when it comes to Islam; 2) the fraught relationship between omniscience
and partiality that gives rise to all manner of doubt amid dreams of certainty; and 3) the
fraught relationship between intangibility and technology—the problem of how one
accesses the inaccessible. Hypervisibility, partiality and technology are thematic do-
mains where the contributions overlap in their site-specific analyses of the ambivalent
poetics and politics of al-ghayb. We will briefly outline the three themes in turn before
spelling out, in the conclusion, our approach to how one might approach invisibility,
methodologically and analytically, in the social sciences.

Theme one: hypervisibility and the politics of invisibility

At a historical juncture where the political and discursive cleavage between Bthe West^
and the Muslim world is as pronounced as ever, Islam is a particularly interesting case
through which to analyze the ambivalent relationship between visible and invisible
worlds. As a religious framework, Islam offers its adherents a long and rich tradition of
relating to the invisible, including theological and philosophical writings, mystical
texts, and a wide range of artistic, devotional, and bodily practices that aim to cultivate
the presence of the invisible world of God in the believer’s heart and mind (Mahmood
2005; Hirschkind 2006; Marks 2010). Since the realm of the invisible in Islam is
always embedded in specific socio-economic and political contexts, it is also always
surrounded by suspicion and skepticism. Claims to see or know the invisible domain of
al-ghayb are often regarded as highly dangerous and associated with moral illnesses
such as heresy (shirk) and arrogance (kibr), which threaten to contaminate the pious
believer (Bubandt 2014a; Suhr 2014, 2015). A traditional Moroccan shaykh quoted by
Pandolfo (1997: 142) eloquently describes the dangers of dealing with invisible spirits
through Quranic recitations: Bunlike what happens with X rays, we cannot see the jinns
directly. [I] can only guess their shape in smoke, or in the shadows [khayal]... There
must always be a wasita, an intermediary, a link, a term between: for if the jinns
appeared right in front of me... I would be seized by madness.^
Invisibility exists not only as a theological concern within Islam, but also as a
political concern about Islam. Recent geopolitics have thus produced Islam as a
problem of both visibility and invisibility. Globally highlighted events like the terror
attacks in New York and Washington, Bali, London, Mumbai and Paris—just to
mention a few—have motivated a global and highly visually mediated BWar against
Terror^ (Zizek 2002). This has been accompanied by a rise and spread of radical
Islamic movements such as Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and ISIS, whose visible acts of
terror are in sharp contrast to their clandestine existence. The result is a world
characterized by risk, uncertainty and mistrust (Beck 2002), in which hypervisibility
and invisibility constantly shape each other.
Muslim minority communities in Europe and America have become the target of
government surveillance programs intended to prevent future terror, which paradoxi-
cally only serve to fuel suspicions about invisible Bconspiratorial spaces^ (Werbner
2009) and about the hidden semantics of the public utterances of Muslim politicians or
religious leaders accused of Bspeaking with two tongues^ (Rytter 2013). The
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paradoxical combination of rational techniques of surveillance and fears of religious

subversion are not restricted to the West. States and governments in predominantly
Muslim countries also have a long tradition of regulating the religious activities of
different groups such as the Sufi orders in Atatürk’s secular Turkey, the Ahmadiyyah in
Indonesia or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The more attempts are made to make
congregations and religious practices visible and transparent, the more threatening their
hidden and unseen qualities seem to become.
The issue of invisibility has also come to play a key role in the way Islam and
Muslims are represented in Western politics, media and scholarly discourse. Islam is
often identified as the cause of a wide variety of problems including violent religious
fundamentalism, the suppression of women, female mutilation, forced marriage, rapid
population increase, or high crime and unemployment rates in the social housing areas
of European cities—just to mention some. In addressing these problems, scholars and
political commentators compete to solve the Briddle of Islam^ (Jacobs 2008). The aim
is not only to deal with concrete social challenges, but also an orientalist fascination and
a curiosity to move Bbeyond the veil^ and to expose the hidden and unknown of Islam
(Said 2003). Islamic clothing (hijab, jilbab, burqa, etc.) that conceals the human body
has throughout Europe—and in secular Muslim states like Turkey—become a potent
symbol in discussions of Muslim presence and visibility in the public sphere (Moors
2009; Fernando 2010; Fadil 2011). Concealment has in this way become a problem
with a distinctly Muslim form at the same time that Islam and Muslims have become
hypervisible through projects of surveillance, in media discourses, and in academic
research on Muslims (Khawaja 2011; Rytter and Pedersen 2014).
Hypervisibility is not globally homogenous, however. The issue of invisibility and
its relation to power, knowledge, and desire has taken many cultural and historical
shapes, both within and beyond the Muslim world. Nation-state politics have created a
plurality of different structural conditions and ways of organizing secularity and
religion. For this reason, disaggregation and recognition of the specificity of local
sociopolitical conditions are needed. Each of the contributions in this issue responds to
this challenge by focusing on the Islamic term al-ghayb among Muslims in particular
social and political contexts, in countries as varied as Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia,
Kyrgyzstan, and Denmark.
The modernization project of the Syrian state before the civil war was partly based
on the establishment of a secret service tasked with gathering information on political
and religious activities. In this environment, after the establishment of the Baath regime
in 1963, Sufi religiosity became an alternative to state-sanctioned religious practices.
Pinto’s article in this volume describes how the hierarchical structure of closed Sufi
brotherhoods (turuq) that were accessible only through initiation protected their mem-
bers from the intrusive gaze of the Syrian state. In this context, Pinto argues that secrecy
and mystical knowledge were established, not by hiding or withholding information,
but rather through its hypercirculation, centered around experiential paradoxes and
embodied idioms.
Similarly, Bubandt situates his study of spiritual healing within the recent political
history of the Indonesian state. During New Order rule (1966–1998), Indonesia was
governed by a modernist, secular political ethos that saw local beliefs in ancestors,
spirits and the mystical traditions as a hindrance to development. In the late 1980s and
1990s, a time when standardized, pious and scripturalist versions of Islam became
 Cont Islam

hegemonic in the country, any engagement with the world of jinn and al-ghayb became
not merely backward, pre-modern, but also, by political default, increasingly un-
Islamic. Suspicious to New Order secularists and orthodox Muslims alike, Kyai
Muzakkin’s boarding school for jinn spirits seeks to carve out a third space by
appealing to the political magic of modern technology within Indonesian development
thought.
In her study from Lahore in Pakistan, Matzen brings attention to the Bcosmological
activism^ of deceased, hidden Sufi saints. The tradition of Sufism is visible in the numerous
shrines that dominate rural and urban landscapes. But in recent years, these shrines have
been targeted by bombing campaigns from Islamist groups. Politically marginalized, the
Sufi adherents interviewed by Matzen nevertheless have grandiose ideas about the impor-
tance and influence of occult Sufi masters on worldly politics. The Sufi notion that
geopolitics is the epiphenomenon of hidden forces may be esoteric, but it is also ironically
reminiscent of the way the global politics of transparency itself is produced through
conspiracy and concealment.
Rytter suggests that the appearance of a hair of the Prophet Muhammad in a suburb
of Copenhagen is constitutive of an alternative subaltern public sphere in Danish
society. Danish media and politics have been dominated by harsh criticism of Muslim
minorities since the late 1990s. In the wake of the Bcartoon crisis^ of 2005–2006
(Klausen 2009; Hervik 2011), public and political discourse have been infused with a
Bfreedom of speech fundamentalism^ in which everything to do with Muslim religi-
osity and practices of everyday life has been subjected to an endless public process of
examination, articulation and discussion. This drive for transparency, ironically, also
helped to shape an environment of harassment, racism and Islamophobia (Bangstad
2014). In this political climate, the religious relic of a hair made the Prophet Bpresent in
absence^ and became the focus for a subaltern public sphere that embraced religiosity
and spirituality. Suhr’s analysis of jinn exorcism among neo-orthodox Muslims in
Denmark highlights another aspect of the same alternative public sphere. Danish
Muslims are not simply patients of the welfare and public health system. They also
turn to religious healers in their quest for solace from the numerous problems, including
those of an occult nature, that confront Muslim immigrants in secular Danish society.
The invisible seems particularly pregnant with trouble and potential in times of
political turbulence and upheaval. As pointed out by Mittermaier in her contribution,
the turmoil of the Egyptian revolution opened the gates to the invisible world of al-
ghayb in politically significant ways. The ghostly appearance of the Bgreen horseman^
in the midst of demonstrations was interpreted as a political sign, yet it also produced a
cleavage between those who accept and those who deny the possibility of seeing into
the invisible world. Similarly, Louw’s informants in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek use
signs and omens appearing in dreams to gain insight into and direction for their
everyday lives. Crucial decisions and vital conjunctures of life trajectories take form
in ongoing interpretations and discussions of dreams. The invisible domain plays a
significant role in a time of personal change and political transformation, when crucial
decisions have to be made.
All the articles of this special issue demonstrate that the issue of invisibility and the
domain of al-ghayb need to be understood in relation to the historical, socio-economic and
political contexts that often work to make particular Muslim groups or practices hypervisible.
Yet, the articles also explore how doubt and invisibility always lurk in the shadows
Cont Islam

of the visible display of politics, and how the boundaries between the visible and
invisible world are politically constituted, yet without being politically overdetermined.

Theme two: partial visions, doubt and the invisible

Donna Haraway (1991) has forcefully argued that vision in positivist science operates
under a specific conceit, namely the idea that vision is deterritorialized and comes from
a non-place outside, and at a distance from, the phenomenon gazed upon. According to
Haraway, the God trick of scientific discourse hides the fact that our vision is always
partial and situated. Hence human vision does not grant access to an objective view
from nowhere. Rather, vision is situated and partial, a necessary result of the physicality
of bifocal primate seeing.
The realm of the invisible is haunted by the same dreams and restrictions. On the one
hand, al-ghayb is the domain of God, and dreams of al-ghayb are dreams of the
ultimate spirit view from nowhere (Mittermaier 2011; Suhr 2015). At the same time,
that ultimate spirit view is often one that human beings are on principle debarred from
having, a necessary consequence of human frailty and failing. The criticism that
Haraway launches against the God trick of modern science also haunts all claims to
seeing al-ghayb among Muslims. Since al-ghayb is the domain of God, all claims of
full insight are as suspicious as they are fascinating.
As the contributions to this issue show, potential omniscience and partial insight are
constant companions in the human engagement with al-ghayb. Promising the absolute,
but haunted by the partial, al-ghayb is suffused by doubt—the second central theme in
the ethnographic analyses of this special issue (see also Bubandt 2014a, 2016). Louw
shows in her article how doubt is a crucial dimension of Muslim belief in Kyrgyzstan: a
consequence of the political history of the region as well as of a Sufi aversion to
assertions of certitude (see also Louw 2007). Pinto in his contribution highlights how
revelation and mystification coexist in the two Sufi brotherhoods he studied in Syria, as
they seek to inculcate access to al-ghayb through contradiction and obfuscation.
Ambivalence about the ontological status of the jinn spirit that they seek to evict from
the bodies of their patients is also central for the exorcists studied by both Bubandt and
Suhr, despite their very different positions in Islam. Abu Bilal, the healer studied by
Suhr, seeks to exorcize the jinn from the body of his patients by conjuring Ba total
world of vision and knowledge to which the patients’ and the jinns’ limited and partial
perspective must succumb.^ The montage-style readings from the Quran seek to ensure
this conjuring, but do so in the knowledge of the imperfection of all human insight into
these matters, including the insight of the healer himself. Kyai Muzakkin, the healer
studied by Bubandt, performs his healing practices in full awareness of the doubts of
his Indonesian contemporaries. He seeks to vindicate his own engagement with the
invisible by comparing it to modern technology, ambivalently making use of the
mystique and alienation of this same technology.
Rytter in his contribution discusses the historical status of relics in Islam, and how
such material Babjects^ make the beholders vulnerable to critique and contestation by
both fellow Muslims and non-Muslims. Nevertheless, Rytter has chosen to Bbracket the
doubt^ of some of his informants and their surroundings in order to pursue the creative
potentiality of the hair and how it is believed to enlighten the hearts and homes of
 Cont Islam

people who gets in touch with it. Matzen to some extent does the same in her article, as
she explores the rationale and logic—we could call it the Bcosmo-logic^—of her
devoted interlocutors and their ideas of the global activism of hidden Sufis and the
unity of the world.
Finally, Mittermaier in her contribution calls for a broader anthropological sensitiv-
ity to doubt, contradiction, and ambivalence. She argues that ethnographies of al-ghayb
may provide a template for anthropology in general—a position which is in line with
the overall ambition of this special issue (see also Bubandt 2014a; Suhr 2015). The
doubt and skepticism that suffuse the seven ethnographic cases arise from the
theological emphasis on the ultimate unknowability of al-ghayb within the Islamic
tradition, but they also reflect the ontological uncertainties of the current moment. The
cases suggest that the doubts and paradoxes cultivated by mystical Islam for its own
theological reasons may be exactly what gives the tradition cachet in a
world governed as much by conspiracy as by transparency.

Theme three: rituals and technologies of the invisible

The final theme traversing the articles of this special issue concerns the fundamental
technical question of how to access the invisible, the domain of al-ghayb. The
ethnographic cases suggest that specific technologies may be employed to create a
momentary opening onto an otherwise inaccessible Elsewhere. The panoply of means
and techniques employed to access the domain of the invisible includes rituals (Pinto),
recitations (Suhr), dreams (Louw), sign divination (Matzen), bodily objects (Rytter) or
modern media technologies such as videos and YouTube (Bubandt, Mittermaier).
In Suhr’s article, the healer’s recitation of the Quran has the potential for excess and
transgression. But in the critical ritual moment where the healer evokes the power of al-
ghayb, he himself becomes vulnerable to attacks by evil jinn, the devil’s whispering
(waswas), and contamination from moral illnesses such as shakk (doubt), shirk (here-
sy), and kibr (arrogance). In Pinto’s study, aspiring Sufi followers strive to gain gnostic
knowledge and spiritual advancement through prolonged self-subjection and participa-
tion in esoteric rituals and sessions of zikr (commemoration of God). Spiritual advance-
ment, however, can only take place under the strict guidance of their shaykh, who
works to ensure that the seeking traveler is not lost and does not give in to the
temptations of this world or to those of the unseen world of al-ghayb.
In Louw’s analysis, it is dreams that become the medium for access. Believers can
perform certain rituals (istikhara) and actively seek answers in dreams, but more often
the ayan come unexpected, given from BElsewhere^ (Edgar and Henig 2010;
Mittermaier 2012; Waltorp 2017). In this respect, dreams bridge the seen and the
unseen; they are experienced and applied both as means and as ends. For Matzen’s
interlocutors in Pakistan, the signs and examples of the power of the hidden Sufis and
the omnipresence of God are not restricted to dreams: they can be found everywhere in
the physical world by the devoted practitioner, if he or she learns to Bsee with their
heart.^ Rytter shows how standing in front of the hair of the Prophet, or even drinking
water that has been used to wash the hair, are believed to enable a connection to the
divine among Sufis in Denmark. Obviously, the hair is not the Prophet, but it is also not
not the Prophet. It is for this reason that the hair is believed to emanate baraka
Cont Islam

(blessings) and bring religious experience and affect to people who come in contact
with it.
Rituals, dreams and sympathetic magic are tried-and-true means of accessing
the unseen. The means to access the realm of the invisible may however also have
surprisingly modern sources. The ghost-rider in Mittermaier’s article only be-
comes the topic of intense discussion as he is captured on a video recording
during one of the demonstrations. Bubandt suggests that when the mystical healer
Kyai Muzakkin portrays his jinn spirits as a form of technology, he appeals to a
general modern tech-gnosis, our shared mystification with modern technology.
These cases point to the magical efficacy of modern technology, to how technol-
ogy is indeed essentially magical. As a result, the mystique and reality of spirits
may also be augmented rather than merely attenuated by modern technology
(Bubandt 2012, 2017).
The magic of geopolitics is similarly augmented when Matzen’s embattled Sufi
informants in Pakistan see the actions of hidden Sufi masters behind the hidden
actions of the intelligence services and of elite anti-terror teams. The rational
technologies, the economic transparency, and the scopic regimes of the contempo-
rary world fuel, rather than quell, the mystique of the unseen, however counterin-
tuitively for secular modernity’s account of itself (West and Sanders 2003). The
hold of the visible world upon us often rests on its invisible, esoteric qualities. As
anthropologists and others have begun to show empirically, modernity has its own
magic (LiPuma 2001; Meyer and Pels 2003), transparency its forms of concealment
(West and Sanders 2003), rationality its own mystique (Kapferer 2003), capitalism
its peculiar millenarianism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000), and democracy its own
sorcery (Bubandt 2006). We suggest in this special issue that these invisible forces
are more than metaphors in and allegories of the modern world; they are a
constituent part of its dynamics and appeal. To be modern, we have to be mystics.

Towards a methodology of the invisible

Social science may always have been about the invisible realm. After all, social
structure, cultural beliefs, mythical narratives, and kinship systems are as invisible
as magical forces, animal spirits, and ancestors. We propose the re-animation of
this old interest in the invisible dimensions of social life, all the better to
understand the contemporary world. As a form of excessive invisibility, al-ghayb
raises questions about the limits of optical epistemological mastery, also within
social analysis. This special issue therefore complements its empirical ambition to
better understand the poetics and politics of invisibility in contemporary Islam
with a methodological and epistemological ambition, namely to re-evaluate how
we may best approach the study of invisibility. A number of challenges lie ahead:
challenges which we pose without claiming to solve. How can we approach
unseen worlds such as that of al-ghayb empirically in our research in ways that
do justice to invisibility and do not domesticate it within the orthodoxies of
ocular-centrism? In what ways might an appreciation of Bother^ understandings
of invisibility, Islamic or otherwise, inform a rethinking of the role of the unseen
as a trope in social analysis? And, finally, how may an analysis of such modalities
 Cont Islam

of the unseen engage broader debates within contemporary social theory about the
politics of vision?
This special issue seeks to begin answering these questions by bringing anthro-
pology, religious and Islamic studies into common conversation to explore how the
poetics and politics of the unseen in Islam may speak to the contemporary world of
politics and to anthropological modes of enquiring into it. The case-studies, con-
ducted in different socio-economic and political contexts in Indonesia, Egypt,
Denmark, Pakistan, Syria and Kyrgyzstan, illustrate how the messy, complex
realities of Blived Islam^ stand in gross contrast to the simplified portrayals of
Muslims and Islam in public media or by religious authorities. The cases suggest
that global, national, and local forms of visual authority all harbor repressed
heterogeneities: visions of the world beyond that which is immediately visible.
They suggest that while world views may seek to mandate Bwhat can or ought to be
seen^ from beyond the sociopolitical limits of the visible, the invisible always
asserts its presence—in counter-visions, in ghostly appearances, in hidden conspir-
acies, and in possibilities hitherto unseen. From beyond the limits of the visible, this
repressed heterogeneity co-constitutes the visible world, augments its appeal, and
shapes its future course.
A major feature of the world since 2001 has been the rise of an acute political
concern with making the hidden threats associated with Islamic fundamentalism
visible, through a variety of technical and discursive means, and in the process
reconstituting what Bthe West^ and BIslam^ mean. This political trend in the
decades since 9/11—to make certain religious practices hypervisible, yet simulta-
neously to promote fearful imaginaries of invisible, conspiratorial spaces—shapes
the ethnographies of all seven cases in this collection. The contributions emphasize
the importance of paying attention to the repressed heterogeneity of globally,
nationally, and locally inflected empires of vision. They do so not to celebrate
mystical withdrawal or political quietism, but precisely to understand the dynamics
of the world of visible politics.
What is underscored by these analyses of hypervisibility and invisibility is not
opposition, but co-constitution and paradox. In the lived Islam of practicing Mus-
lims, the invisible realm of al-ghayb is not in opposition to the visible world.
Rather, each is the condition of possibility of the other. The articles collected here
therefore stress how the paradoxical poetics of al-ghayb speaks directly to the
politics of vision, co-constituting it rather than merely forming its outer limit. This
point, too, we suggest, has applicability beyond the world of Islam. As anthropol-
ogists and social scientists in general have pointed out for some time, the trans-
portability of cultural and religious forms depends on their ability to speak to
contemporary political worlds (Horton 1975; Csordas 2009). The poetic emphasis
on paradoxical, hidden dynamics gained through mystical, personal insight that
characterizes the forms of Islam described in this special issue may exactly be what
makes them so appealing in the contemporary political world that to such a large
extent seems also to be driven by paradox, mystique and conspiracy.
The contributions presented here, finally, suggest the need to take ocular-centrism
and the hegemony of vision less seriously. While we describe the historical impor-
tance of the empire of the gaze, we suggest we should not believe in its exclusive
omnipotence. This re-examination entails reflecting on the very analytical tools of
Cont Islam

social science itself. The power of the invisible realm of al-ghayb reminds students of
the social world, as Amira Mittermaier notes in her contribution,

that seeing does not always equal knowing, that Bhaving been there and having
observed it^ does not mean one understands what is really going on, that some
see more (or differently) than others, and that we ultimately share a fundamental
condition with our interlocutors: we are all immersed in the Unknown.

There is plenty of flotsam and jetsam in anthropology and social science to draw
upon to attune ourselves better to the indeterminate power of the invisible realm: from
classical studies of the magic of coral gardens on the Trobriand islands (Malinowski
1935) or witchcraft among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard 1937) to more recent analyses
of the increasingly occult dynamics of financial markets and our unnoticed connection
to animals of all kinds in an age of extinction (Graeber 2001; Ho 2009; Kohn 2013,
Tsing 2015; Tsing et al. 2017. Qualitative science consists, among other things, in
constantly learning to notice once again what has been unseen. In that sense, social
science has always been the study of al-ghayb, of the poetics and politics of the unseen.
The contributions to this issue seek to demonstrate one way in which we can renew
social science so as to continue the study of realms unseen.

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