CHAPTER TWO

THE ‘RELIGIONATED’ BODY:

FATWAS AND BODY PARTS1

Roxanne D. Marcotte

If we accept claims that the body is important for one’s self-experience

of others, that it plays a role in the production and reflection of social
meanings, and that it is significant as the subject and object of power
relations,2 then we can legitimately explore the meanings that bodies
possess in particular religious traditions. Nobody would deny that
religious traditions impart particular meanings to social and individual
bodies. We can look at some of the issues that arise with meanings that
are associated with Muslim bodies to illustrate the importance of the
body in Islam as a reflection of social meanings and its significance as
the object of power relations.
In order to investigate how the body is imagined in Islam, it may
be useful, for our purpose, to resurrect an obsolete mid-17th century
verb in order to discuss the specific religious ontological statuses that
are attributed to persons and bodies: to ‘religionate’ literally means
‘to make religious’.3 In the Qur’an, non-Muslim bodies, like those of
the polytheists (mushrik) (Q 9:28), are, from the time of Ibn ‘Abbas
(d. ca. 686–8), considered unclean and ‘impure’ (najes). Contrary to most

1
A draft version of this paper titled ‘Regulating the Muslim body’ was presented
at the ‘Negotiating the Sacred III: Religion, Medicine and the Body’ (2–3 November
2006) conference, held at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research, Australian National
University. I would like to thank especially Professors Vardit Rispler-Chaim, Ebrahim
Moosa, and Khaleel Mohammed for having graciously agreed to read and comment
on an earlier version of this paper and for which I are immensely grateful. It goes
without saying that any infelicities remain mine. Diacritics have been omitted for the
transliteration of Arabic terms.
2
Meredith B. McGuire, ‘Religion and the body: Rematerializing the human body
in the social sciences of religion’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 29,
no. 3, 1990, pp. 283–96.
3
The term was used by Andrew Marvell in his Mr. Smirke, or, The Divine in Mode,
being certain annotations upon the animadversions on the naked truth: together with a
short historical essay concerning general councils, creeds, and impositions, in matters of
religion (1676), cf. Oxford English Dictionary Online 2006, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, http://dictionary.oed.com/ accessed 7 Oct. 2006.
28 roxanne d. marcotte

Sunnis, Zaydis and Twelver Shiites (Iran) have opted for a literal reading
of the Qur’anic verse that requires ritual ablution if one is touched by
a polytheist.4 The concept was also applied by Sunnis to Christians and
Jews to forbid them the sacred enclave of the Great Mosque in Mecca
and later to expel them from the Arabian Peninsula.5
‘Religionated’ bodies are not, however, a phenomenon specific to the
Islamic tradition. Ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews remind us of the sanctity
of God-given bodies when they meticulously collect with tweezers every
scattered pieces of the flesh of Jewish victims of suicide bombings and
consider post-mortems to be a desecration of the Jewish body. Religious
meanings attached to bodies equally determine their fate after death:
the bodies of excommunicated Christians do not rest with their kin
in Christian cemeteries, with similar reservations for Muslims in early
Islamic traditions.
Ethico-religious, social and physical segregation of ‘religionated’
bodies often finds its religious justification in the theological or religio-
legal realms. Meanings attached to bodies in Islam cannot, however, be
fully understood without introducing the Islamic concept of persons
expounded by classical Islamic jurisprudence. While persons may be
defined in a variety of sociological, psychological, anthropological,
philosophical, and even theological manners, in the Islamic (and Judaic)
tradition, this includes a religio-legal dimension.
Classical Islamic jurisprudence was, however, developed in particu-
lar social, political and historical contexts. Some have noted that the
statuses of persons in Islam, and by extension those of their bodies,
were defined within the context of a distinctive ‘cognitive system’ that
is quite different from the cognitive system of contemporary ‘secularised
societies’ that are driven by modern notions of equal rights all citizens
are deemed to possess. The traditional Islamic cognitive system orders
the world in accordance with what some call Islam’s ancient ‘mythical’
construction of reality.6
This socially constructed mythico-historical reality of the origins
of Islam took shaped with the encounter of the revealed truths of the

4
A. Kevin Reinhart, ‘Contamination’, in Jane D. McAuliffe (general ed.), Claude
Gillot et al. (assoc. eds.), Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, 5 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2001, vol. 1,
pp. 410a–412b.
5
Uri Rubin, ‘Jews and Judaism’, in McAuliffe (general ed.), Gillot et al. (assoc. eds.),
Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, pp. 21b–34a.
6
Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam; Common Questions, Uncommon Answers,
Boulder: Westview Press, 1994, pp. 99–100.