Fabio Vicini
I am Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Verona, Senior Research Associate in the "Quite Aid" Project (https://quietaid.info/), and founder and convener of the EASA Muslim Worlds Network (MSN) (https://easaonline.org/networks/mwn/).
From 2014 to 2020, I was Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Istanbul 29 Mayis University. I also served as an Affiliate Member of the School of Religious Studies at McGill University, Montréal (from 2019 to 2020). Before, I was TÜBITAK Post-doctoral Researcher in Istanbul (from 2013 to 2014) and Research Fellow at BGSMCS, Berlin (2011).
I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from SUM – Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (now Istituto di Scienze Umane e Sociali, Scuola Normale Superiore, Firenze) in 2013. The same year, I was honored with the Malcolm H. Kerr Award in the Social Sciences by MESA. My book "Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey," drawn from that dissertation, has been published in Brill's Social, Economic, and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia Series, edited by Dale F. Eickelman.
Currently, I am supervising a PRIN project (Research project funded by Italy's Ministry of University and Research) on Muslim Albanian communities in Italy, and initiating a new project on Islamic networks connecting Turkey with Central Asia.
My work has been published in various scholarly journals, including Culture and Religion, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Ethnicities, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, La Ricerca Folklorica, and Sociology of Islam. I am now co-editing the '[Oxford] Handbook of Religion in Turkey' (alongside Caroline Tee and Philip Dorroll: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/55832), and a special section dedicated to Divine Presence in Islam for the HAU - Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2024, with Lili Di Puppo).
My work engages in interdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of Anthropology, Islamic studies, and Social Theory. My research interests encompass the Anthropology of Islam; Religion and Secularism in Turkey, the MENA region, and Europe; the relationship between Religion and Modernity; Political Theology; and Ethics. I welcome Ph.D. and postdoctoral students whose research aligns with these themes, particularly focusing on Europe, Turkey, Central Asia, and South-East Asia.
Address: Fabio Vicini
Università di Verona
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane
Palazzo Zorzi-Polfranceschi, piano 1° ala Vipacco, stanza 1.34
From 2014 to 2020, I was Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Istanbul 29 Mayis University. I also served as an Affiliate Member of the School of Religious Studies at McGill University, Montréal (from 2019 to 2020). Before, I was TÜBITAK Post-doctoral Researcher in Istanbul (from 2013 to 2014) and Research Fellow at BGSMCS, Berlin (2011).
I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from SUM – Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (now Istituto di Scienze Umane e Sociali, Scuola Normale Superiore, Firenze) in 2013. The same year, I was honored with the Malcolm H. Kerr Award in the Social Sciences by MESA. My book "Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey," drawn from that dissertation, has been published in Brill's Social, Economic, and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia Series, edited by Dale F. Eickelman.
Currently, I am supervising a PRIN project (Research project funded by Italy's Ministry of University and Research) on Muslim Albanian communities in Italy, and initiating a new project on Islamic networks connecting Turkey with Central Asia.
My work has been published in various scholarly journals, including Culture and Religion, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Ethnicities, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, La Ricerca Folklorica, and Sociology of Islam. I am now co-editing the '[Oxford] Handbook of Religion in Turkey' (alongside Caroline Tee and Philip Dorroll: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/55832), and a special section dedicated to Divine Presence in Islam for the HAU - Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2024, with Lili Di Puppo).
My work engages in interdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of Anthropology, Islamic studies, and Social Theory. My research interests encompass the Anthropology of Islam; Religion and Secularism in Turkey, the MENA region, and Europe; the relationship between Religion and Modernity; Political Theology; and Ethics. I welcome Ph.D. and postdoctoral students whose research aligns with these themes, particularly focusing on Europe, Turkey, Central Asia, and South-East Asia.
Address: Fabio Vicini
Università di Verona
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane
Palazzo Zorzi-Polfranceschi, piano 1° ala Vipacco, stanza 1.34
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Books by Fabio Vicini
‘For the better part of a century, Turkey has been a major center of intellectual, educational, and ethical reform in modern Islam. In this vividly written and theoretically sophisticated book, Fabio Vicini takes readers through a reading of the two most foundational currents in that reform movement, and shows their deep relevance for education, ethics, and civility in the broader Muslim world. This is a must-read book for all students of Islamic affairs.’
Robert W. Hefner, Pardee School of Global Affairs, Boston University
‘Fabio Vicini’s Reading Islam is both methodologically careful and theoretically insightful, reflecting the best qualities of ethnographic writing on the social life of Islam in Turkey. Vicini describes in rich detail the forms of piety and intellectual development encouraged in religious communities active in Turkey. It is certainly refreshing to read an analysis of religious practice that takes seriously the practitioners’ orientation toward transcendence in developing religious knowledge and ethical reasoning.’
Kim Shiveley, Kutztown University
‘This perceptive study of brotherhood, ethics and self-disciplining in religious communities focused on reading Said Nursi’s Risale-i Nur draws attention to aspects of religious tradition hitherto neglected in studies of Turkish Islam. Vicini’s thoughtful analysis engages critically with a large body of contemporary social theory and provides essential new insight into the interiorizing practices of these communities and Islamic piety in general, offering a sympathetic understanding of Muslim life in modern Turkey.’
Martin van Bruinessen, Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, Utrecht University
Edited Special Issues by Fabio Vicini
of intellectual and spiritual maturation (e.g. batin, spiritual growth, intuitional
knowledge and inner awareness) may converge, intersect, and also diverge from
modern epistemologies of the inner self. In doing so, the contributions touch upon
two questions in particular. On the one hand, they discuss the relation between
selfhood and the transcendent, describing not only how the self is built but also
how it is somehow unbuilt in the relationship with the divine: rather than defined
through its ‘inner’ boundaries, the self is seen as emerging continuously on the
background of a wider horizon of existence, that is, the transcendent dimension
of life. On the other hand, the authors highlight the overlaps between notions
belonging to the Islamic tradition and modern discourses on interiority, tracing
out the specific social and micro-political issues that lie behind this entanglement
through key experiential notions such as dhawq, love, imagination, dreams and
visions. In such a way, the papers tell about the strive of translating transcendence
into new forms of sociality which may subvert, substitute or be alternative to
institutionalised, established mundane and also religious forms of interaction and
inter-subjectivity.
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles by Fabio Vicini
Keywords: sociability, Islam, self, community, embodiment.
After an overview of how the secularization thesis has impacted the study of Islam in Europe and Italy, the paper explores the way new generations of Muslims in Northern Italy rediscover and reinterpret Islam through social media and Islamic youth groups. The article relies on interviews with Muslims raised in Italy who were born between the late 1990s and early 2000s as well as on materials drawn from social profiles and online discussion groups of Islamic youth groups that these young Muslims attend. The paper illustrates that, in line with long-standing trajectories within Islamic reformist thought, these “second generation” Muslims aim to live Islam in a more conscious way than their parents and also the Muslims who live in their countries of origin. It finally argues that, as my interlocutors contribute to the definition of an “Italian Islam”, they claim recognition not only for their Muslim identity but also for the possibility of cultivating their Islamic spirituality within the secular-liberal institutional and intellectual environment of contemporary Italy.
‘For the better part of a century, Turkey has been a major center of intellectual, educational, and ethical reform in modern Islam. In this vividly written and theoretically sophisticated book, Fabio Vicini takes readers through a reading of the two most foundational currents in that reform movement, and shows their deep relevance for education, ethics, and civility in the broader Muslim world. This is a must-read book for all students of Islamic affairs.’
Robert W. Hefner, Pardee School of Global Affairs, Boston University
‘Fabio Vicini’s Reading Islam is both methodologically careful and theoretically insightful, reflecting the best qualities of ethnographic writing on the social life of Islam in Turkey. Vicini describes in rich detail the forms of piety and intellectual development encouraged in religious communities active in Turkey. It is certainly refreshing to read an analysis of religious practice that takes seriously the practitioners’ orientation toward transcendence in developing religious knowledge and ethical reasoning.’
Kim Shiveley, Kutztown University
‘This perceptive study of brotherhood, ethics and self-disciplining in religious communities focused on reading Said Nursi’s Risale-i Nur draws attention to aspects of religious tradition hitherto neglected in studies of Turkish Islam. Vicini’s thoughtful analysis engages critically with a large body of contemporary social theory and provides essential new insight into the interiorizing practices of these communities and Islamic piety in general, offering a sympathetic understanding of Muslim life in modern Turkey.’
Martin van Bruinessen, Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, Utrecht University
of intellectual and spiritual maturation (e.g. batin, spiritual growth, intuitional
knowledge and inner awareness) may converge, intersect, and also diverge from
modern epistemologies of the inner self. In doing so, the contributions touch upon
two questions in particular. On the one hand, they discuss the relation between
selfhood and the transcendent, describing not only how the self is built but also
how it is somehow unbuilt in the relationship with the divine: rather than defined
through its ‘inner’ boundaries, the self is seen as emerging continuously on the
background of a wider horizon of existence, that is, the transcendent dimension
of life. On the other hand, the authors highlight the overlaps between notions
belonging to the Islamic tradition and modern discourses on interiority, tracing
out the specific social and micro-political issues that lie behind this entanglement
through key experiential notions such as dhawq, love, imagination, dreams and
visions. In such a way, the papers tell about the strive of translating transcendence
into new forms of sociality which may subvert, substitute or be alternative to
institutionalised, established mundane and also religious forms of interaction and
inter-subjectivity.
Keywords: sociability, Islam, self, community, embodiment.
After an overview of how the secularization thesis has impacted the study of Islam in Europe and Italy, the paper explores the way new generations of Muslims in Northern Italy rediscover and reinterpret Islam through social media and Islamic youth groups. The article relies on interviews with Muslims raised in Italy who were born between the late 1990s and early 2000s as well as on materials drawn from social profiles and online discussion groups of Islamic youth groups that these young Muslims attend. The paper illustrates that, in line with long-standing trajectories within Islamic reformist thought, these “second generation” Muslims aim to live Islam in a more conscious way than their parents and also the Muslims who live in their countries of origin. It finally argues that, as my interlocutors contribute to the definition of an “Italian Islam”, they claim recognition not only for their Muslim identity but also for the possibility of cultivating their Islamic spirituality within the secular-liberal institutional and intellectual environment of contemporary Italy.
The Muslim Worlds Network aims to promote international collaboration and scholarly exchange around the contribution that the anthropology of Islam and Muslim life can offer to the discipline by foregrounding non-Western ontologies and epistemologies. It intends to serve as a forum for exploring how embracing these worlds can generate new theoretical and methodological insights within anthropology and beyond.
The following are some of the questions we hope to think through together:
- What other modes of experiencing and knowing the world have been disclosed during your ethnographic encounters (for instance: experiential knowledge, meditative reflection, revelation through dreaming or visions, theological demonstration, etc.)? To what extent and how did these modes challenge (or had the potential to challenge) your methodological and/or theoretical approach?
- What type of limits and/or potentialities have these modes of experiencing and knowing revealed? For instance, have you felt the secular conditioning of the discipline to be a limit when you wrote about those encounters? Did these modes of experiencing and knowing encourage you to explore new ways of conducting research, thinking, and/or writing?
- How did the encounter with other modes of experiencing and knowing the world resound, challenge, or unsettle your usual way of viewing the world as a trained anthropologist, or simply as someone in search of knowledge? Did this encounter invite you to rethink how “knowing” is usually understood in anthropology and beyond?
- Did this same encounter with other forms of knowledge lead you to reimagine what fieldwork is? How have you approached your interlocutors’ modes of experiencing and viewing the world? Have you been inspired to follow their spiritual, “vertical” journeys? What has been your own journey during fieldwork and after it?
- What forms of “being” have you encountered during your fieldwork (in the form of your interlocutors, invisible realms, the divine, God, transcendence, your own self, etc.)? Relatedly, did your fieldwork experience reveal other dimensions of your own being?
di “tradizioni discorsive” di Talal Asad con la nozione foucaultiana di “tecniche del sé”, ha ispirato quella che Filippo Osella e Benjamin Soares hanno definito una “svolta pietista” (2009: 10) in antropologia, animando il dibattito nelle scienze sociali per due decenni. Alcuni studiosi (es. Pandolfo 2007; Schielke 2009), in dialogo critico con il modello teorico di Mahmood, hanno spostato lo sguardo etnografico dalla formazione etica di soggettività pietiste all’esplorazione di ambivalenze, tensioni e incoerenza come elementi costitutivi dei legami fra Islam e vita quotidiana. Più recentemente, altri studiosi e studiose hanno dato visibilità a modalità d’incontro con la trascendenza divina che
si discostano dalle correnti dell’Islam salafita e/o che non possono essere compresi attraverso il “paradigma di coltivazione del sé” (Mittermaier 2011:5). Ed è proprio all’interno di questa seconda linea di ricerca che si situa Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey di Fabio Vicini, una raffinata etnografia delle pratiche di lettura e riflessione meditativa che animano due comunità religiose della
Turchia contemporanea: Suffa e Gülen. L’idea centrale è che l’analisi di queste pratiche intellettuali imponga non solo di attraversare i confini, soggiacenti al senso comune e alla tradizione epistemologica moderna occidentale, fra religione e scienza, fra metafisica e riflessione intellettuale, ma anche di ricollocare la trascendenza a pieno titolo nell’ambito dell’analisi sociale.
This panel investigates how the divine and the spiritual become present in Muslim life by opening spaces of individual or collective reflection, transformation, and imagination of alternative views of human life, hope, and future. In the last few decades, the anthropology of religion has dedicated particular attention to processes of human mediation in the articulation of the relationship between immanence and transcendence. While these studies have been fundamental in renewing the field, in the name of mediation, they have underplayed religiously specific ways of conceiving transcendence and human interactions with it. On the other hand, whereas the ontological turn has paved the way for the discipline to engage with non-Western ontologies, religious traditions with a strong theological background have been only tangential, if not absent, in these debates. Religious ontologies, with their theological and epistemological underpinnings (i.e. specific views of the human self, senses, and other organs that allow for connecting with transcendence) have remained largely underexplored. In this light, the panel embraces the ontological turn's spirit of re-establishing anthropology as "a theory-practice of permanent thought decolonialisation" (Viveiros de Castro 2014) by inviting papers that will take these Muslim worlds, including their metaphysical and philosophical traditions, as offering not simply anthropological data but alternative insights into the nature of the divine and its relationship with human life. In the spirit of EASA 2022 general theme, the panel calls for papers illustrating how Muslim worlds prevalently structured upon a specific articulation of immanence/transcendence generate imaginaries of the present, past, and future that are ingrained in views of radical hope/transformation, either individually or collectively articulated, that diverge from those proposed by capitalist modernity.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Islamic Modernities and Modern Muslim Subjectivities
Dietrich Jung and Kirstine Sinclair
1Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Theories, Concepts, and First Findings
Dietrich Jung
2Decolonizing Body and Mind: Physical Activity and Subject Formation in Colonial Algeria
Jakob Krais
3Daily Ritual, Mission, and Transformation of the Self: The Case of Tablighi Jamaat
Zacharias Pieri
4Hasan al-Banna and the Modern Muslim Self: Subjectivity Formation and the Search for an Islamic Order in Early Twentieth Century Egypt
Dietrich Jung and Ahmed Abou El Zalaf
5“Worship is Not Everything:” Volunteering and Muslim Life in Modern Turkey
Fabio Vicini
6The Modernity of Neo-traditionalist Islam
Mark Sedgwick
7An Islamic University in the West and the Question of Modern Authenticity
Kirstine Sinclair
8The Muslimist Self and Fashion: Implications for Politics and Markets
Neslihan Cevik
9Social Class, Piety, and the Formation of the Singaporean Muslim: Exploring Educational Choices in a Highly Regulated Society
Kamaludeen Mohamad Nasir
10Imaginaries of the Good Life from the Egyptian Revolution in 2011: Pride and Agency
Line Mex-Jørgensen
11“When I’m on the Mic Everything is Ḥarām:” Narrative Identity and Modern Subjectivities among American Rap Artists
Philipp Bruckmayr
Concluding Remarks: Modern Muslim Subjectivities, Islamic Modernities, and the Multiple Modernities Thesis
Dietrich Jung and Kirstine Sinclair
Index
The articles of this volume offer intriguing and origi-nal thoughts about the appropriate economic system for a Muslim society. Some of the concepts are based right away on socialism, while others call for a genu-ine, non-Western Islamic ‘third way’ between com-munism and capitalism. In fact, political reality has forced the secular Left to grapple with the response of Islamic movements to poverty and injustice. The vol-ume therefore also includes useful insights into the Left’s reaction to this political challenge.
The articles cover a wide range of world regions, not only the Middle East and Turkey, but also the Far East and North Africa, with a time span ranging from the late 19th century to the present. In addition, the reader is also introduced to economic concepts of early Islam and their textual sources.
La monografia L’impero mediatico di Fethullah Gülen, che include saggi di autori turchi, italiani e statunitensi ed è la prima in Italia sul tema, intende analizzare il movimento Gülen e il suo rapporto con i media (tv, stampa, film), nell’uso che il movimento ne fa sia per la propaganda della sua ideologia e del proprio messaggio tanto religioso quanto politico, sia per la costruzione della propria immagine tanto al suo interno quanto nella sua rappresentazione all’esterno. Attraverso un’analisi dei suoi media la monografia offre uno sguardo sul movimento, sul suo conflitto con l’Akp e più in generale sui media in Turchia e gli sviluppi più recenti dello scenario politico turco.
Saggi di Ruşen Çakır, Joshua Carney, Ragıp Duran, Joshua Hendrick, Lea Nocera, Semih Sakallı, Maria Concetta Tedesco, Fabio Vicini
2013 Review committee:
Andrew Flibbert, Trinity College (Chair)
Linda Darling, University of Arizona
Ali Mirsepassi, New York University
The paper does so by illustrating how beyond representing a model to be individually emulated by pious Muslims willing to discipline themselves to a righteous life, the Prophet’s exemplary conduct is also at the core of inter-communitarian practices whose final goal is to foster amity, solidarity, and brotherhood in religion. The sociological notion of brotherhood is used in the paper to soften the rigid link between discipline and subjectivity construction that is often established within the anthropological scholarship on Islam. Rather than simply marking the model of an idealized Muslim conduct, within the Suffa community, the sunna is indeed part of a broader pattern for inter-subjective engagement that my interlocutors saw as having also shaped the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and his companions in the early times of Islam. In this regard, the case of the Suffa community points to the way, beyond self-fashioning processes, in which Prophetic piety has historically shaped and continue to sustain the collective dimension of Muslim life.
For people at Suffa reading the Risale implies to engage in an inductive kind of exercise based on meditative reflection (tefekkür) from which they conclude that God must exist given the pre-ordered and perfect functioning of existence. The paper points to how the continuous reliance on scientific descriptions of the natural world in reading meetings of the community (e.g. the fact that man’s memory is contained in a gland as big as a nut) is a way to disclose new hermeneutical openings that allow for both integrating science in religious discourse and reversing the materialistic assumptions upon which modernist discourse was formulated.
Addressing more specifically the issue of what epistemological questions arise from attempts to relate contemporary science to the scriptural tradition of Islam, the paper points to how the inclusion of a modernist epistemological emphasis on reasoning and science within reading practices of the Risale is accompanied by a heuristic reversal of the human-centered conclusions that are drawn from such modernist emphasis. In this direction, it sheds light on the combination of modern and long-standing religious forms of intellectual engagement in Islam.
Drawing on ethnographic material from within the community, the paper highlights lines of both continuity and rupture between the reading-related intellectual exercise of tefekkür and the Islamic pedagogical tradition. I will argue that my interlocutors’ semantic and practical redefinition of tefekkür as a reason-based exercise represents an attempt to come to terms with modern epistemological and hermeneutical discourses, and that their redefinition of reading as a technique for keeping in pace with the times should be understood in a similar way. However, I will also show that Nur reflective exercises still rely on a specific “sensitivity of the heart” that matches with the ethical sensibility of Islamic tradition. Although recent anthropological studies of Islam often stress a dichotomy between religious-embodied practices and secular-intellectual practices, I argue that Nur reflective exercises cannot be easily accommodated within such a framework. While acknowledging that embodiment processes have an important place in religious education, the paper uses the Nur case to suggest that more attention to reading and other reflection-based techniques can enrich our understanding of religious formation and ethical thinking within the Islamic tradition and beyond.
Based on ethnographic research and interviews with young volunteers and workers of these two organizations, the paper elucidates how Turkish Muslim STKs deal with Western legal traditions and the related market-driven political system in ambivalent ways. It will show that the accommodation of Muslim long-standing values with Western modern liberal traditions takes place through some controversial compromises, which are revealed by the difficulties these organizations have in dealing with contested issues such as gay rights and abortion. Moreover, through their reference to Islamic ideals they implicitly disapprove of liberal democratic society's stress on individualism, as well as of what they perceive as capitalism's inclination toward reproducing social divisiveness, inequality and unhappiness.
While elucidating these aspects the presentation aims to show how by recovering long-standing ideals of justice and solidarity Muslim STKs go beyond binary distinctions of an alleged purely secularist versus an Islamist vision that are still reproduced both in some important scholarships and within Turkish society itself. With their call for a revitalization of monotheistic religions' dynamism and stress on the common good, these organizations contribute to the remoralization of the public discourse in ways that are not necessarily in contradiction with secular demands, and rather engage with modern liberal traditions by claiming confrontation on the common ground of universal notions of human solidarity and justice.
In particular, I will show how the practice of tefekkür although thought in opposition to ecstatic exercises such as Sufi dhikr, is anyway based on an essentially mystic vision of existence, structured around the dichotomy between manifest (zahiri) this-world reality and the true (batini) reality of God. While in their discourses community brothers might wink with complicity at modern psychological discourses and scientific language in general, and put a modernist emphasis on reasoning rather than on ecstatic practices, nevertheless their reflective method aims to make people gain awareness of the true Reality laying behind the veil of this-world appearances. Quoting both authoritative brothers' arguments and their reinterpretation by ordinary participants to community meetings, I will illustrate how during such meetings Nur brothers reflect upon their lives through the dense metaphors and poetical images offered by this cosmological framework.
Süresi: 10 Hafta