Lifeworlds of Islam: The Pragmatics of a Religion

Author: Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Book review by: Sari Hanafi

Published by: Oxford University Press

Year of publication: 2019

Number of pages: 256 

ISBN-13: 9780190280567

How have Muslims historically, and in the present, employed the faith as a practical means by which to foster engaged civic lives, public philosophies, and global networks? This is the main question raised by this book, which examines Islam as a discourse that has served as a guide for a wide range of ideas and movements, not because it has any primordial meaning, nor because it determines human behavior in a specific way; rather, Islam is useful precisely because it lacks such qualities (4).

In three chapters, Mohammed Bamyeh explores the role of Islam in three spheres of practice: social movements, public philosophy, and global orientation. These spheres are the lifeworlds as everyday methods, the pragmatics that sustain its life across vastly different times and spaces. Why lifeworlds? This is a Habermasian phenomenologist concept, analogous to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and to his sociological notion of everyday life.

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Lifeworlds of Islam: The Pragmatics of a Religion