The aesthetics of comparativeness in Clifford Geertz’s Islam Observed

Interdisciplinarity and comparativeness in studying complex phenomena, such as religion, proved to be of very crucial utility either as methodology or as analytical model. In Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz demonstrated the extent to which cultural anthropology can recount and revisit social formulations of religions and thus reopen new horizons and positionalities in understanding and perceiving religion practices by employing a comparative methodology that combines disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and literature. Geertz’s comparative perspective in tracing the foundational formation of Islam in two distinct geographical contexts (i.e. Indonesia and Morocco) is notably significant. This article seeks to explore the comparative concepts he employed, particularly the notion of aesthetic codes, which illuminate the diverse practices of Islam across regions. It also highlights the role of cultural poetics in shaping the belief systems of societies situated in geographically distant parts of the Islamic world. It also engages critically with the literary aura in Geertz’s comparative approach by extending the reflection with more recent theories in comparative and world literature.