FOCUS ON ISLAM III Archaeology and Islamic identities in Bahrain

The discussion of identity within Islamic archaeology is rare, and it is often treated as a given, as if Islam was a monolithic category, when in reality it is composed of a variety of identity variables, such as those revolving around sectarian affiliation, ethnicity or gender for example. Ideally, Islam should be structured by ‘emphatic ideological denial of the primacy of ethnic identity (and rank)’ (Barth 1969: 38), but in reality divisions based on class, caste, ethnicity, occupation and the like exist. These types of identities can be manifest internally within the overall Islamic community, but Islamic identities are also evident in relation to external identity groups as well, most notably those of other religions. Such a dichotomy of labels broadly corresponds to what Jenkins (1994: 200) defines as the difference between ‘groups’ and ‘categories’ – the former ‘rooted in processes of internal definition’ and the latter ‘externally defined’. Essentially the problem can be framed as one of categorisation and classification. The ‘rigidity of Western taxonomizing’ has recently been critiqued from an archaeological perspective by Meskell (2001: 185) drawing upon similar criticisms made by Foucault (1977), and it could be argued that the label ‘Islam’ is sometimes used too inflexibly by archaeologists. Which in turn relates to the very notion of what Islam is – what constitutes Islam? This is a question which has been well considered by anthropologists (Asad 1986; Geertz 1968; Gilsenan 1982), but rarely by archaeologists (Insoll 1999). Yet the archaeological record – material culture – can allow the evaluation of the notion of diversity within Islam, the exploration of the creation and maintenance of identities, the extent to which diversity renders the term ‘Islams’ preferable to ‘Islam’, and the interplay between ‘contextualism’ and ‘Levi-Straussian universalism’ (Asad 1986: 2). This paper works from the proposition that of course Islam as a recognisable category exists, but within the supra-structure there is great diversity, what has been referred to