AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Michael M. J. Fischer is professor of anthropology and director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mehdi Abedi is research associate in the Anthropology Department at Rice University, where he teaches and lectures on Islam and Iran.

REVIEWS

"An engaging and illuminating account of Islamic culture in the Middle East and in the West. . . . The word ‘ethnography’ can hardly describe the many subjects this book broaches, from a seductive account of Abedi’s passage to America from a small village near Yazd, Iran, to an illuminating discussion of crucial Islamic practices such as the Qur’an and the hajj, to inquiries into the ‘autographics’ of Islamic popular art in Iran."—Ali Behdad, International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Describes a modern culture torn apart by the conflict of resurging Islamic fundamentalism and emerging secular intellectualism. . . . Debating Muslims is an important reader for the serious student of modern Muslim society, as it explores daily life inside Iran and in exile, politics intertwined with religion, multiple voices of Islamic ideology, and media graphics and the Rushdie phenomenon."—Library Journal

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Note on Transcription
• Calendars
• Chronology of Significant Dynasties
• Preface: Notes Toward Anthropology as Cultural Critique
• Part 1: 
• Oral Life Worlds
• 1. 
• Shi′ite Socialization in Pahlavi Iran: Autobiographical Sondages in a Postmodern World
• Scenes of a Village Childhood
• Scenes of an Urban Childhood: Class Distinctions
• Secondary School, Sexual Purity, and Marriage
• Tehran: Ideological Crucible
• Lawrence, Kansas
• Part 2: 
• Texts, Con-texts, and Pre-texts
• 2. 
• Qur′anic Dialogics: Islamic Poetics and Politics for Muslims and for Us
• Con-texts to Dialogue
• Dialogue and Presence Iqra! (“Recite!”): The Sounddance, the Oral, Performative Qur′an
• The Graphics of Absence Guides through the Woid: Plain Meaning, Prolepsis, the Knowledgeable, the Hadīth Game
• The Politics of Interpretation Exposing the Unbewised: The Hadīth Game, [Blind] Followership, Rule by Faqih/Amir, and Islamic Economics
• Conclusion: Dialogue, Ethics, Politics
• 3. 
• Fear of Différance: The Hajj “Rodeo”
• Hajj Pretexts and Re(rites): Ethics and Politics in the Play of Nationalism, Class, and Gender
• Hajj as Primal Scene
• The 1968 Hajj, the Rise of Islamic Ideology, and Renewable Shi′ism
• Conclusion: Giving Hagar Voice
• 4. 
• Social Change and the Mirrors of Tradition: Baha′is of Yazd
• Introduction
• Yazd: Mirrors of Diversity
• Nurullah Akhtar-Khavari
• Part 3: 
• Shifting Ritual Grounds (To Houston)
• 5. 
• Diasporas: Re-membering and Re-creating
• Exiles and Immigrants, Authenticity and Identity
• Prologue: Negotiating Death and Marriage in a Loose Social Structure
• A Month among the Believers: Ramadān in Houston, 1984
• Voices of Hagar: An African-American Muslim Woman Talks to an Iranian Muslim Man
• Part 4: 
• Visual Projections
• 6. 
• Concluding Notes: Autographically Changing Iran—Minor Media and Bicultural Graphics
• Emergent Ethnographic Subjects
• Minor Media as Reminders of the Postmodern Condition: Posters, Cartoons, Emblems
• Truth in Tulips: Emblems, Arabesque Design, Allusive Graphics
• Revolutionary Operatics and Cartoons for Export
• Revolutionary Posters and Cultural Interférences
• Hypertextual Feints and Constraints
• 7. 
• Postscriptural Parergon: Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
• They Shoot Novelists Don't They?
• Beyond the Text
• Qur′anic Sources and A–maze–ments
• Reading the Novel: Highjacked Souls
• Literature to Think With
• Appendix 1. 
• Alternative Traditional Orderings of the Qur′an
• Appendix 2. 
• The Ring, Octagon, or Eight Propositions of Political Wisdom
• Appendix 3. 
• The Imām's Blasphemystic Ghazal
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

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