Baber Johansen

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1990s. The difference between their analysis of ritual purity as a
universal, non-exclusive quality shared by all human beings irrespective
of religion, and the perspective outlined by, for example, Bousquet, in his
article on the cultic obligations (ÝibÁdÁt) of Muslims for the second
edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam (1971), is important.
To better understand the difference between an approach that underlines
the universal character of the Muslim cult in its ritual of purity and
Bousquet’s denial of the quality of the Muslim worship as a cult, it is
necessary to quote and discuss Bousquet in some detail. Here is what
Bousquet has to say:
If we translate ÝibÁdÁt as ‘cult’ we are committing something
of a theoretical error […] for it has quite correctly been said,
that, strictly speaking, Islam knows no more of a cult,
properly speaking than […] it does of law; nor, we should
add, of ethics. Fiqh is, in fact, a deontology (the statement of
the whole corpus of duties, of acts whether obligatory,
forbidden, or recommended, etc.), which is imposed upon
man. Therefore, what we call ‘cult’ is a part of the duties
prescribed by Allāh and formulated in minute detail by
learned writers in the works of fiqh, whereas in other
religions the object of the cult is to bring the believer closer
to the divine and in contact with it; it is not concerned solely,
or even principally, with carrying out the divine will. 48
This is an excellent example of how not to work in the field of Islamic
Studies. One theoretical category, deontology, suffices to deny the status
of cult to the Islamic acts of worship, the status of law to the fiqh, and the
quality of ethics to akhlÁq. Bousquet does not elaborate on the question
why deontology should be irreconcilable with law, cult, and ethics and
why, for example, the divine command theory is not considered to have
the same effect on canon law in the European context. 49 He may also
have found his statement a bit too bold: he admits, in the same article,
that his assertion, while being true in theory, is not borne out by the
social practices and psychological states of the believers. In other words,