Straying from the Straight Path breaks with this tendency by examining how self-perceived failure is, in many cases, part and parcel of religious practice and experience. Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the largely separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, this volume gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.
Daan Beekers is a social anthropologist currently affiliated with the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, University of Edinburgh. His first monograph, an ethnographic study of religious commitment among young Muslims and Christians in the Netherlands, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.