When Fieldwork Burns: 'Miracles,' Politics, and the Boundaries of Knowledge
By Prof. Alix Philippon
The rhythmic chanting of a Sufi dhikr fills the space as bodies sway in unison. A man opens his mouth wide and drives a metal spike through his tongue, deep into his throat. Nearby, another pushes a knife into his forehead, while a third pierces his cheeks with an awl. These practices, observed among the Qadiri Kasnazani brotherhood in Iraq and known as dirbashas, seem to defy the most basic expectations of pain and bodily integrity. For many Iraqis, they are disturbing, often dismissed as dangerous or even diabolical. For practitioners, they are something else entirely: a sign of divine power. This tension points to a deeper problem in Islamic contexts, where the miracle, far from being consensual, appears as a site of dispute where different claims about truth collide. So what are we witnessing here?
A common definition describes a miracle as an event that defies the laws of nature and is attributed to a supernatural agent. But in Islamic contexts, things are far less straightforward. There is no single word for miracle and no agreed definition. In Sufi traditions, miracles can be understood as signs of divine proximity, the result of a long process of spiritual discipline culminating in union with God. Yet they are also treated with caution. Many masters warn that miracles can become traps, sources of pride that distract disciples from the true goal of the path. The most valued miracle, some insist, is the ability to “revive dead hearts.” At the same time, miracles are deeply entangled in social and political life. They can legitimize authority and attract followers.
At the shrine of the great saint ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Gilani in Baghdad, rituals of bodily piercing were banned a few years ago, and several shaykhs denounce what they see as a dangerous drift toward spectacle and commercialization. In a highly competitive religious landscape, miracles appear as precious resources. They help establish legitimacy and construct religious identity. The debate over miracles is also a debate over who has the right to define Islam and to shape the forms it takes in contemporary society. As such, if the debates on miracles can take an obvious theological form, they might be more political in substance.
Paradoxically, while such practices are contested or stigmatized in their local context, they have also attracted the interest of Western researchers in (para)psychology and alternative medicine, who approach them as empirical phenomena to be studied, measured, and even replicated. In this shift, what is dismissed by some as superstition can be reinterpreted by others as evidence of unexplored human capacities. Dirbashas have thus been approached as cases of extreme pain modulation and rapid wound healing. Psychologists and physicians have attempted to measure physiological responses during these performances, interpreting them in terms of beliefs, expectation, and the role of ritual context in shaping bodily experience. In this perspective, what appears as a “miracle” becomes evidence of little-studied interactions between mind, body, and environment. These controversies actively produce new ways of thinking about the world. In the process, boundaries between science and religion become less fixed, giving rise to unexpected exchanges, reinterpretations, and even transformations of the actors involved -like one of the American psychologists, Howard Hall, who eventually converted to Islam and joined the Kasnazaniyya. Rather than a simple “break with nature,” the miracle here appears as a routinized practice, one that can circulate between religious settings, laboratories and public debate.
Social scientists, too, can be caught up in these debates. Fieldwork, I learned early on, can be unsettling in unexpected ways. During my very first fieldwork in Pakistan, in an interview in a Sufi shrine in Uch Sharif, a caretaker unexpectedly performed a healing ritual, blowing Quranic verses onto my hand after I had been stung several times by a wasp. The pain vanished instantly and I did not become swollen which, in my case, was all the more striking as I am allergic to wasp stings. A month later in Lahore with a Qadiri Sufi master called Chand Pir, a colleague and I were invited, without warning, to take part in yet another healing ritual. Under his guidance, we applied a white-hot knife to our tongues, repeating bismillah. We felt no pain, no burning. The shaykh even told us we had been granted the power to heal. The experience was deeply disorienting.
I later learned that such “trials by fire” exist in very different contexts, from Bedouin practices of truth-testing to Siberian shamanic traditions. But in that moment, several “truths” clashed. As an inexperienced researcher, I was trained to observe, to maintain distance, to interpret, convinced that the scientific framework I relied on did not coincide with the truth of the believer I was studying. But confronted with this challenge, refusing the ritual would have meant refusing trust, and retreating into the safety of skepticism. Accepting it meant stepping into a different regime of truth, one in which rational explanation seemed insufficient and where efficacy is experienced before being explained. Fieldwork, in such contexts, is as much about entering situations that challenge our very perception of reality as about gathering data on rituals or conflicts.
Looking back, this episode also highlighted what was at stake in the specific political situation I was studying at the time. My research focused on tensions between Pakistan’s Ministry of Religious Affairs and Sufi authorities marginalized by state reforms. By staging this “miracle,” the shaykh was demonstrating healing or thaumaturgical power and, in doing so, was making an argument. The experience itself became a form of evidence, offered to counter the state’s attempt to delegitimize “traditional” religious actors in the name of modernity. In that sense, the miracle functioned as a form of resistance from below, an embodied claim about authority, truth, and the limits of a purely materialist or modernist worldview imposed from above
What did I do with such experiences? What most of us tend to do when such events disturb our epistemological peace: I bracketed them out. And yet, they lingered as an unresolved enigma I would occasionally recount to colleagues, as a way of suggesting that perhaps our default rationalist and materialist framework is not only limited, but may also, in some sense, be unscientific, insofar as it discourages us from fully engaging with the complexity of the world.
Encounters with miracles, or with phenomena that seem to defy ordinary expectations, have led a number of anthropologists to question the limits of the materialist framework that continues to shape much of the social sciences. Rather than dismissing such experiences as illusion or superstition, some have suggested that they invite us to question the limits of our current ways of knowing reality. Even brief participation in such practices can blur established boundaries between belief, experience and knowledge.
I, too, felt this tension in my fieldwork, as these encounters disrupted many of my initial assumptions and made it difficult to maintain a strictly external position. Rather than resolving the tension, they forced me to rethink it. In my own work, this has led me to adopt a stance close to a form of “methodological theism” (Piette, 2003): not a commitment to the ontological reality of invisible forces, but a willingness to take seriously their presence as it is enacted in social situations. In practice, this means approaching unseen agents as participants in interaction, real for those involved, and therefore analytically significant, not as abstractions to be explained away.
Instead of asking whether miracles are “true” or “false,” the question becomes what to do with such experiences when they refuse to fit our usual ways of interpreting reality. In this sense, the study of “miracles” points to the ways in which the practices of mystical traditions force us to confront the limits of our own epistemological assumptions. It may even push us to reconsider what counts as real, and to acknowledge that reality may be deeper, more textured, and maybe less settled than our dominant frameworks allow us to believe.
Bibliography
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Hall, H., & Schwartz, G. E. (2004). “Rapid wound healing: A Sufi perspective”. Seminars in Integrative Medicine 2(3), 116-123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sigm.2004.09.004
Hunter, Jack. “«Between Realness and Unrealness»: Anthropology, Parapsychology and the Ontology of Non-Ordinary Realities».” Diskus: Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion 17.2 (2015): 4-20.
Piette, Albert. Le fait religieux. Une théorie de la religion ordinaire, Paris, Economica, Coll. Études sociologiques, 2003.
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Thomas, David. “Miracles in Islam”. In The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, edited by Graham H. Twelftree, 199– 215. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Alix Philippon is an anthropologist and ethnographer whose work explores mysticism, religion, and power. An Associate Professor at Sciences Po Aix and co-director of the Master's program in Social Sciences of Politics, she specializes in Sufism and political Islam, with a particular focus on Pakistan and Iraq. Her research follows history, geography, and local studies, and asks how spiritual traditions shape public life, identity, and political imagination. She is the author of several books, including Sufism and Politics in Pakistan: The Barelwi Movement at a Time of ‘War Against Terrorism’ (Paris 2011) and In the Shadow of Shrines: Sufi traditions in Pakistan (Paris 2016), and her latest work examines the Qadiriyya Sufi order in contemporary Iraq.