The paper explores two opposing yet simultaneous forces of aesthetics as transformative and constitutive force of Muslim identity politics, religiosity and cultural style in Cape Town The ethnography focuses on Muslim artists in Cape Town, namely Thania Petersen and twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, whose artworks embody a ‘social drama’ of a lived experience of Muslims’ ongoing individual and collective active engagement with and appropriation of the plurality of competing discourses that are religious and secular, local and global. The discussion unpacks the ways in which the artworks of Petersen and the Essop brothers serve as a transformative force and as a politic of authenticity to Muslim identity, religiosity, and cultural style. The paper offers an appreciative but critical reading of Talal Asad’s idea of an anthropology of Islam. Taking into consideration the incommensurable diversity and internal contradiction that could be conceived as Islamic discursive traditions, this paper argues that the aesthetics of Muslimness is what inspires coherence within and across diverse, contradictory Islamic traditions.

本文探讨了两个相反但同时发生的美学力量，它们是开普敦穆斯林身份政治，宗教和文化风格的变革性和构成性力量。人种志着眼于开普敦的穆斯林艺术家，即塔尼亚·彼得森（Thania Petersen）和孪生兄弟哈桑和侯赛因·埃索普（Hausain Essop），他们的艺术品体现了一种“社会戏剧”，讲述了穆斯林持续不断的个人和集体积极参与和挪用宗教和世俗，地方和全球的多种竞争话语的真实经历。讨论揭开了彼得森和埃索普兄弟的作品如何发挥变革力量和对穆斯林身份，宗教信仰和文化风格的真实性的政治态度。本文提供了对塔拉勒·阿萨德（Talal Asad）的伊​​斯兰人类学思想的赞赏而批判的解读。