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In the period between 2013-2015, I have been doing ethnographic fieldwork in three mosques and three Islamic institutes from a Moroccan background in the region of Brussels, which deliver Islamic religious courses for lay adults. The aim of these courses was a personal and communal reform through a re-engagement with the own Islamic tradition by acquiring additional discursive and practical knowledge about it. Hence, Islamic religious knowledge gathering was not merely aimed at the correct performance of Islamic rituals, but also at the acquisition of a specific ethical conduct in alignment with both the Islamic tradition and majority society. Such a personal and communal reform, also in ‘normal daily life’, was not experienced nor presented as an active counter-movement against the majority society. Instead, this aspired reform of conduct, punctuated by an Islamic vision, was seen to be not only beneficial for the pious individual on an eschatological level, but for the general coexistence in society as a whole as well. Not through sameness and assimilation, but through a self-conscious, spiritual and intellectual re-engagement with the own religious tradition. In total, I have participated in over 200 courses that dealt with subjects like Islamic jurisprudence, Quranic exegesis, Quranic recitation, Islamic ethics, the biography of the Prophet Mohammed, hadith sciences, Islamic dogma and Islamic theology. This participant observation was complemented by various (semi- or unstructured) interviews and spontaneous talks before, during or after class with male and female teachers, as well as mostly female students. The focus in the chapters thus lies on what happens in the courses with and between respective teachers, students and fellow-students throughout the process of discursive, religious knowledge transmission. Thereto, the emphasis firstly lies on what kind of knowledge that is being transferred in which epistemological frame (chapter five). The latter is important for understanding not only the discourse of what is considered true knowledge and its methodology, but also its implicit or explicit metaphysical premises. Such is a necessary consideration, I believe, because these chapters depart from the findings that the courses are not only characterized by instigating the individual’s embodiment of the ‘religious perspective’[1] in more and more situations, spaces or circumstances, but simultaneously and discursively aim to unveil the world (and everything in it) in relation to which piety is conceptually understood and aspirationally constructed, because beneficial for one’s and others’ being in the unveiled world. Drawing on Talal Asad’s argument that “the connection between religious theory [or knowledge] and practice is fundamentally a matter of intervention – of constructing religion in the world (not in the mind)” (Asad 1993: 44), I expand this by arguing that this also implies a religious deconstruction (in the sense of unveiling) of the world.[2] Piety, therefore, is considered not only to contain efforts on the self (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Jouili 2015), but the latter are also, necessarily, seen to be in relation to “one’s adherence to an order of things” (Ricoeur 1977: 40). And therefore, how these courses discursively learn, offer affective reminders of, or metaphysically depart from, what there is or potentially might be, is equally a part of my research. Hence, chapter seven asks what this knowledge does (and aims to do) in the world with relation to an ethical self-reform both in and beyond the field of the ‘ibādāt; how this relates to pious subjectivation processes and personal agency; as well as what exactly is stipulated by these. But before going into that, chapter six elaborates on what this knowledge does with the world and everything in it, all considered as belonging to the same cosmological frame and metaphysical Cause. This is called an “ontographic technique of description” (Holbraad 2009)[3], and it is theoretically presented in chapter four. Emphasis in chapter four is put on previous traditions in social sciences that have attempted to discuss religious alterity and belief, as well as the Western metaphysical genealogy thereof. Subsequently, the complementary value of re-introducing a concern with ‘ontology’ is discussed, as well as what is meant by the latter. This approach does not presume that such an ethico-epistemological investment (Barad 2007), which ultimately also deals with ontological presumptions, is typical for Islam. Quite to the contrary, authors are referred to who consider the latter integral to any epistemology (Bhaskhar 2008 [1975]; Barad 2007). However, the kind of cosmological and metaphysical frame in which the ‘talk about being’ (i.e. ‘ontology’) takes place is specific, and can be better understood and possibly translated by using an inter-traditional approach: in referring both to ‘Islamic’ and ‘Western’ (philosophical, analytical, theological) traditions.[4] As such, an attempt is done to describe the kind of metaphysical thinking that matters in the courses and for the people I’ve met there, and thus a different approach of ontology (as to a certain extent remaining uncertain, potential and debatable) is delivered. This is the necessary starting point, I believe, for chapter five, in which the epistemological background of the courses is further unraveled. Chapter six, then, gives an ethnographic approach to these points of departure, in which the emphasis is put on students’ learning to recognize and ethically react upon signs of God for them in the world on the one hand (for example, after having performed duʿā’s or supplication prayers), and their experiences of ‘being acted upon’ from the Elsewhere in case of (mis)fortune, on the other. In that chapter, examples are given as to why I believe metaphysical presumptions, as well as a concern with what there is and might be, matter for my teachers and fellow-students, and thus for an enhanced understanding of what happens during the courses. [1] How ‘perspective’ is used here, which is in a different way than with Clifford Geertz (2009 [1983]), will be explained in chapter four. [2] In his analysis of Asad’s work, Anidjar therefore concludes that : “Through its iterations and reiterations, it takes the world apart: it makes the world, and simultaneously divides it, transforms it, redistributes it” (Anidjar 2009: 368). [3] Martin Holbraad uses this designation “to indicate that what is at stake in it is the attempt to chart out the ontological presuppositions required to make sense of a given body of ethnographic material” (2009: 82). [4] As will be further explained in chapter four, this approach is inspired in a way by Michael W. Scott in his own research on Christianity on the Solomon Islands. He argues in favor of what he calls an ‘ethno-theology’, which looks at “the indigenous theological speculations and constructions of both lay persons and clergy” (2005: 106). Ethno-theologies are seen to address “who one’s people were in relation to God before they became Christians and where they belong in God’s plan for humanity” (Idem). He concludes with calling for “a more intentionally biblically literate, theologically astute ethnography of why and how ordinary Christians take notice of, overlook, reframe, reject, or revise the content of Christianity. This means that anthropologists of all backgrounds need to collaborate more closely with theologians and historians of Christianity, observe more than one context of Christian practice, and above all, like many of the Christians we study, immerse ourselves in the dramas, tropes, and internal debates of the Bible as in an ethnographic field site” (Idem: 120. See also Scott 2007: 301-02).