Questioning the Boundary: J. Z. Smith, Timothy Fitzgerald, and the Category of Religion Among North Indian Muslim Jogis

The analytical viability of “religion” remains deeply contested within contemporary sociological and anthropological theory. Whereas Jonathan Z. Smith maintains that religion is an indispensable, second-order scholarly construct whose utility depends upon critical reflexivity, Timothy Fitzgerald argues that the term is an ideological, Eurocentric artifact that mystifies material relations of power and ought to be abandoned in cross-cultural inquiry. This paper evaluates both positions through the ethnographic and historical case of the Muslim Jogi community of Northern India. Historically engaged in itinerant musical mendicancy, esoteric asceticism, and devotional balladry while affirming a shared Islamic identity, the Jogis systematically disrupt the rigid binaries of modern taxonomy. Using this empirical case, the study demonstrates that while Fitzgerald correctly identifies how reified religious typologies obscure material survival, caste stratification, and patronage relations, his outright abandonment of the category obscures the real institutional effects of religious classifications deployed by courts, censuses, and reform movements. Conversely, Smith’s emphasis on reflexive category formation provides the methodological apparatus needed to retain the category without committing a substantialist fallacy. The paper proposes a third position: sociology must retain “religion” not as an autonomous, substantive essence, but strictly as a provisional analytical question. Rather than declaring an empirical practice religious, sociological inquiry must trace when, how, and by whom practices are classified as religious, and examine the political consequences that follow.