4. Islam

Author(s):  
Charles L. Cohen

“Islam” looks at the origins of this religion. Islam arose in an area contested by empires and populated by diverse religious groups. Muhammad’s revelations, recorded in the Quran, drew loosely on Jewish and Christian ideas, but they pointedly situated him within the biblical prophetic tradition, and Muslims asserted that they had recovered the original religion of Abraham. At its inception, the umma (Muslim religious community) was also a political body, but the difficulties inherent in investing spiritual and civil headship in one person manifested themselves quickly. Clashes about who should guide the umma inflected Islamic religious identity—particularly its division into two major sects: Sunnis and Shiites.

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Fong ◽  
Elic Chan

This study, based on 2001 Canadian census data for 16 census metropolitan areas, explores residential segregation among eight religious groups. We include non–Christian religious groups to reflect the emerging religious diversity of Canadian society. Our study provides the first comprehensive comparison of the residential patterns of people affiliated with major religious groups in Canada. We argue that each religion is associated with unique sets of religious institutional behaviors, which in turn shape each religious group's relationships with other religious groups. In this study, we identify four religious institutional behaviors that can affect the residential segregation of various religious groups: institutional orientation of religious community services, subcultural identity, religious identity, and discrimination. The findings indicate that these religious institutional behaviors are related to the residential segregation patterns of different religious groups.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Alexeeva

This article is devoted to the study of how religious identity and belonging to a religious community becomes a life strategy for socialization, and can help to overcome crises at different stages of life. The text presents an analysis of the autobiographies of those who made religiosity the basis of their way of life and a means of of self-determination. The methodological basis of the research is the combination of the theory of multiple modernities and the method of biographical interviews. Namely, we pay attention to the strategy of constructing religious identity. Sampling was carried out using a combination of reference sampling methods and ‘snowball’, since our previous experience has shown that this combination gives the best results in the study of hard-to-reach religious groups. In total, the sample included 30 respondents at the rate of three representatives of each denomination (Orthodox, Catholics, old believers, Buddhists, Jews) in each of the two cities. They were interviews (in person and on Skype), then the resulting transcripts were processed according to the methodology of the analysis of biographical narrative, described by T. Ingrata. The method of biographical interview removes the problem of psychological barrier in respondents when communicating on sensitive topics, as Hyde does not affect them directly. When planning the sample, we included major denominations represented in Russia — Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Buddhism and Judaism. This procedure allows identifying and describing strategies of behavior, as it is based on the comparison of biographical data of respondents with the ‘told life story’, that is, the consideration of subjective experience in comparison with the real socio-cultural context. Keywords: religious conversion, life crisis, biography, biography method


Author(s):  
Jon R. Kershner

John Woolman’s ministry efforts translated his vision of God’s will for human affairs into the physical realm. This state of union with God entailed an outward dimension consistent with the transformed state Woolman believed God intended for creation. Woolman was committed to his religious community and viewed himself as representing the best of what colonial society would become. He understood himself to be a prophet like the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, and so he believed his actions to be within the prophetic tradition. This chapter explores Woolman’s sense of commissioning to the prophetic role and his conceptions of what such a role entailed. Then, this chapter demonstrates that the content of Woolman’s message was the application of his vision to human affairs. This message declared God’s claim over the whole world, renounced idolatrous influences, and challenged the alienation of sin.


2000 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Gregg

In the aftermath of the 1967 “Six Days' War,” 254 ancient inscribed stones were found in forty-four towns and villages of the Golan Heights—241 in Greek, 12 in Hebrew or Aramaic, and 1 in Latin. These stones, along with numerous architectural fragments, served as the basis of the 1996 book by myself and Dan Urman, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in the Golan Heights—a study of settlement patterns of people of the three religions in this region in the early centuries of the common era.1 The area of the Golan heights, roughly the size of Rhode Island, was in antiquity a place of agriculture and, for the most part, small communities. Though historians of religions in the late Roman period have long been aware of the “quartering” of cities, and of the locations of particular religious groups in this or that section of urban areas, we have had little information concerning the ways in which Hellenes, Jews, and Christians took up residence in relation to each other in those rural settings featuring numerous towns and hamlets— most presumably too small to have “zones” for ethnic and religious groups. The surviving artifacts of a number of the Golan sites gave the opportunity for a case study. Part 1 of this article centers on evidence for the locations and possible interactions of members of these religious groups in the Golan from the third to the seventh centuries and entails a summary of findings in the earlier work, while part 2 takes up several lingering questions about religious identity and ways of “marking” it within Golan countryside communities. Both sections can be placed under a rubric of “boundary drawing and religion.”


Al-Albab ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Hilmi Muhammadiyah

This article attempts to explore the dynamics of the Lembaga Dakwah Islam Indonesia (LDII) or Indonesian Islamic Da'wah Institution community in Kediri of East Java, Indonesia in maintaining its existence, transforming and seeing the processes, patterns, and strategies that developed by the LDII. The article elaborates how social actors of the LDII carry out social practices continuously so that LDII can continue to survive, develop, and reform the doctrine and religious identity paradigm and its organizational identity thus being accepted by people in the region. The role of the actors as the agent in changing the character of the movement is discussed in this work. They have made strategies including building closeness to the authorities, building attitudes of openness, changing the image of the organization, strengthening identity, establishing dialogue and public cooperation with the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI – Majelis Ulama Indonesia) that positioning LDII as a heretical and splinter organization, and establishing cooperation with Religious Community Organizations (Ormas) that are considered mainstream, such as NU (Nahdatul Ulama) and Muhammadiyah. This work attempts to provide materials and considerations in dealing with the issue of raising between the flow of splinters and established groups.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-58
Author(s):  
Cynthia Baiqing Zhang

Linking concepts from networks, identities, and ecology, I draw on material collected during sixty interviews to show how a group of culturally homogeneous Chinese graduate students, when placed in two sociocultural environments in the United States, displayed different processes of religious identity network formation. In a large and heterogeneous community with more possible identities, students showed human agency by forming religious identities less constrained by networks. Human agency is also exemplified in the expansion of their religious circle of friends once they developed a religious identity. Religious identity often preceded networks. However, in a small and homogeneous community, students did emotion work to stay in pro-religious groups, presumably due to the limitations they had in choosing friends, particularly Chinese friends. The formation of networks more likely preceded the emergence of religious identities premised on the coexistence of multiple relationships in dyads and solidarity within primary groups. The narratives demonstrate how ecology matters for the formation of network ties and religious identity. 根据对60个对硕士博士研究生的采访,通过运用网络分析、身份研究、和环境研究领域的概念,本文详述同属一个文化的中国留学生当处于美国两个不同城市文化环境中时,通过生活圈子发展特定身份的不同过程。在一个大型、充满差异的城市里,留学生的身份选择具有多样性。其主体性表现在自主选择宗教认同并扩大有宗教信仰的朋友圈子。他们的宗教认同常常先于他们的宗教朋友圈。而在一个小型、倡导同化的城市里,由于可选择的中国朋友人数少,留学生常常通过控制自我感情来维系与亲宗教的朋友的关系。他们的宗教网络常常先于他们的宗教认同。在这种环境中,当两人有多重社会关系,并处于一个高度团结的小群体中时,宗教认同才得以传播。本研究显示社区规模和文化是重要的影响身份和社会网络的环境因素。 (This article is in English.)


2019 ◽  
pp. 81-101
Author(s):  
Sarah Stroumsa

This chapter focuses on Andalusian philosophers. Philosophers, in al-Andalus as elsewhere in the medieval Islamicate world, were committed to what can be called “the philosopher's life,” namely, the unremitting effort to attain human perfection. At the same time, as intellectuals integrated into their own societies, they could significantly shape their communities' cultural, communal, and even political profiles. Philosophers in al-Andalus truly shared a common philosophical tradition. Jews and Muslims alike read scientific and philosophical works translated from Greek into Arabic, as well as books by earlier Muslim and Christian thinkers. Being a small minority within their respective religious communities, and sharing the same education, interests, concerns, and ideals, philosophers constituted, in some ways, a subculture of their own. While they lived fully within their own religious community and adhered to the boundaries between it and other religious groups, they were acutely aware of the commonality of philosophy. The chapter then evaluates the philosophical curriculum which guided the advancement of students to become philosophers, as well as the friendships formed between philosophers. It illustrates the inherently elitist nature of the philosophers' life qua philosophers.


Author(s):  
Sally Mayall Brasher

In this chapter the various structures of hospital management are examined. As the model for charity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was almost exclusively religious, these institutions were universally organized within some format of religious or semi-religious community that provided housing for staff and administrators as well as, patients, the poor, and pilgrims. Confraternities, converse, regular canons, neighbourhood associations and semi-religious groups such as the Humiliati were all involved in managing hospitals. This chapter provides an analysis of the groups and individuals who administered the hospitals and their affiliations with other larger religious and community entities.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 233
Author(s):  
Vladimir Bakrač ◽  
Danijela Vuković-Ćalasan ◽  
Predrag Živković ◽  
Rade Šarović

The process of converting individuals to a particular religious community is one of the issues addressed by the Sociology of Religion. In the post-socialist Montenegrin society, there have been research works related to dominant religious communities, the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Islamic, while science has shown no interest in small religious groups. The Adventist movement in Montenegro, although present for a long period of time, has failed to mobilise individuals for conversion to a greater extent. Therefore, this research aims to find out when, under what conditions and in what way the individuals in Montenegro, as a post-socialist state, chose Adventism as religious affiliation, what affected this process the most, and were there any specificities in that regard. This paper is a result of a survey conducted via an in-depth interview with 17 believers of the Adventist Church. The obtained results indicate several valuable data: most respondents accepted the Adventist movement in Montenegro in the early 1990s; they got first-hand knowledge of this religion from their friends or wider family members and relatives, a consistent interpretation of the Holy Bible is the main reason for conversion. A significant factor in the process of conversion to Adventism is early religious socialisation within a family.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Gary D Bouma AM

AbstractThe use of intercultural dialogue (ICD) to promote intergroup understanding and respect is considered as a key to reduce tensions and the likelihood of conflict. This paper argues that understanding the differences among religions – those between packaged and lived religion – enhances the chances of success and makes the effort more challenging. Religions contained and packaged are found in formally organised expressions of religion – churches, denominations, synagogues, mosques, temples and so on. For packaged religions, religious identity is singular and adherents are expected to identify with only one religion and are assumed to accept the whole package of that religion. ICD in this context involves communicating with religious groups such as organisations and encouraging different leaders to speak with each other resulting in platforms filled with ‘heads of faith’ – bishops muftis, ayatollahs, chief rabbis, swamis and so on. In contrast, lived religions involve ritual practices engaged in by individuals and small groups, creation of shrines and sacred spaces, discussing the nature of life, sharing ethical concerns, going on pilgrimages and taking actions to celebrate and sustain hope.There is some evidence that, although packaged religions are declining, lived religions continue at persistent levels. Violent extremism is more likely to be associated with lived rather than packaged forms of religion, making a more balanced intercultural competences approach to ICD critical to countering conflict.


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