Islam and Modernity

The problem of Islam and modernity has been an important point of discussion in the Arab and Islamic world for decades, though this discussion has taken various forms, such as being called the conflict between the past and the present, or tradition and progress. This discussion has hidden within it clear contradictions when seeking compromise between the Abrahamic religions and present times throughout history. This conflict first appeared in the geographic area known as the Islamic world and looked much like the Age of Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century. However, the true meaning of the conflict revolved around the capacity of Islam as a religion to be compatible with modernity and its philosophy, precepts, politics, and historical facts. This means that Islam was obliged to come into agreement with modernity, which became like the soul and language of the present.

Stratification and Social Mobility, Slavery in Islam

In this chapter we propose a Weberian three dimensionality of stratification to explore the amount of upward and downward movement that goes on within and between Islamic societies and the industrial world. Our argument regarding social mobility provides intriguing clues as to the connection between legal systems (specifically civic laws based on religious jurisprudence), and stratification systems. We will discuss the issue of slavery and status inconsistency and contrast it with the caste system, which forbids upward, downward, inter-caste and intergenerational social mobility. We argue that the slavery system of stratification is more complex than the caste system, as there is an element of uprising and resistance built into the slave system by means of religious economic values. We will pay close attention to the role of Islam as a belief system which provides pathways for social mobility through the production and distribution of goods and services. In a previous chapter on sociality and inequality, a general proposition was made that, as human groups are formed, ranking and hierarchies come into existence in correspondence with rewards and the manner in which they should be distributed. From this viewpoint, inequality is a manifest function of a sociality whose latent function is to create poverty. This is an ethical issue for which Islam devised a variety of mechanisms to address. . For Marx, with his locus of attention on the specific, inequality is a manifest function of capitalism whose latent functions, among others, are monopolization and the enlargement of stratification.

Foundations of Islamic Economy, Islamic Scholarship, Mass Media, Linguistic Turn, and Social Mobility

The world's reaction to the September 11th, 2001, event demonstrated its minimal understanding of Muslim societies from sociological, psychological, economic, and political perspectives.. In this chapter, socio-cultural, political, legal and historical forms of Islamic conditioning are reviewed to manifest how the Shi'ite clerical establishment became lenient towards what Weber called traditional capitalism. The impact of colonialism on Islamic societies and the political-religion bifurcations are discussed. A new and useful explanation of Islamic societies will assist one in looking at the Islamic world from a new perspective by synthesizing sociological and economic viewpoints, especially given the uneven globalization that is affecting Muslim societies. Patterns of intergenerational mobility in industrial nations and Islamic societies are reviewed. Only by developing a fresh perspective on the struggle of Muslim societies can the West understand how best to engage with these countries in order to precipitate reform and vastly improved relations. We concur with Esposito (1999) that our challenge is to better understand the history and realities of the Muslim world and to recognize the diversity and many faces of Islam.

Revisiting Companionship and the Socio-Economy of the Islamic Guilds

This chapter is an introduction to the history of the formation of guilds and how they connect them to the religious and social structures that molded them. The craft-guilds are one of the most interesting and characteristic phenomena of medieval Muslim civilization. The guild in Muslim life was built essentially on the idea of the market and based on the needs of the guildsmen. Many different countries officially claim their commitment to Islam and Islamic economics. However, Islam and Islamic economic systems differ significantly from one country to another. Analysis of the Islamic economic system is impossible without a clear understanding of the legal parameters that shaped such a system. The legal foundation of the Islamic society, known as Shari'a, is considered eternally valid and applicable to all times and places. Islamic laws not only provide society with collections of laws and prescriptions which indicate the Islamic path, they also focus on specific human activities and classify them according to their degree of desirability from God's perspective. Different viewpoints on the relationship between religion, culture, and economic performance are investigated here. Finally, the role of the central bank and Islamic banking and finance will be discussed in detail. While Islamic banks play roles similar to conventional banks, fundamental differences exist between the two models. The main difference between Islamic and conventional banks is that the former operate in accordance with the rules of Shari'a, the legal code of Islam. The central concept in Islamic banking and finance is justice, which is achieved mainly through the sharing of risk. Stakeholders are supposed to share profits and losses, and charging interest is prohibited.

Functionalism and Stratification, Socio-Cultural Evolution and Revolution

In the previous chapter we argued that the conception of creatio ex nihilo is the determinant of hierarchy and stratification in Judaism and Christianity; Islam teaches that God created divisions as a way for human beings to recognize each other. The metaphysical origin of sociality and the reality of tribal and clan structure are reflected in the Islamic conception of community, gamaat; on a larger scale it is called ummah. Members in Islamic ummah are set apart from non-Muslims. This is dissimilar to the ancient Judaic racial and ethnic symbiosis which came to be known as the “chosen people,” an early manifestation of stratification in monotheistic religions. Among the Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages, Ibn Khaldun approached the objective foundations of sociality, attending to an implicit conception of stratification by appropriating detached observational methods to explain the rise and fall of dynasties. Principally, his work demonstrates the possibility of synthetically a posteriori, based on his personal experience and analytical a priori by which he asserted that the rise and fall are part of the definition of all dynasties. However, since Ibn Khaldun's day, our notion of the objects of structure and function of societies requires that we distinguish many variables in order to understand Islamic societies – particularly the way that their stratification systems are affected by globalization, or their transition toward, or their opposition to modernity. Using geometry metaphorically, it is true that we have departed from Euclidian theorems with the advent of various geometries. Yet Euclidian geometry still has many functions, a point that amplifies the intersections of both Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries. Notwithstanding the various intersections among political, economic, religious, cultural and social matrices that provide multiple logics to understand the operations of societies, the Khaldunic notion of rise and fall has survived to this day.

Religious Economies and Religious Mobility

Religious economies are a novel idea with potential application in a free market economy. They bring the idea of the existence of the supernatural and concern with ultimate meanings, so ubiquitous to religions, in touch with the multiplicity of paths available to us. In Islamic Sufism, there are as many paths to God as there are individuals. A situation in which people could compare and evaluate religions, regarding them as a matter of choice, can best described as a religious economy. Just as commercial economies consist of a market in which different firms compete, religious economies consist of a market (the aggregate demand for religion) and firms (different religious organizations) seeking to attract and hold clienteles. Just as commercial economies must deal with state regulations, religious economies' key issue is the degree to which they are regulated by the state. From Stark's viewpoint, the natural state of a religious economy is religious pluralism, wherein many religious “firms” exist because of their special appeal to certain segments of the market or the population. However, just as there is incentive for a commercial organization to monopolize the market to maximize its profit, it is always in the interest of any particular religious organization to secure a monopoly, maintain its followers, and expand into new interest groups. This can be achieved, (and even then to a very limited extent) only if the state forcibly excludes competing faiths (Stark, 2001). The building blocks of Stark's ideas are the assumption of a free market, a market economy, and the key issue of rational choice theory, hand in hand with American Pragmatism. As with the history of religions, which are not and have not been free from contest and cooperation, similarities, and differences, so religious economies have not been and are not easily shaped without considering forces from within and among different economies. Religious actions, reactions, and interactions in monotheism, diversity of textual interpretations, the growth of intellectualism or counter-intellectualism, human perception of transcendence and the sacred, as well as the realities of everyday life, all imply that the idea of religious economies needs more exploration. Christianity and Islam, one dominating the West and the other the East and Africa, offer the instances of two massive markets. Each religion has more than a billion adherents and a history of sharing the monotheistic market. Both religions, in spite of Islamophobia in the West, have formed and will participate in the decline, incline, or stability of the market. This subject is timely in light of the political movements in the Middle East and monolithic misconception of Islam.

Two Sociological Outlooks

The sociological distinction between ascribed and achieved statuses and the typology of roles attached to them construct “status sets” that form the building blocks of class, social inequality and stratification – the most important components of social structure. Among other topics, this chapter addresses the correspondences between work, salvation, piety and economics, by discussing the complexity of meanings in Islam, and through a discourse on Islamic culture. Both theoretically and empirically, we argue that work and social mobility have advanced by placing emphasis on achieved status rather than ascribed status, as in the Protestant vision. The prevalent assumption is that everybody is born with equal capabilities that can be actualized by individual endeavors. Thus, from the Protestant viewpoint, achieved statuses, and the social roles attached to them to build up the social structure, are more individually than socially based. This statement, that reflects a long debate on the role of nature and nurture, does not mean the authors are underestimating societal resources by an emphasis on psychologism. Attempts are made to avoid both sociologism and psychologism especially where theological foundational concerns are built upon here and beyond. Nonetheless, since creation starts with motivation, there are individuals who are prone to uphold and judge their creations to achieve a status without expert information. That is the moment that societal auditioning in various forms hold individuals' estimation of their creation to the societal standards whether in terms of subjectivity of taste or normative demands of a status. By de-emphasizing ascribed status, the individual's endeavors to gain rewards, material or non-material in this world not only contribute to capital accumulation, or prestige, but also open the avenue for the individual who believes in salvation, or engagement in innovation and scientific experimentation. As functionalists suggest, the expectation of reward, failure, and specialization create social inequality – that is, the qualities such as a degree of religiosity that have nothing to do with the stratification of people. If the degree of religiosity, measured by frequency of attending church or mosque, is able to impact drastically upon societal stratification, then the more stratified societies with large gaps between social classes are able to close them harmoniously.

Middle East Studies and Muslim Experience after September 11th, 2001

United States foreign policy towards the Middle East has shifted from advocating authoritarianism, to embracing capitalism and free market, and finally, to promoting democracy. These shifts have been administered after new ideas emerged to supersede old ones, thus justifying new thrusts in policy approach. Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, there was a major change in the US policy in Islamic countries, and in the Middle Eastern region in particular. The September 11th attacks demonstrated that support for corrupt, authoritarian, yet pro-Western regimes jeopardized American domestic security, and the failure of U.S policy destabilized the region. We present different concepts which show that today's Islamophobia may harm the formation of a real multicultural society in which Islam can become a recognized and meaningful part of Western society.

Re-Stratification in the Name of God

Considering the modern sociological enterprises of Emile Durkheim's view of the social origin of religion, Max Weber's categories of actions, and Talcott Parsons' action theory as well as theories of stratification, we have focused on Islamic ummah, differentiating Shi'ite /Sunni Islam and the role which ulama plays as a status group. Re-stratification in the name of God has referential significance to the Iranian revolution and the re-emergence of the Shi'ite Islam grabbing political power. Following Parsonian emphasis on socio-cultural differentiation the Islamic, ummah is neither a total whole nor limited to the ulama but diversified in terms of incorporating certain modern establishments and ideas, from publishing religious journal, spreading ideas among the high schools and university student to pushing for less patriarchal domination, from absorbing components of the western constitutional tradition and governmental division of power to detachment form economic co-optation by the state. Hence we can speak of old and innovative religious class in Islamic societies characterized the former by propensity to keep the status quo, functionally a prerequisite for maintenance of cultural, political and religious dogma, usually called conservative Islam and the latter enthusiasm for working its way towards reinterpretation of dogma, developing propensity for participating in global dialogue for change or re-stratification of society. Finally, demand for an innovative communicative system in order to be touch with the larger world exists in and among the innovative religious groups. In general, politico-religious action, within the domain of action theory, behooves us to revisit Iran as the first birthplace of resurgent Islam, exposing an otherwise hidden process, the rise and fall of a system of stratification that was led by a high-ranking Shi'ite cleric in modern times. The Iranian religious revolution that brought about a different system of stratification, rather than being interactive, was originally molded by reaction to modernity is investigated in this chapter. The diversity of Islams indicates that they can be considered as examples of an open system of stratification. In other words, whatever the cultural disposition or religious orientations of Islamic societies would be, we generalize that they have a propensity to have social mobility dissimilar to the closed caste system. Our sheer learned interest in stratification and social mobility is an acknowledgment of “connections” between economy and religion in Islamic societies that is elaborated in this chapter.

An Investigation of Creatio Ex Nihilo, Islam, Sociality and Inequality

Everyday life is abundant with interplay between ascribed and achieved statuses. Social structures are built upon those statuses and social behaviors are to great extent predictable based on those statuses. Socio-economic status (SES) is just one manifestation of this interplay. Indeed, sociality, the construction of all forms of stratifications and discourse on the relative significance of these attributes and their functions flows in various echelons and institutions of all societies; that is, from a granted ascribed status of a charismatic authority to those who routinize it, from a talented soothsayer to a learned magician, from a tribal medicine man to modern medical occupations. The old debate of nature versus nurture and a profusion of courses to develop leadership, occupational choices, psychological tests, arts and literatures all revolve around the demarcation of and interplay between granted and achieved statuses. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are prime examples of the implicit and explicit encompassing ascribed and achieved status in their theologies with social implications. Their problematic is to make the unknown knowable to us by using a variety of resources conceived to be true a priori. It is invariably in their nature, what they are, to bestow social and individual identity through that they nurture the believer. Contrary to other ascribed statuses such as gender, age and race, a believer, under free conditions, can flee from one religion to another pragmatically, agnostically, remain a theist outside of a specific religion's boundary, or leave it behind. Both the history of religious persecutions and the means by which, in the past, one believer recognized another, show the overriding power that ascribed status possesses to either keep the believer within their monopolistic bond of a religion or force them to convert. We have appropriated the Isma'ili Shi'ite understanding of dialectic reasoning, or aql and its manifestation in terms of rationality to make sense of the stratification systems that the human will creates and modifies in its pursuit of justice, and its conception of human agency in determination of one's destiny - an idea that resonates in Durkheim's assertion on creating something out of nothing, or creatio ex nihilo, in our view. Theologically, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all rely foundationally on creatio ex nihilo, or briefly, ex nihilo, according to which God created the world out of nothing. Given His attributes of omnipotence and omniscience, the question is to what extent the vocation of an individual is pre-elected, or willed by the individual's rational choices. This bewildering question appeared in classic Islam with the emergence of the Baghdad and Basra-based Mu'tazilite school of Islamic theology influenced by the Greeks and the traditionalist Ash'arite schools. This level of learning is achieved by the ‘ulama, combined with historical, political, and sociological discussions and contemporary findings on inequality and health is discussed.