I just came across this. I haven't read it so I've no idea how good it is:
Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction - Brian MorrisThis is probably worth looking at. I've read it but a long time ago and my memory of it is a bit hazy:
Muslim Society - Ernest GellnerErnest Gellner was an interesting writer, though he seems to have gone out of fashion. The following is from a lecture on Marxism and Islam given, I think, shortly before he died in 1995.
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Gellner2.htmThere are two big events of this century which obviously deserve our
attention. One is the failure of Marxism; the other is the success of
Islam. I am an outsider to both these faiths. The terms I use are
analytical or sociological. They do not imply endorsement or condemnation
from an absolute viewpoint; they express the judgments of an observer of
society concerned sympathetically with the fate of the people involved in
these systems.
Let me begin with the failure of Marxism and my attempt to understand it.
Marxism has often been compared, I think correctly, to a religion...
<snip>
Now let me consider the other major interesting phenomenon of our age, the
victory and success of Islam. In the social sciences, one of the commonest
theses is the secularisation thesis, which runs as follows. Under
conditions prevailing in industrial- scientific society, the hold of
religion over society and its people diminishes. By and large this is
true, but it is not completely true, for there is one major exception,
Islam. In the last hundred years the hold of Islam over Muslims has not
diminished but has rather increased. It is one striking counter-example to
the secularisation thesis. Like the failure of Marxism, it is a
fascinating intellectual problem that serves as a background to the more
practical, moral and political problems which are the concerns of this
symposium.
I would tentatively and in all humility attempt to offer you an
explanation. The Western perception of the strength of Islam is distorted
by the fact that the West has largely noticed this fact in connection with
the Khomeyni revolution. Although the Iranian revolution is,
unquestionably, the most dramatic manifestation of the social and
political vigour of Islam, it is in some interesting ways untypical, which
somewhat distorts the perception. The social and political vigour of Islam
is something which long antedates that particular revolution and ought not
to be identified with it.
<snip>
What then is the distinctive feature of Islam amongst the high religions?
I think all high religions, by a high religion I mean a religion equipped
with a scripture, a doctrine, and a professional core of interpreters,
tend to suffer from a tension between the high variant and the folk
variant. This takes a very specific form in Islam. The high variant is the
faith of the scholars, unitarian, pure and puritan, spiritualist,
anti-mediationist and anti-hierarchical. Their's is an egalitarian
religion stressing the unity of God, the symmetry in the relationship
between believer and God, with an ethic of rule observance rather than an
ethic of loyalty to particular individuals. There is such a strong
distrust of mediation, that there is a special name for the sin of
associationship and of the use of mediators. By contrast, folk religion is
more oriented towards mystical practices, hierarchy and a kind of
surrogate priesthood in the form of cultish living saints.
If I read Muslim history correctly, within the history of Islam, from
whenever it shook down after the early first centuries under the impact of
the West, there was a tension between these two. Sometimes they lived in
harmony, interpenetrating each other. Often the tension was expressed in
the form of revivalist movements attempting to establish the true faith of
the scholars against the corrupt version of the folk. Then came the impact
of the West. Of course this occurred at different times and in different
regions, as early as the Napoleonic invasion in Egypt, as late as the
French invasion of Morocco in 1912, and even later in places like the
Yemen.
Under the impact of Westernisation, Muslim society can reform itself
without facing the dilemma which the Europeans faced, namely either to
westernise or to idealise the folk culture. This is because it can invoke
its own high tradition which is always respected, but usually not fully
implemented, honoured in the breach, but not always in the observance.
Muslims like to think that the high tradition goes back to the Prophet and
his companions. I find this historically implausible, because I think that
the circumstances in which they worked were different. But what is
unquestionably true is that there is a genuine well-established old local
tradition, and that it has many of the features which make it suitable for
conferring what you may call international dignity: a very low level of
magic, low ritualisation, egalitarianism and all kinds of features which
make it compatible with modern conditions, and in particular the
conditions of self-correction and industrial, economic and scientific
catching up. Islam is more compatible with this than are the more
hierarchical, ritual-ridden aspects of other religions. In brief, the
Islamic World escapes the dilemma which, in my argument, pervades other
societies caught in the trap of temporary underdevelopment.
Islam revives in the name of its own high tradition, not in the name of
either the West or in the name of a populist idealisation of the folk
culture. Muslims leave the latter to Western romantics; they do not
themselves practise this and what they idealise is the old high tradition,
in which case it appears as fundamentalism.
The definition of the term "fundamentalism" has a double edge, a double
frontier. What fundamentalism says is that religion, its doctrines and its
prescriptions are to be taken seriously; they mean what they say, neither
more nor less. The doctrine of firm interpretation has of course two
negations.
The first is a Western one which says that religion does not really mean
what it says, and is in fact just a kind of symbolic expression. Talking
to uneducated people like peasants and fishermen in Galilee, the founder
of the dominant Western faith had to use simple language because if he
talked modern philosophy they would not have understood him. But he really
meant the latest philosophic fashion. So you get Christianity which in
this sense tends to be vulgarised. In each generation it gets restated,
and the basic message is: the doctrine does not mean what it says, it
really means what the latest prophet has been saying, in simple language
so that a simple fisherman can understand it.
The other one of course is esotericism: the doctrine of the hidden
meaning, that there is a special secret way that the religion is
stratified. Islamic fundamentalism fought on both these fronts. On the one
hand, it opposed that alliance between itself and its folk use of
mediators, while on the other hand it enhanced the stratification of an
inner truth and an outer truth. If my diagnosis is correct, that the
strength of Islam comes from this fundamentalism and self-correction in
terms of a literal doctrine taken seriously, a kind of combination of
simple and elegant unitarianism in theology with a firm set of rules for
social life, why should the most dramatic manifestation of fundamentalism
have appeared in Iran? It seems to go against the thesis, because of the
sects established by the fissions in the early history of Islam, Shi'ism
is of course in theological terms, furthest to the right, most given to a
cult of personality, and to ritualism.
My answer to this is that although the cult of personality, combined with
the cult of martyrdom, was very useful in the act of political
mobilisation practised by Khomeyni, it was rapidly dropped in the course
of success. What Khomeyni in fact did was Sunnify Islam. I have studied
Khomeyni's works in the translation of his Welsh convert and acolyte
Algar, and it seems to me very clear that the social and political
doctrine of the kind of Islamic republicanism you get in Khomeyni's
thought is a shift from a cult of personality to a cult of law, in other
words a shift towards Sunnism.
Khomeyni does not deny the authority of the hidden Imams, but politically
speaking he pensions them off. They are really politically irrelevant.
What matters about religion is the implementation of the law. When the
Imam comes back, of course, the authority will be his and he will take on
government, but until he comes back the law must be implemented by those
most competent to do so. Who else can do this but the lawyers? They will
implement the law neither more nor less severely before or after his
coming. His coming is almost a political accident. Khomeyni has rude
things to say about such things as the cult of saints. So without actually
abolishing the cult of personality there has been a kind of transfer or
movement to a cult of the law away from the cult of personality, which I
took to be the crucial distinguishing line between Sunnism and Shi'ism.
Let me now come back to the contrast with Marxism. Once again I have an
interesting little disagreement, it is a matter of stress really, with
Professor Keane. Professor Keane rightly pointed out that Islam is not
just faith; it is an ordering of social life. Yes indeed, but it is an
ordering of social life that does not fully sacralise it. In the
regulation of economic life, for instance, Islam provides a set of hand
rails so that people know where they are but it does not actually say that
economic life in itself is sacred.
In other words, Muslims have a sphere of the profane to which they can
retreat at times of less and maximum religious zeal. When it had the
opportunity to play at the world of religion, Marxism deprived humanity of
that zone precisely by sacralising the economic. If it had ritual and
symbolic objects, they were the tractors, the images of muscular workers,
huge socialist dams and so on. Economic life provided the sacraments for
that religion. But when economic life in the end turned out to be both
squalid and markedly less efficient, then Marxism collapsed. I think one
of the most important factors in the final self-destruction of the Soviet
Union was the discovery that Western capitalism could indeed be overtaken,
but not by them; the people who were doing it were the Confucianists of
East Asia and not the Marxists of the Euro-Asian centre. That discovery
was crucial in causing the loss of faith which led to the self-dismantling
of a system which had not provided a zone in which people could retreat
when they wanted to work out their way.
Islam does provide for such a zone, which is one of the things which makes
it a workable modern religion. It combines firm guidance in an idiom
compatible with modern backgrounds, with a respect for the type of social
division which is essential for a viable society.
<snip>
Topic: Sociology and anthropology