Simon Róbert

The Social Anatomy of Islam


The hermeneutics of the key concepts of political Islam

If we try to analyse the basic range of concepts of classical Muslim society and to express it succinctly in a European language, very often we find ourselves confronted by insuperable difficulty. A great number of the concepts have a wide range of meanings, there are those (we shall return to these) which are rooted in pre-Islamic times (and so we may compare them with their meanings in other Semitic languages); a significant proportion go back to the Koran and naturally have religious connotations, while most have acquired in the course of historical development what may be called "lay" political meanings without their having transcended or rendered superfluous the former religious roots. Thus concept-use expresses a non-self-sufficient character of politics and rule that lacks legitimacy. The haziness of Islamic political language, its ambiguity and time-dependent quality are particularly striking if we compare them with the rich, concise range of concepts expressing the forms of rule and "social metabolism" of the Greek polis that decisively defines European political language (we have only to think of words such as politics, aristocracy, tyranny, democracy, hegemony etc. and the way that their meanings have scarcely changed). The unambiguous, semantically precise nature of the latter, of course, derives from the fact that the polis was a political, not a religious community, in contrast to Islam, where politics has never been able to become independent and has always taken its legitimacy from the normative regulation of religious law.

The Social Anatomy of Islam

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó – Felsőbbfokú Tanulmányok Intézete

Online megjelenés éve: 2024

ISBN: 978 615 574 253 8

This work analyses some essential features of the classical as well modern Islamic society. Islam cannot be regarded as a religion in the strict sense of the word, because civil change marginalized it and made it into societally insignificant movement in the private sphere. Some consider it a kind of a politically organized formation, but politically unified Islamic society disintegrated from the second half of the ninth century, independent units came into being reproducing the original model. Others are of the opinion that Islam is an ideology. This, however, would mean that during one and a half millennium the Muslims gave wrong answers to the different challenges. Some consider Islam as a culture, but this concept is a category of civil society subjected to permanent change. Therefore, we shall interpret Islam as society-integrating network which organized its own society, the umma on the principle of repristination or retraditionalisation.The main topics treated in the first part of our work are: the problem of genesis; the hermeneutics of the main concepts of Political Islam counterpointed by the categories of Ibn Khaldún’s power-state; integration and stratification of society; forms of changes (reform, revolt, revolution). The second part is dealing with the problems of modern Islam, taking into account revivalist movements from the Khárijites to the Islamic State.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/simon-the-social-anatomy-of-islam//

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