Georg Stauth Book order

Saints, their places, the rituals of their veneration - the heroes and martyrs they represent or to whom they are often connected with - and the beliefs in their powers have often been described as being counter-thematic to the constructive issues of modern society in our times. However, in the Middle East - and certainly this is true for many other world regions and other world religions - local saints, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, have gained a very ambiguous status in religious movements, political struggles and events of social re-construction. In the case of Islam, perhaps more openly, modernists and fundamentalists alike attempt to abolish or to re-formulate the agenda of venerating the saints. However, at the same time saints and their localities have become a sort of overcharged symbolic incidence in the modern presence of Islam, in politics, in the media and - perhaps on a more hidden ground - in the struggle of ideas. In this volume historians, islamologists, anthropologists and sociologists give a multiple description of the inherent issues of the unhampered continuity of Muslim saints and their significance. With this volume 5, the Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam is linking empirical research on individual saints (including cases from Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Syria and Morocco) with the debates around Islam and modernity. Georg Stauth teaches Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and has widely published on Islam and Theory of Modernity.

In this first volume of the Yearbook of Sociology of Islam Georg Stauth brought together Islamologists and Sociologists who explore Islam and modern applications of Islamic thought as a way of demonstrating in a variety of social fields the ambiguity of the effective use of religious ideas and specifically Islamic models of social order to promote change. Far away from being apologetic, this collection of papers intends to show that the transcendental visions of Islam have been used as a foundational matrix for an indigenized ""Islamic Sociology"" as much as they played an important role in the modern restructuration of local symbolic and political orders. Analysis and discourse are privileged components in the scientific part of both the Islamic and the Western world. Accordingly, this volume attempts to contribute to the ongoing dialogue among sociologists about the effective ""history"" of exchange between Islamic visions and modernity. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Mohammed Arkoun, Friedemann B ttner, Fanny Colonna, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Peter Heine, Armando Salvatore, Reinhard Schulze, Georg Stauth, Karin Werner, Sami Zubaida Editor: Georg Stauth teaches sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany.