A New Introduction Sociology of Islam

Studying religion and society is a complex phenomenon, especially given the great transformations wrought by global capitalism. As Sociologists, we struggle to make sense of the impacts of increased privatization, deregulation of markets, refiguring of civil society, democratization, technological innovations, the spread of and challenges to individual liberties, proliferation of popular culture through mass communications, cultural amalgamation, shifting balances in rural-urban demography, increased participation of women in the global workforce, challenges to our conception of gender and sexuality, and many other social transformations made possible or altered by the spread of global capitalism. All of these changes impact and shape the role of religion and religious ideology in modern social life, redefining our understanding of the sacred and the secular as they function as both social and individualized phenomena. As Jose Casanova argued in Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), religion was once a communityoriented belief system that, aided by global flows, had come to be expressed in more privatized forms of the sacred. But these shifts are nowhere fixed and stable. In 1969, in Sacred Canopy: Elements of A Sociological Theory of Religion, Peter Berger, a seminal theorist of sociology of religion, argued that secularization was inevitable in a rapidly globalizing world. However, three decades later, in his The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (1999), Berger made a different argument that a contra-process of desecularization had risen to address the stresses and challenges of this totalizing globalization and that religion would be resurgent as an important facet of daily social, political and economic life

Asian values · Postmodernity · Secularism · Secularization · Islamic Studies and History · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development

• Beyond external theories

  Open Access•Susan Carland, Anisa Buckley•Contemporary Islam•2025

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• Sociologies of Islam

  C Kurzman•Annual Review of Sociology•2019

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