Islam - Motor or Challenge 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 Büttner, 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.