Sociology of Religion

A striking portrait of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that changed greatly since the war in Syria, and about which there is almost no recorded literature.

An investigation of the altering effects of migration on the leadership roles of dedes in the Alevi Movement after the 1990s and the expanding of their influences from local to transnational space.

La primera historia integral de la teología de la liberación en Ecuador y su impacto sobre la formación del movimiento indígena.

Religions are contested by fundamentalists who seem to understand Covid-19 as a supernatural »sign« that might be useful for triggering a religious revolution. In this book, internationally renowned scholars discuss the term »Religious Fundamentalism« as well as the practical impact of Covid-19 on the religions.

This award-winning study illuminates the historical, theological, and philosophical contexts of posthumanist promises.

Healer, Doctor, Priest: Entanglements of religion and medicine in contemporary Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Why is Islam a topic of hot debates in most European societies? Researchers from several countries assemble elements for an answer.

In light of the challenges of globalization, this volume takes a new look at the connections between local and global aspects of Islamic religious practices.

The articles included in this Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam are focused on two perspectives: Some link the comparative analysis of Islam to ongoing debates on the Axial Age and its role in the formation of major civilizational complexes, while others are more concerned with the historical constellations and sources involved in the formation of Islam as a religion and a civilization.
More than any other particular line of inquiry, new historical and sociological approaches to the Axial Age revived the idea of comparative civilizational analysis and channeled it into more specific projects. A closer look at the very problematic place of Islam in this context will help to clarify questions about the Axial version of civilizational theory as well as issues in Islamic studies and sociological approaches to modern Islam. Contributors among others: Said Arjomand, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Josef van Ess and Raif G. Khoury.

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.