Chapter 1
In: Dynamics of Islam in the Modern World
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Abstract
This chapter first briefly discusses the concept of the secularization of the social order and shows that it was not only in the Euro-American sphere that the secularization paradigm determined the normative order of the social field, but also in the Islamic world up to the 1950s and 1960s. Then between the 1960s and the 1990s, Islamic communities and parties succeeded in attaining hegemony in the public sphere and in the regulation of social orders. But this also transformed the Islamic tradition into a secular order. Unlike in the West, the secularized social order has been symbolically represented by a religious tradition since the 1960s. While the West saw this as a confirmation of the religious character of Islam, many Muslim commentators insisted that Islam was not at its core a religion, but rather a worldly order. But it would be wrong to conclude from the difference in the symbolic representation of secularization that there are essential differences in the social history of Western and Islamic modernity. Since the 1990s, a new post-secular condition has come up in the public sphere of many Muslim countries. It must be assumed that religious communities and churches have lost their normative regulatory power over not only the social field, but even over the religious field. The present chapter argues that this process also particularly affects the Islamic tradition.