Social Compass

The last 25 years have shown a marked increase in the meanings which Muslims attach to the concept of Islam. The first part of this paper discusses some of these new meanings of Islam: new socio-political meanings in a national and in an international context as well as new moral meanings. The second part discusses aspects of the relations between Islam and national consciousness which have changed considerably in the course of the 20th century. Attention is also paid to relations between Muslim countries and the West and the meaning of Islam in this changing context.

At the end of the paper four theses are formulated, dealing with secular and Islamic models of the Muslim state; with relations between Muslim states; with the links existing between Muslim and other (ethnic or national) identities; and with the competition between alternative versions of Islam, considered here as articulations of Muslim identity. The way in which an individual views Islam reflects a particular articulation of his or her identity. Muslim societies, consequently, can usefully be studied according to the meanings which different groups and persons give to life and reality and which use Islam as a referent.

The collapse of communism has led, if not to an actual transition to a world in which everything is experienced as relative, then at least to a greater awareness of already living in such a world. Contemporary societies were not prepared for this and feel cast adrift. The so-called transition period ushered in by this collapse is marked by a threefold crisis, analysable as the manifestation of the global redistribution of a relation to meaning, affecting centrality, identity and mediation and testifying to a revelation of the relation of believing through the truth of believing. What is at work here, and what forces us to set aside our traditional categories of analysis, is, beyond the difficulty of expressing a relationship to movement and pluralism (the religious being constantly called upon to participate in the management of this expression), the pursuit of a long process of disenchantment with politics. The lack of a plausible politics in this perspective explains the recourse to religious categories (secularized or not) and the use of these categories in an identitary thematic.

In Brazilian popular religions, alongside and often mixed with Iberian-derived popular Catholicism, Amerindian survivals are found mainly in Catimbó, while Candomblé (or Xangô) has clear African (mainly Yoruba) roots. The followers of these cults are prone to stress the ethnic origins, indeed (in spite of all syncretisms) the ethnic purity of their beliefs, yet they are at the same time very much oriented toward the national market of consumers of religious goods and services. This kind of identitophagy has also been associated with essays to establish a synthetic national religion, often conceived as the prototype of the religion of a brave, postmodern world....

Russia suffers today from a lack of identity which concerns its geographical as well as its political space. In this context of anomie it uses the religious register to find a new identity. Thus the Orthodox religion appears as the basis of a new collective project but also as a source of new cleavages.

Nevertheless religion suffers from the consequences of the “destructuring” of society. Beside religious identification which involves a strong cultural aspect, denominational vagueness is widespread. The search for identity does not automatically entail the emergence of an “ethnic religion”. Like society itself, religious traditions are being torn apart.

Between the religion of the parents and the aspirations of their daughters, many lacunae make transmission difficult. In these areas as with all cultural questions, one observes a distancing on the part of the children. The parents' religion is in fact encumbered with numerous handicaps: their low social level and their origin (most often rural) have endowed them with popular religion, faith, beliefs and practices which the children readily judge to be naïve and which, objectively, would be insufficient to satisfy the aspirations of the educated young people. Besides, in the eyes of the young girls, this same religion is usually perceived as a “religion of the Father”, essentially constituted from a body of prescriptions, the expression of a patriarchal authoritarianism they reject. The Islam of the parents is only assumed by the daughters of Maugrabin immigrants as a component of identity: they concur in seeing themselves as “Muslim by descent”.

The three papers (of which only two appear in this issue) dedicated to the theme “Migrations, culture shock and religion” necessarily bring the old question of the relationship between the social identity and religious reference of actors to the forefront. The use actors make of their religious referent is never dissociable from the social position they occupy and the mobility strategy they adopt. Beyond the overly simplified paradigm which postulates the decline of the religious referent accompanying the transition from “tradition” to “modernity”, contemporary situations seem to indicate a renewed and complex use of a religious referent always associated with community membership.