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The Roots of the Revival
The
revival of religious sentiment in Asia and Africa is directly linked
to several global trends. Rather than a mere return to a pristine
past, the Islamic revival is connected to the "malaise of
modernity."(6)
Many
Muslims link modernity to an increase in social problems such as
higher divorce and crime rates, substance abuse, and family
breakdown.(7)
In
troubled times this social miasma has engendered a search for a new
identity to meet the needs of the modern age and respond to the
challenges of an uncertain future.
In
times of great social transformation a natural recourse is the
revival of religion. During the Mongol occupation of Russia
(1237-1480), for example, the Orthodox Church experienced one of its
greatest periods of growth.(8)
A
similar phenomenon occurred in the United States in the
mid-nineteenth century with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
Social upheaval engenders a reaction where one seeks stability and
security by a return to the familiar. In Muslim societies, given the
centrality of Islam in a believer's life, a religious revival
becomes almost axiomatic. Writing specifically about the Muslim
reaction to modernity, James Piscatori observes:
Muslims
are in a sense looking for-old rites of incorporation that appear to
be new even as they are familiar. Religion, precisely because in the
past it answered questions about life and death and provided its
followers with moral links to each other, becomes the means by which
individuals hope to answer the new question of what it is to be
modern, and, in so doing, to gain perhaps a reassuring, common
world-view.(9)
The
resurgence of religious sentiment over the last twenty years in
Muslim countries is not an isolated phenomenon, nor is it due to the
idiosyncracies of Muslims. What distinguishes Islam from other
religiously-based revivalist movements is "that Islam professes
to be a political religion in which certain religious principles
were formulated with a clear intention of implementing them and even
transforming them into institutions."(10)
Speaking
of an Islamic revival implies something novel and unprecedented.
Islamic history, however, is replete with examples of religiously
inspired protest movements.(11)
The
current resurgence falls within the same continuum. A common thread
among most Islamist groups is that they are reactions to
contemporary social and economic problems. There exists a popular
perception, often based on sensationalized media coverage, that the
turmoil in the Muslim world is due to the return of medieval
dogmatic tendencies defying rational explanation. Yet there is
considerable diversity among the various Islamic trends-from
moderate to militant.
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