What Caused the Global Islamic Revival? - new paper!!
Hello gang! I have just written a ginormous paper, which systematically evaluates contending theories of the Global Islamic Revival, explores their interconnections, and presents a new theory - “The Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop”. Thank you so much for your ongoing support, critique is always welcome.
Abstract
The Global Islamic Revival represents one of the most significant religious-political movements of the past half-century, transforming societies across multiple continents.
What were its causes? Existing scholarship tends to focus on local idiosyncrasies – Egypt’s economic stagnation, Iran’s religious authoritarianism, state weakness in the Sahel, Pakistani return migration from the Gulf, repression in Uzbekistan, resistance to secular schooling in Indonesia, and Saudi-funded Wahhabism. While these country-level analyses are hugely valuable, they fail to explain why the revival occurred worldwide, even in prosperous countries like Qatar, Malaysia, and Britain.
This review synthesizes the global literature on the Islamic Revival and its profound impacts on gender relations, presenting a novel theoretical framework to explain why modernization has strengthened rather than weakened religious authority and homogenisation across the Muslim world.
Here’s the working paper.
Acknowledgements:
Usama Polani provided superb research assistance. For valuable feedback, I thank Michael Cook, Robert Hefner, Aaron Rock-Singer, Jared Rubin, Arpit Gupta and Daron Acemoglu and Malika Zeghal. All errors are mine. This research was supported by the O’Shaughnessy Fellowship, Open Philanthropy, ACX Grants and Leverhulme.
That's a great survey. Just a couple of thoughts, off the top of my head:
1. Among the organizations that worked to homogenize Islam as practiced, I think the Tablighi Jamat is key, especially in South Asia.
2. I wonder if colonialism plays a role in determining whether exposure to modern media and technology increases liberalism or results in a backlash to it. Is the backlash worse in places that were colonized by a European nation? Does the duration of colonization matter?
Hello, I wonder did you read E . Todd his book about the origin of family system ? As a french demograph and anthropologist he's interested in this issues since 1984 ! The determination of political system by familial system tourough europe and then eurasia ...
Nevertheless it's an interesting and clear synthesis of modern days changes . I went to Indonesia ten years ago and i was marked by the proliferation of mosque on christian islands like Flores and the diffusion of islam by riches and hifi speacker for the call to the prayer even if less than one third of the city was muslim . It was brand new modern Mosques contrasting with the relative poverty of the surroundings .