Bishara’s Theory and the Horizons of Comparing Dynamics of Contemporary Islamic Religiosity Prolegomena in Light of the Crisis of Current Models

Abstract

This paper seeks to shed light upon one facet of the contemporary interest of Azmi Bishara's work Religion and Secularism in a Historical Context, inasmuch as it is a theoretical achievement that has at its disposal new methodological concepts and terminology that makes sense of the outcomes of the religious, and the dynamics of religiosity in contexts of modern secularization, aside from those which have become mainstays of the classical theory of secularization. Bishara applies these terms to an approach to Islamic religiosity and its modern, present-day dynamics, including its most controversial phenomena: Islamic political movements ( Ikhwani, Salafi, and Jihadi ) and sectarian groups. From the classical perspective on secularization, these phenomena once characterized the rigidity and resilience of Islamic religiosity, as well as the exclusion of Muslim societies from the process of secularization, but in Bishara's theory of the outcomes of piety within secularization they instead represent the dynamics of this religiosity, as part of the particularity of the outcomes of secularization as witnessed by modern Arab states. Therein, this paper finds an opening for new horizons in the study of contemporary modes of religiosity.