SECULARIZATION AND ISLAM
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Secularisation and Islam
The study of religion is important for the rise of social sciences, especially for sociology. For Turner, it has been fundamental for 19th century sociologists, including Durkheim, Weber, Spencer and Simmel ( Turner, 1997:1). Religion is a social phenomenon since it "makes a difference" in social institutions ( Wallis and Bruce, 1992:11). One must look at the religion as the interpretation of God's message when talking about the monotheistic religions; Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Today, we encounter two basic assumptions about religion: that secularisation is a part of the mechanism of modernity which has a unilinear fate and that Islam is an exception to the decline of religion. In order to evaluate these assumptions, we have first to look at where the notion of religion derives in social sciences.
Today's ideas about religion come first of all from Durkheim, whose ideas parallels the general idea of the 19th century "climate of opinion", with the words of Carl Becker (Becker, 1932). These ideas were following a chain of assumptions. In industrial societies, rationality emerged as a principle. Then, the primitive belief systems came to be regarded as unscientific and irrational...