This book presents a collection of papers having a common theme in the question of modernity and mass culture. Two papers discuss aspects of this theme in a general, global context, all the others are concerned more specifically with the regional context of the Middle East.

The papers in this collection have a common theme in the question of modernity and mass culture. Two papers, those by Chaney and Featherstone respectively, discuss aspects of this theme in a general, global context, all the others are concerned more specifically with the regional context of the Middle East. All the articles in this collection were

The articles included in this "Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam" focus on two perspectives. Some link the comparative analysis of Islam to ongoing debates on the Axial Age and its role in the formation of major civilizations, while others are more concerned with historical constellations and sources involved in the formation of Islam as a religion and a civilization.

More than any other particular line of inquiry, new historical and sociological approaches to the Axial Age have revived the idea of comparative civilizational analysis and channeled it into more specific projects. A closer look at the very problematic place of Islam in this context will help to clarify questions about the Axial version of civilizational theory as well as issues in Islamic studies and sociological approaches to modern Islam. Contributors include Said Arjomand, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Josef van Ess and Raif G. Khoury.

Each of the editors are sociologists who have widely published on related issues.

As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban planning, regional networks, imaginary spaces, and spiritual hierarchies alike. This importance of saintly places has, however, become increasingly complicated and troubled by reformist currents within Islam, on the one hand, and the emergence of modern archeology and anthropology, on the other. While they have often tended to posit "the local" in opposition to "the universal", in this volume islamologists, anthropologists, and sociologists offer new ways of thinking about the local, the place, and the conceptual landscapes and spaces of saints. In this, its eighth volume, the Yearbook for the Sociology of Islam looks at different sites and regions around the Muslim world (notably Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia) not as "localized" versions of a universal Islam, but as constitutive of one particular outlook of the universalizing order of a world religion.

This book is dedicated to cultural and political figures, insti- tutions and ideas in a period of transition in Muslim soci- eties in Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia. It also tackles some of the flavors of civilizing processes in Singapore and surrounding areas. Its focus is on how Islam was re-created as an intellectual and sociopolitical tradition in Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Subjects of this inquiry include scholars who study Islam both as a textual and local tradition, students who take the heartlands of Islam as imaginative landscapes for cultural transformation, and politicians and institutions concerned with transmitting the idea of "Islamization."
Georg Stauth is an Orientalist and sociologist who specializes on the Middle East and has spent several years in Southeast Asia. Using this vantage point, he observes the emerging ideas of a modern Islamic future as forces of both local self-assertiveness and transnational relations.

Saints, their places, the rituals of their veneration - the heroes and martyrs they represent or to whom they are often connected with - and the beliefs in their powers have often been described as being counter-thematic to the constructive issues of modern society in our times. However, in the Middle East - and certainly this is true for many other world regions and other world religions - local saints, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, have gained a very ambiguous status in religious movements, political struggles and events of social re-construction. In the case of Islam, perhaps more openly, modernists and fundamentalists alike attempt to abolish or to re-formulate the agenda of venerating the saints. However, at the same time saints and their localities have become a sort of overcharged symbolic incidence in the modern presence of Islam, in politics, in the media and - perhaps on a more hidden ground - in the struggle of ideas. In this volume historians, islamologists, anthropologists and sociologists give a multiple description of the inherent issues of the unhampered continuity of Muslim saints and their significance. With this volume 5, the Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam is linking empirical research on individual saints (including cases from Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Syria and Morocco) with the debates around Islam and modernity. Georg Stauth teaches Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and has widely published on Islam and Theory of Modernity.