Near Middle East/North African Studies: Religion

Abstract

The study of religion in the Middle East and North Africa has been characterized since the 1960s by a heightened concern for how world religious traditions are articulated in specific yet rapidly changing historical, political, and local contexts in which the pace of communication has rapidly accelerated. The adherents in the region to the world religious traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all make universal claims for their respective faiths. At the same time, both believers and scholars interested in the study of religious traditions increasingly recognize the significance of the highly varied local and particular contexts in which religious symbols, ideas, and practices are understood. The ‘local knowledge’ produced in these contexts shapes social and political life. It also profoundly influences the understanding of ideas and practices considered global and universal. Since the mid-twentieth century, the rise of mass education, the proliferation of communications, and the greater ease of travel for labor migration, education, and pilgrimage have reconfigured how people think about their own and other religious traditions. Understandings of these other traditions are often distorted, but the fact of their existence is now foregrounded in the consciousness of many believers. They also are increasingly aware of how their interpretations of belief and practice vary from others sharing their faith. Local traditions of belief and practice, earlier taken for granted, increasingly are seen as systems of meaning and action to be articulated and reformed, argued and explained. Mass education and mass communication facilitate such awareness and, in changing the style and scale of possible discourse, reconfigure the nature of religious thought and action and encourage explicit debate over meaning. In the contemporary setting, participation in such debates is no longer confined to religious specialists, but involves others who compete for the mantle of religious and political authority.