L’auteur

Mohamed A. Bamyeh, sociologue, est actuellement professeur d’études internationales au Macalester College à Saint Paul, Minnesota. Il est par ailleurs l’éditeur d’une revue intitulée Passages : Journal of Transnational and Transcultural Studies. D’origine jordanienne, il a déjà enseigné à l’Université de Georgetown, l’Université de New York, SUNY-Buffalo, et de l’Université du Massachusetts. Il a reçu son doctorat en sociologie à l’Université de Wisconsin-Madison en 1990. Ses champs de recherche incluent notamment les études islamiques et la sociologie de la religion. Avec son livre "The social origins of Islam", il a reçu le Prix d’honneur de l’association Albert Hourani pour les études moyen-orientales.

Presentation

Explores the genesis of Islam for insight into the nature of ideological transformation.

The story of the origins of Islam provides a rich and suggestive example of sweeping cultural transformation. Incorporating both innovation and continuity, Islam built upon the existing cultural patterns among the peoples of the Arabian peninsula even as it threatened to eradicate these same patterns. In this provocative interdisciplinary study, Mohammed A. Bamyeh combines perspectives from sociology, literary studies, anthropology, and economic history to examine the cultural ecology that fostered Islam.

Highlighting the pivotal connections in pre-Islamic society between the emergence of certain economic practices (such as trade and money-based exchange), worldview (as rendered in pre-Islamic literature and theology), and the reconfiguration of transtribal patterns of solidarity and settlement, Bamyeh finds in the genesis of Islam a sophisticated model for examining ideological transformation in general.

At the heart of Bamyeh’s enterprise are close readings of both the Qur’an and the pre-Islamic poetry that preceded it. Bamyeh uncovers in these texts narrative and pedagogical content, poetic structure, use of metaphor, and historical references that are suggestive of societies in transition. He also explores the expressive limits of the pre-Islamic literature and its transmutation into Qur’anic speech in the wake of social transformation.

Emphasizing the organic connections between belief structures, economic formations, and modes of discourse in pre-Islamic Arabia, The Social Origins of Islam explains how various material and discursive changes made the idea of Islam possible at a particular point in history. More broadly, it persuasively demonstrates how grand cultural shifts give rise to new systems of faith

(Source http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/bamyeh_social.html#TOC)

Table des matières

Introduction

Part I: The Ground

1. Ideology of the Horizons
Horizon, Vision, Settlement—Halting and Discourse—The Camel, the Path, and the Marketplace

2. Socioeconomy and the Horizon of Thought
Sedentarization—Money, Trade, and Abstract Thought—Mecca—The Nomadic Flux—Kinda

3. Social Time, Death, and the Ideal
Rendering the Experience—Idealization and the Past—Mortality and the Future—Waiting

4. Pre-Islamic Ontotheology and the Method of Knowledge
Paganism and the Idea of Ritual—Reformers, Hanifism, Pagan Monotheism—Examples and Commentary

5. The Discourse and the Path
Forms, Codes, Words—Nature, Text, Ruins—The Wandering Logic—Sources of Structural Stability

Part II: The Faith

6. Prophetic Constitution
The Land Dreams of a Prophet—Constitution of Sagehood: Knowledge, Foreknowledge—The Tear of the Poet and the Fear of the Prophet: Failures of Belonging

7. The House of Umma and the Spider Web of the Tribe
The Tribe—The Ruins of the Tribe—Fitnah, Hijra, War—The Satanic Verses and Their Background—The Boundaries of the Umma—Hudaybiyyah and the Paradigms of the Umma

8. Austerity, Power, and the Worldly Exchange
Death, Subjectivity, and Identity—Austerity, Justice, and Perishing: Moses and ‘Ubayd—God’s Contracts—War and the Code of Justice—Fate and the Legitimacy of Acquisition

9. In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Origins, the System, and the Accident

Notes
Bibliography
Index