Ruthven met a young man in an English city whose father had come from rural Pakistan, was a Muslim, but not an intense one. As a student the young man developed a more personalized and intense religious commitment, in response to what we can recognize as the alienation of life in a modern industrial country.
> "There's no separation in Islam," he told me. "It's all just One.
> You can't be God-conscious some of the time and then
> unconscious."
> The remark was revealing, confirming the tendency noted by
> informed observers that a quantum change occurs in the religion
> of migrants moving from countryside to city, or from a Muslim to
> a European country. Werner Schiffauer, who has studied Turkish
> peasants in their home villages in Anatolia and in Germany, notes
> what he calls the 'islamisation of the self' among urban
> immigrants and migrants to Europe. In the village or homeland,
> religious practice is unreflecting, bound up with the rhythms of
> peasant life. In the village, society oscillates between two
> states according the rhythms dictated by the Islamic Calendar: at
> secular times the village consists largely of autonomous
> households, in which relations are based on the classic
> polarities of honour and shame and the 'reciprocal exchange of
> offerings and provocations'. During sacred times (the five daily
> prayers and congregational prayer on Fridays, the month of
> Ramadan, the holy nights and the 'ids or religious festivals) the
>
>> whole society 'changes into a religious community'. The Islamic
>> rituals establish an alternative social structure which
>> complements the secular one, in which brotherhood replaces
>> opposition, in which one no longer protects one's honour against
>> others but collectively honours God, in which sharing replaces
>> exchange and so forth. Religious thought in the village takes the
>> form of 'collective self-certainty', in which the legal norms,
>> the do's and don'ts of Islam, are central: discussion focuses on
>> such questions as 'whether the sin of eating pork is greater or
>> less than that of drinking raki, or how one can accumulate the
>> most religious merit'. Abroad, the Turkish Muslim no longer
>> encounters the person with whom he has ties of reciprocity but a
>> person of similar mind. 'During sacred times, society no longer
>> changes into a religious community, but, rather, one leaves the
>> society and enters the religious community.' The latter 'often
>> becomes a counterweight to the secular society, as well as a
>> place of retreat, a haven' where, in contrast to the outside
>> society, 'one is treated with respect and esteem, a place where
>> the value and dignity of individuals are recognized - as opposed
>> to the external society where one often feels discriminated
>> against and humiliated.' The process is an aspect of a wider
>>
>> phenomenon, the privatising of religion. A person's social
>> standing no longer depends on membership of the religious
>> community.
>>
This is an intensification of faith, but not a conclusive process. There
is historical precedent for this, and it is part of the process of the
process by which a conscious ego develops as people move out of peasant
culture.
Ruthven says --
>
> This privatising of religion is an essential component of what is
> generally called 'fundamentalism'. Among Christians, those who
> experience this change talk of a private relationship with Jesus,
> whom they claim to have taken as their personal saviour. Among
> Muslims such as Anwar, the privatisation is more likely to take
> the form of internalising the text of the Qur'an by self-
> education. Though few 'born-again Muslims' would acknowledge it,
> the privatising of Islam - which as Schiffauer points out,
> 'bespeaks a totally new concern with self' - is a necessary state
> on the road to secularity.
>
>
>
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema