Religious Revival and Secularism in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Dobroslawa Wiktor-Mach

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110534634
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie islamique

The book explores the complex world of Islam from the perspective of its adherents and activists in Azerbaijan. Baku, the most secular Muslim capital city, is a battlefield for the minds and souls of "ethnic Muslims." Visiting pirs was till now the typical expression of religiosity among Azerbaijani Muslims. Sunni-Shia division was blurred. Nowadays, Shia and Sunni Muslim movements propose new distinctive identities. Foreign and local preachers took advantage of liberal religious policies of the 1990s to promote their ideas. Salafis stress the "pristine" Islam and the idea of universalism, while Shias underline rationality in their faith tradition. Turkish model of Islam is more inclusive towards local customs. Sufism, although not as powerful as before, also finds a committed audience. Finally, independent charismatic local leaders gain supporters. The book investigates how this pluralism affects both religious groups and believers. Competitive environment requires effective strategies and flexibility. In this process, the traditional dominance of Shiism is challenged by Sunni movements. Shiism, however, is not giving up and adapts its concepts and practices to contemporary contexts.

Chapter 1
Religion as a Field of Competition

Among many approaches in the social study of religion, a relatively recent one— the economics of religion—has many advantages in shedding new light on the religious revival taking place all around the world. The idea of applying the science of economics to explain patterns of religious activity and the place of religion in society can be traced to Adam Smith. He is regarded as a pioneer in taking a keen interest in functioning of what is now called the religious marketplace. A lot of reflections and discussions in Book V of his “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776) is devoted to religious institutions. As an economist and philosopher, Smith emphasized the positive effects of competition among religious institutions and stood against the alliance of religion with the state. Competition, in his view, has many functions. Looking from the political point of view, it is a force capable of contributing to social order. For religious institutions competition invigorates their activity towards ensuring survival. Believers, or consumers, on the other hand, gain more freedom of choice.1 Nowadays, researchers, both sociologists and economists, continue this idea of applying economics to exploration of religious activity and build their models using specific concepts and tools of modern economic theory. This approach assumes that people do not change the basic principles guiding their behavior when changing settings from “profane” to “sacred.” The same rules apply to workplace or business as to church. Religion and its impact on society is regarded as too crucial to simply be excluded from academic research. This paradigm is possible due to the redefinition of the scope of economics. Earlier, this discipline was concerned mainly with wealth and money. Contemporary horizons of economists are much wider and focus on utility, or satisfaction also in many “non-market” areas of social life (Ekelund, Hébert, Tollison, 2006, p. 5). In his Nobel lecture on November 1992, Gary S. Becker (1992) argued for extending the economic approach to analyze numerous social issues, which until then had not been regarded as the domain of economists. This vision inspired many scholars, including sociologists and economists of religion. The academic encounter between economics and religion does not cause so many surprises as in the past.

The goal of this chapter is to discuss the topic of religious pluralism and basic theoretical propositions of the religious economies approach that provides the theoretical background for this book. The first sections discuss the concept of religious pluralism which is a necessary, although insufficient, condition of competition and its relation to religiosity. It is one of the key topics in the contemporary sociology of religion responding to the urgent need to better understand the fast changing religious landscape in the world and, in particular, local contexts. The prevailing definitions of pluralism do not simply relate to the situation of coexistence of many religions or forms of religions. Pluralism which is interesting for researchers is the complex and dynamic system of social interactions between religious actors. There are interactions of various kinds, such as an ecumenical dialogue or a collaboration in a humanitarian crisis. For analyzing changes in the religious realms, however, it is important to pay attention to the process of competition among religious actors as well as to the context in which competition takes place. When we define pluralism in such a wide sense then it exhibits many similarities to the market approach and both can be linked together in looking for understanding of the contemporary religious revival in Islam.

The review of a variety of changes triggered by the diversification of religious spheres will follow. The global environment is increasingly competitive, and migrations, travels, mass media and internet show other belief systems. Religions, in order to survive, cannot ignore this fact and continue their traditional activities in an unchanged way. The forces of the religious market have an impact on both sides of the interactions—religious institutions (firms) and believers (customers). After presenting the influence of religious pluralism, I will discuss the religious market hypothesis proposing a causal relationship between pluralism and religious activity. The idea that religious engagement is not static but can depend on various external factors, including the level of pluralism and activism of religious actors, raises controversies and questions. The issue whether a higher number of religious firms and entrepreneurs, using the language of the economics of religion, and their struggle for believers impact the level of religiosity has till now not been settled. It thus remains an open question for further investigations. Another part of this chapter will be devoted to the role of competition and regulation—chief factors identified in the model as linking the levels of pluralism with the levels of religious activity.

As discussions around this proposition show, there is a need to widen the scope of research on religious pluralism. The mechanisms postulated by the theory should be better understood, not only assumed. One possible way, that has directed my study as well, is to abandon the causal relationships postulated by the theory and search for other possibilities. The anthropological perspective which I applied in the research meant giving voice to the actors themselves. To understand the impact of the unprecedented religious pluralism I was asking people questions about how they perceive the situation. I conducted interviews with both sides of the market—religious “entrepreneurs” who are trying to attract people to their communities, mosques or movements, and with people looking for a suitable Islamic branch and searching for a religious leader they could trust. I observed meetings with religious topics and visiting mosques to see what attracts people to each form of Islamic religion and why. During interviews I asked people about their individual way to religion, when and in which circumstances they became attracted to religious ideas. Anthropological methods, although being non-representative, were useful in gaining more understanding of how competition in a plural religious landscape works.

So far, most studies in the economics of religion relied on quantitative data and applied to the United States and some other Western states. This is understandable as the researchers who began exploring this topic asked questions relevant to the reality they experienced living and working in these countries. If, however, the theory has universal ambitions and aims at constructing general laws of human behavior, it should encompass data from other political, economic and socio-cultural contexts. It is a challenging task, because American data on religion are more detailed than elsewhere and were systematically collected for a longer time. They are obviously not perfect; the U.S. government does not survey all the aspects of religion interesting to scholars, and religious institutions frequently use the data in their PR activities, for example keeping inclusive records of believers (e. g., the Church listing all baptized people as its members even if some of them never attend a mass or pray). Besides, religious behavior is observable only to some extent. Measuring beliefs, values, morality or symbolic imagery poses numerous challenges. It is hard to evaluate the accuracy of respondents’ answers to questions on their personal beliefs and attitudes. Nonetheless, in the U.S. context researchers can find more data on the history and present situation of religious market than other parts of the world. There is a long history of social surveys covering religious issues. Although several research institutions organize surveys also in the non-Western states, the data are less abundant and less detailed than in the U.S (Iannaccone, 1998, p. 1467–1468). The post-Soviet states, for example, have had a complicated history in regard to state-religion relations and the official data lack reliability. Religion was, to various degrees, an enemy to the state, and religious ideas were considered to be a threat to socialist ideology. Religions which survived were either collaborating with the state or went underground and access to them was limited for researchers.

Applying the market model to the Islamic religion in the post-Soviet context is challenging and creates many problems. The economics of religion was mostly developed to deal with institutional forms of the Christian religion. This aspect is one of the main differences in dealing with Islam from the point of view of researchers. Contrary to Catholic Christians, Muslims do not have a Pope, or a formally recognized hierarchy of priests with parishes extending all over the world. The institutional character of Islam is different. Religious rites can be private and do not require any intermediary, although this may happen. There is no direct equivalent to the church, or “religious firm” in Islam. There is no central institution in the Muslim world which has the right to excommunicate other groups or define what is proper in Islam. Therefore, there is a need to better conceptualize what “Islamic market” means and who are the players. Many communities or movements operate independently and the forms of organization differ, making it more difficult for comparisons than in the case of Christianity. In order to better conceptualize the Islamic market I have taken inspirations from Pierre Bourdieu (1991), whose ideas related to the topic of religious revival I present in the final section of this chapter. The concepts developed by the French sociologist in his analyses of a religious field seem to be a fruitful tool to complement the theory of the economics of religion. Bourdieu’s concept of a “field” shares many common characteristics with the market approach, but it is a wider term and I believe it better suits the situation of Islam. The religious field is an arena of interactions, including competition, between various kinds of participants and players, not only churches. This concept is more flexible and makes it easier to analyze the transactions and interactions between the faithful and religious actors offering goods and services. Bourdieu’s writings also point to the need to explore deeply two internal elements of competition—“capital” and “strategy”. This focus on the struggle for capital and the unequal access to it, as well as on the strategy which every player on the market must choose in a, more or less conscious, process can be a fruitful extension to the market model. It is also a convenient tool for qualitative research helping to formulate adequate questions to believers and religious entrepreneurs. All these reflections do not try to undermine the economics of religion as a research model. It is a paradigm that has many successes in explaining the evolution of religion as well as the behaviors of people and organizations on the religious market. But it can be further expanded, with the help of Bourdieu’s concepts, by taking into consideration the differences in religions in the world, especially outside the Judeo-Christian world.

Another suggestion for improving the market model of religion is to test the theory in non-Western contexts, which have largely been neglected in scientific explorations. Such tests require that the concepts and their operationalization are suitable for non-Christian and non-Western societies, in the case of this study, for a Muslim country. Responding to these challenges, I propose to understand pluralism not only as a multitude of religious groups or “firms,” but much wider, as a set of options consisting of “discursive traditions,” which is a term employed in the anthropology of Islam. Representatives of various traditions constantly influence and challenge each other, thus prompting change in the belief system, ideology, organization, goods or services provided by them.

1.1Studying Religious Pluralism

Two interesting shifts have taken place in the recent scholarship on religion. Firstly, this subject has returned from the marginal position it occupied in sociology since around the 1950s to the mainstream field of social research. For decades students had been discouraged from studying religious problems. “Why invest in studying something that was destined to wither and die,” mentors advised (Smith, 2008, p. 1561). A bulk of books and articles on religion has recently been published by prestigious scientific companies. Numerous enterprises attempting to understand the vast and complex area of religious phenomena are noticeable. This unexpected change is related to a general trend in social sciences of religion to widen the scope of research by increasing the extent of observations from non-Western religious traditions and cultures (see Zielińska, 2009). World events and religious movements since the mid-1970s, indicating an increasing vitality of religion around the globe, have gradually attracted scientists’ attention. The cold war finished and religion became a factor in ethnic conflicts and wars. Rising nationalisms included religion in their agendas. At the same time, we are currently observing the revival of evangelical Christianity, the global spread of Protestant movements and a growing popularity of transnational Islamic networks, such as the Salafists. In that process of religious ferment on nearly all continents, new stimuli to theoretical developments have appeared, resulting in turbulent discussions in social sciences.

Secondly, the issue of religious pluralism emerged in the centre of the debate on religion. Obviously, the phenomenon of pluralism existed in the past, to mention some examples, such as the Silk Road, multi-ethnic and multi-religious Andalusia ruled by Muslims, or toleration of religious dissidents in Poland-Lithuania. The Tatar population living in Poland for several centuries managed to keep their attachment to Islam, although the architecture of their mosques resembles that of Catholic churches. The process of exchanges and interactions between Catholic Poles and Muslim Polish Tatars resulted in striking similarities in many ideas on religion and its practice (Wiktor-Mach, 2008). Each of the world religions has its own local characteristics with elements of ethnicity, nationality, and culture influencing the overall content and form of religion. Religious traditions adjust and reveal a colorful diversity of customs, beliefs, and convictions. At the same time, research on contemporary modern religious pluralism have been dealing almost exclusively with the American situation. It was only with the sudden “globalization of pluralism” (Berger, 2006), that the problem emerged as a hot topic in the scientific study of religious behavior. At present, neither is the American religiosity studied as a “deviant case,” nor are scholars pursuing the thesis of “American exceptionalism” (Tiryakian, 1993). Social scientists analysing all aspects of pluralism and diversity in religion aspire to create theoretical propositions that could apply to non-American contexts as well.

Research on religious pluralism and conflict are an alternative to the influential functionalist paradigm in social sciences, which assumes an integrative role of religion in society. Far from Durkheim’s interpretations, studies of religious groups in a pluralistic society do not focus on common values or social bonds between people belonging to different social strata. Instead, they analyse religious figures as agents of conflict between groups and nations.

Some of the puzzles in contemporary debates on religious pluralism concern the questions: What is the impact of religious pluralism? Does the lack of a religious monopoly influence peoples’ faith? Does it induce religious organizations to change their way of doing? How does pluralism reshape the religious map? Or, more precisely, what is the relationship between religious pluralism and religious vitality? Does religious pluralism decrease religious participation or increase it? What are the mechanisms behind this relation? As we will see further in this chapter, the answers found in the literature are far from being conclusive.

The Concept of Pluralism

Pluralism is a concept used in different branches of humanities and social sciences, such as philosophy, ethics, political studies or sociology. It is thus inevitably understood in a variety of ways and thus has to be clarified. Which meaning of the term pluralism will be suitable for exploring the religious resurgence? If by pluralism we understood simply a coexistence of diverse religious orthodoxies and orthopraxies under the condition of at least a minimum level of tolerance and freedom of acting (“civic peace” (Berger, 2006)), then such definition would be too wide for the aim of this study. It will not be a useful tool for studying the situation in the post-Soviet religious sphere. We should widen the scope of the term to include not only the existence of diverse religious expressions but also some level of social interactions between representatives of various religions or branches of religion. Pluralism, therefore, is not diversity. It describes the field of engagements between religions. If we excluded an element of interactions, then pluralism would also refer to different forms of ghettos, isolation, or the caste system. It is imaginable that in such circumstances other religions do not constitute real options for the majority of believers who keep attachment to their religious tradition.

In scientific literature there are also other approaches to the concept of religious pluralism. Quite often it is defined in a purely institutional way (Jagodzinski, 1995); the number of churches or other sacred places, organized communities, sects, cults, or religious movements is taken as an indication of the level of religious pluralism. Researchers examining Muslim communities in the West underline an increase in the range of mosques, Muslim organizations, cultural centres, foundations, associations, with many such institutions acting in practice also as mosques. In this case it is possible to compare the level of pluralism on the state, regional or other levels of analysis. Although this approach is applicable to American or European contexts, it creates problems outside the Western world. Islamic religion is, to a larger degree than Christianity, based upon a direct relationship between people and the Creator. Although a lot of ritualistic life in Islam takes place publicly (e. g., hajj, prayer in mosques, pilgrimages), there is also a tendency to celebrate religion either privately, in the family circle or in informal groupings, which are not registered anywhere nor do they appear in statistics. There is no Islamic equivalent to the Catholic parish system of organization. Further, fundamentalist militant groupings will be unwilling to share true information on the numbers of their communities or members. The number of sacred places in Central Asia and Caucasus that are visited by believers of different faiths will not indicate the real level of pluralism. Finally, at least in Azerbaijan, participation of people in religious movements or an affiliation with a particular tradition does not require believers to attend mosques or other sacred places. Especially among young people links with a religious branch are upheld through the Internet, where people seek the advice of scholars, look for specific information, take part in discussion groups, or join on-line religious communities. Religious lifestyles begin to follow completely new patterns. The emergence of a network society poses new challenges to researchers.

These examples make us aware of the difficulties related to a purely institutional conceptualization of religious pluralism that can easily be quantified and employed in statistical research. Another intuitive understanding of pluralism is the diversity of religions in a given society. The number of religions would then indicate the level of pluralism. However, in many cases, the differences between distinct traditions inside Judaism, Hinduism or Islam are too huge to be neglected. It is probably the most important lesson from social research on Jews and Christians that inner divisions matter a lot. Orthodox Jews differ in many aspects from...