Summary
Contents
Subject index
Being Muslim and Working for Peace explores various ways in which religious beliefs, ritual practices and dynamics of belonging impact the politics of Muslim peace activists in Gujarat, and traces how their activism in turn transforms their sense of being. It challenges popular notions about Muslims in India and questions ill-conceived research designs in the sociology of religion.
More than a decade after the 2002 riots in Gujarat, this empirical typology sheds light on the diversity of Muslim civil society and Muslims in civil society. Muslim peace activists in post-conflict Gujarat experience the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ as a personal dynamic; as faith-based actors, secular technocrats, emancipating women and doubting professionals, they struggle for a better future in diverse and sometimes surprising ways. By taking their diversity seriously, this book sharpens the distinction between ambivalence and ambiguity, and provides fresh perspectives on religion and politics in India today.
Why Individuals Matter
Why Individuals Matter
All the world's a stage, or—more precisely, if less graciously put—the crystallization of rules into roles is the basic fact of society and thus of social science. (Dahrendorf 1973: v)
For this book, I spoke with many people, but primarily with 21 individuals, whose stories I collected in many hours of conversation, and whom I asked to fill psychometric questionnaires. How can these few individuals matter, and why should they? These two questions need not inspire a long, detailed and probably boring methodological detour, but they need to be addressed at least briefly. This chapter thus provides a crisp epistemological interlude before turning to the empirical core of my study.
Social scientists generally agree that most people do not act at random; ...
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