Cultural Sociology

Cultural sociology brings cultural analysis to the field of sociology, creating space for analytic questions about meaning. It looks at society through the lens of culture, considering how cultural theory can inform sociological understandings of individual and group behaviors and activities.

In particular, cultural sociology considers how culture inflects and affects social structures and organizations, whether at the community, national, or global level. Conversely, it has also been used to approach cultural phenomena from a sociological perspective—phenomena such as mass media, consumption, art, ethnic identities, and gender relations. In this case, scholars from a range of disciplines, trained and located around the world, have brought cultural theories [Page Iviii]and sociological perspectives to bear upon the historic and contemporary Middle East, using sociological tools to analyze cultural phenomena while taking culture seriously as a field of sociological inquiry.

The Encyclopedia

The purpose of this volume is to provide readers with a comprehensive reference work that can answer their questions and guide their research on the historic and contemporary Middle East, through the lens of cultural sociology. As a scholarly, multiple-author work, this volume will serve as an accessible but cogent resource for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars of other geographic areas considering comparative projects, and serious-minded general readers.

This volume is divided into three subsections: Prehistory to 1250 covers the years from the evolution of humanity through the foundations of the three Abrahamic faiths, the establishment of the caliphate, the rapid and widespread adoption of Arabic and the slow emergence of a Muslim majority throughout the region, and ends with the Mongol invasions of the late 1240s.

The years 1250 to 1920 cover the medieval, early modern, and part of the modern period—nearly seven centuries of crucial and wide-sweeping developments. That period covers the institutionalization of Islam's religious scholarly class, the ulama, as well as of its more spiritual approach, known as Sufism. Politically, it covers the region's reconstruction in the wake of the Mongol invasion and the emergence of the two great early modern empires: the Ottoman Empire, which stretched from modern Turkey to modern Algeria, and the Safavid, which governed Iran and which transformed Iran from a Sunni state into a Shiite state. Finally, it includes the many cultural, social, political, and technological developments of the period—from the capitalist speculation of the Tulip Period to the dismantling of the millet system and the push for constitutional governments in the late 1800s—and the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

The third section, 1920 to Present, looks at the modern and contemporary Middle East—a period primarily defined by the rise of nation-states, the last throes of European colonialism, cold war politics, and state-heavy, socialistic postcolonial regimes.

Topics addressed in the first section of this volume include the origins of the alphabet, Byzantium, Christianity, the figure of Abraham and his family in the Muslim tradition, art, architecture, major intellectuals of the early Muslim period like Ibn Rushd (known in Europe as Averroes), nomadism, understandings of race and skin color, the institution and morality of slavery, the position of women throughout this period, and the Turkic influence on the Muslim world starting from the early medieval period. These subjects range from the political to the religious, from the artistic to the familial; together they help paint a portrait for readers of daily life in the Middle East during this period.

Topics addressed in the second and third sections continue in the same vein, with articles on key modern reformers like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, fields of inquiry like mathematics, broad themes like nationalism, key economic and political drivers like oil, cultural figures like Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, and daily life matters such as food and health. Readers who use this volume as an encyclopedia and search for particular articles of interest will find these articles' combination of conciseness and depth to be invaluable; readers who read through the volume as a coherent work will gain even more insight, developing a chronological, historically grounded sense of the culture and society of the Middle East, past and present—one deeply grounded in the analytic interplay between the fields of sociology and cultural studies.