6 - Religion and social stratification

Summary

I will show in this chapter how the operations of the market and the qualities appropriate to the successful entrepreneur or capitalist are legitimised by urban religion. I suggest that rural and ‘proletarian’ religion has the opposite tendencies, for it stresses rather the need to communicate with the Great Patron, and to placate belligerent spirits. Moreover it emphasises not the worthiness of the individual but attempts to preserve the solidarity of the segmentary unit, the ksar, by creating religious community among its most tenuously attached members, its women. I show, further, that women are considered intrinsically dangerous to men, and suggest that this belief corresponds to a real antagonism of interests. There is a structural conflict between the social necessity of marriage, and the superior rewards of kinship especially for women.

I mean to use religion in a general sense to refer to that sphere of action and belief where ideas of the supernatural intercept and account for the social and physical orders, introducing into each a symbolic and moral dimension. The symbolic and moral relationships brought thus into dialectic with these orders are conceived both as their cause and as their result, and supply a rationalisation for anomaly and suffering.

As in the case of Buddhism and Christianity, the generality of the statements of Islam and the vast superstructure of commentary make possible a plethora of interpretations.