Muslim Sociology for Human Rights E-Book

Milena Rampoldi

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 64

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This booklet is a manifesto in favour of a Muslim sociology focused on change and development, social justice/equity and multiculturalism. If Muslim sociology is based on interdisciplinarity and open research, it can represent an important force to struggle for human rights in Muslim countries. In particular, Muslim sociology can be an important non-eurocentric force in the struggle against slavery in Mauritania, the last stronghold of the Muslim world where slavery is still practised. Muslim sociology can overcome the still existing dialectics between aboli-tionism and anti-abolitionism in Muslim communi-ties by showing how the core message of the Quran can be exclusively abolitionist. By explaining different methods and approaches of Muslim sociology and by affirming the importance of opposing to positivism in sociology, the author Milena Rampoldi shows how microsociology and macrosociology must be integrated dynamically in order to deeply understand the relationships between master and slave and at the same time the institution of slavery based on racial discrimination, perpetuation of rape, and total reification of human beings who were born free. Muslim sociology is a discipline based on inclusion, promotion of knowledge/competence, respect and struggle for human rights.

Leseprobe

ProMosaik LAPH 2024

Copyright: Milena Rampoldi

Printing: EPUBLI

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Cover Photo:

A scene from Mauritania. Geraint Rowland/Flickr. Creative Commons.

Dedication

To all sociologists for human rights and change in the Muslim world

Introduction

Photo by Anti-Slavery International

This booklet is an extract from my PhD thesis at A.I.U. concluded in September 2024 in the field of sociology concerning strategies and approaches to overcome slavery in Mauritania in particular and in the Muslim world in general.

The core question I started with in my research was the following:

In terms of an "interpretive sociology", how can/will an internal Islamic perspective contribute to the abolition of slavery in postcolonial Mauritania?

In my research paper focussing on Muslim slavery in Mauritania, history of contemporaneous sociology in Western Africa (by starting with the Mauritanian sociologist and historian Saïdou Kane (1947-2006) in chapter I and the journalist and human right activist from the today’s Benin Louis Hunkanrin (1887-1964) in chapter II and then inserting the Futa Toro historical events of two Almami opposing slavery around 1800, as an example of an opposition to the slaveholder economy and society in the beginning of modern times in Senegal in chapter III, and the inner-Muslim dialectics between abolitionism and anti-abolitionism (chapter IV) when it comes to slavery in Muslim societies and the concept of ethnical differentiation in Islam (called the concept of “race” by the Dutch Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) I introduced in my chapter V), I pursued various and overlapping objectives.

However, all said objectives focus on the science of sociology seen as an interdisciplinary science and as a laboratory of interdisciplinary hermeneutics posi-tionned at the interface between cultural studies, ethnology, psychology, intercultural psychiatry, the-ology, educational sciences, sociology of religion, history, human rights, and practical philosophy as main research topics. 

I am convinced that sociology is the unifying disci-pline which will be able to structure Muslim sociology as a sociology fostering change. If we start from sociology, we will also be able to overcome any kind of fatalism and immobilism characterising many Muslim societies which seem to show no potential of change and future-oriented development towards a better world.

The fact that I decided to start my research on Mauritanian slavery and its eradication from a sociological standpoint is based on my firm convic-tion according to which sociological studies about Mauritania and thus a sociology-focused (multi-method based) starting point can support our deeper understanding as researchers and human right acti-vists as well as our dynamic promotion of social/po-wer change in this where slavery still exists today1 despite of various legal prohibitions both during French colonialism2 and post-colonial independence and de-colonisation of the contemporaneous Islamic Republic of Mauritania3.

Muslim Sociology for an Internal Solution

Photo by Anti-Slavery International

The above-mentioned objectives can be achieved if we start from a perspective pointing out the importance of going beyond and opposing to any kind of Eurocentrism and leading to a reformism from inside the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Muslim society of Mauritania to overcome slavery in the country from a Muslim abolitionist perspective by making use of different sociological methods and approaches and to integrate all the freed slaves into the multicultural society of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania by empowering them and creating real and measurable educational, social and professional perspectives for them. 

Indeed, we need an internal solution of the issue of slavery in Mauritania starting from a deeply Mus-lim/Islamic perspective based on egalitarianism and multi-perspectivism, competence-oriented models like that of Ahmed Zaki Yamani4 (1930-2021) shifting from women political rights to a paradigm focused on competence and empowerment of women in Muslim politics and society, and Jamal Badawi (born in 1939) with his model based on business-management leadership5 when they talk about human rights/com-petences of women in politics and interdisciplinary and multi-cultural approach to society, whereby in this context, of course, gender-specific, anti-discri-minatory and anti-racist solutions and perspectives shall not be bracketed out. 

About gender-specific (un)competence in politics, Jamal Badawi exemplarily and ironically states6:

„Der Koran plädiert für die Partizipation der Frauen in Staat, Gesellschaft und in sämtlichen gesellschaft-lichen und politischen Tätigkeiten, bis auf wenige Ausnahmen, die mit deren geschlechtlicher Beson-derheit in Verbindung stehen. Solche zulässige Tätig-keiten schließen das parlamentarische Leben und die Vertretung sämtlicher Bereiche der Gesellschaft ein; diese Tätigkeiten schließen die Partizipation in der Rechtsprechung und im Erlass der Verordnungen und der Überwachung der öffentlichen Angelegenheiten ein. Wenn man sich dem widersetzt, indem man behauptet, dass die muslimischen Frauen „unwissend und unbedacht“ sind, so übersieht man die Tatsache, dass der Großteil der Männer in den muslimischen Ländern auch „unwissend und unbedacht“ ist. Aber das ist kein Grund, ihnen ihre politischen Rechte abzuerkennen…“

For what concerns the affirmation of an opposition to Eurocentrism in sociological studies about Africa and the Muslim world, I have based my point of view on Edward Said’s (1935-2003) statement in his work “Orientalism” written in the 1970s and still an essential paradigm for me today:

“From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the Orient and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident (British, French, or Ame-rican), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist” (page 12).”7

The attitude described by Edward Said towards all cultures, societies and religions which are not considered as typically Western, is “Orientalist” within the meaning according to which the so-called Orient is objectivized by being deprived of its own subjectivity whereby the Western culture misuses the dialectically opposed “Orient” to define itself and find its own identity by opposing to the so-called “other”.8

Semantics of Sociology

Photo by Media Foundation for West Africa

First of all, before introducing different methods to be applied in Muslim sociology, I would like to outline what sociology means to me personally and which general concepts, paradigms, approaches, and points of view I would like to include in the field of Muslim sociology and in my future research dedi-cated to the various correlated subjects.

There are many definitions of sociology we could combine into a mosaic or puzzle to show different perspectives and approaches of sociology as science and as interdisciplinary method at the service of social, institutional, and political change in today’s Mauritania in the name of human rights, egalitarianism, social justice and equity.

However, as affirmed by Morakinyo and Akiwowo9 some methods and theories applied in sociology, are rather “rooted in the cultures and traditions of the western world than the non-western cultures and traditions.”10

The same criticism is moved by the researcher Syed Farid Alatas teaching at the National University of Singapore11 who lamented how modes of knowledge production in sociology were Eurocentric dominated and consequently “the condition of academic dependency is related to the global division of labour in social sciences, which, I argue, play a significant role in maintaining the structures of academic dependency.”

This is the exact reason why we need an innovative sociology communicating and focussing on seman-tics from an intercultural and multicultural point of view by creating a world of peace as already affirmed by the researcher A.C. Leyton in his article written back in 1956 where he correctly states12:

“In the sphere of international politics alone it is urgent that the semantic, social and psychological problems inherent in the use of language be examined, and that understanding of them be applied in international consultive bodies and tribunals; urgent if we are to hope for a more secure and more stable world, urgent if ever we are to achieve the rationale for peace.”

Max Weber: For a Sociology of “deutend verstehen”13

Photo by CNN