Youth Religiosity: A Phenomenon Independent of the Ideological Establishment

This paper presents a reading of a new form of religiosity that emerged in the squares of the Arab revolutions: the religiosity of young people. The approach of the study rests on the understanding of religion as a cultural system, in an effort to make a socio-cultural contribution to the analysis of the relationship between models of the production of religiosity and the givens of the social structure in Arab societies with a composite makeup. This hypothesis rests on the assumption that the means of communication and imagination and their intensive spread within Arab societies have led to the emergence of a new public sphere – albeit a virtual one – that has broken the link between sheikh and pupil that organized Islam established as the basis for its model of education. When that happened, the Arab social subject could read more than one source for Islamic-political knowledge and chose what suited it or adopt an idea or ideas without the need for involvement with the educational model of the ideological establishment. In this way, the spread of the products of globalization within the middle and lower classes led to the creation of a virtual public sphere, which made religion, as a cultural system, slip out of the grip of the traditional social institutions and become available to the individuals and young people who disassembled it into values which they used to reclaim their social needs and human rights.

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This paper presents a reading of a new form of religiosity that emerged in the squares of the Arab revolutions: the religiosity of young people. The approach of the study rests on the understanding of religion as a cultural system, in an effort to make a socio-cultural contribution to the analysis of the relationship between models of the production of religiosity and the givens of the social structure in Arab societies with a composite makeup. This hypothesis rests on the assumption that the means of communication and imagination and their intensive spread within Arab societies have led to the emergence of a new public sphere – albeit a virtual one – that has broken the link between sheikh and pupil that organized Islam established as the basis for its model of education. When that happened, the Arab social subject could read more than one source for Islamic-political knowledge and chose what suited it or adopt an idea or ideas without the need for involvement with the educational model of the ideological establishment. In this way, the spread of the products of globalization within the middle and lower classes led to the creation of a virtual public sphere, which made religion, as a cultural system, slip out of the grip of the traditional social institutions and become available to the individuals and young people who disassembled it into values which they used to reclaim their social needs and human rights.

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