Modernity reversed Islam’s orientation, making religion egalitarian while politics grew patronage-ridden
Evidence
The most significant cultural event in the Muslim world of the past 100 years has been a very major Reformation, a shift from mediationist religious brokerage to a symmetrical relationship between the deity and believers in conformity with the old, but previously unpractised, high theology. Suddenly religion is egalitarian and symmetrical, centralized, with an exclusive single deity and without mediators. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2046
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: The symmetry inversion (religion egalitarian, politics hierarchical) echoes how stripped observability in Saramago inverts the trust structure of society.
Related
- Modern secular authorities have displaced Islam as the arbiter of Muslim social life (similarity 0.80)
- Medieval Islam and Christendom were structurally opposite societies (similarity 0.79)
- Religious revival thrives in advanced, secularized Muslim societies, not backward ones. (similarity 0.79)
- Islamic doctrine has justified opposite political programs alike (similarity 0.79)
- Islam’s egalitarian message has been continuously contested by older river-valley social orders (similarity 0.78)