Towards A New Sociology?

Teaching a course on Women in Islam invokes a radical departure in restructuring the curriculum. It goes beyond revamping course content and critically examining discrete approaches to considering the framework and premise for a new sociology and anthropology. One of the more conspicuous consequences of this attempt affects the field of women's studies. Within the dominant academy, women scholars today are in the forefront of an effort to establish the credentials of a maiden field of gender studies against resistant frontiers where gender has been introduced more as an accoutrement and appendage on the periphery of existing disciplines. Unlike the prevailing practice, a restructured disciplinary format such as the one suggested here would make women's studies integral to both sociology and anthropology. Note, that we refer to "both" as discrete but related disciplines as a matter of concession to the current classification of knowledge, although this too can be open to debate. To illustrate the point relating to the re-appropriation of women's studies to the center of a field I shall focus for a moment on the idea of a New Sociology.

At the heart of the New Sociology is a conception of the moral community. The moral community is the foundation of the sane society and the ground of the legitimate polity. Introducing the moral community as a base category into our discourse on social knowledge transfers the focus of our sociological inquiry from the quantitative to the qualitative domain. At least it introduces a new plane of inquiry and re-orients its course in a manner that potentially transforms the sociological discourse and opens out a new field of possibilities. I am not suggesting that sociology be collapsed into ethics or into a discourse on moral philosophy. The moral community is not a disembodied abstraction. The moral community expresses an ideal that is embodied in the patterns of conduct and social relationships which define society at any given moment of time. The morality that animates the New Sociology is institutionalized and as such it is projected on the structures and functions that constitute society. Sociology remains essentially concerned with elucidating and explaining/ as well as interpreting and practically affecting the social aggregate that is its conventional field object. But the kind of questions that it raises, the units of its analysis, the resources it deploys in its field research, and the directions it explores as well as its more general objectives, would all have to be reconsidered in the light of redefining its theoretical matrix of inquiry.

The Old Sociology took its inspiration from a set of questions and concerns that arose in a specific historical context. It was nineteenth century Europe, in the aftermath of the intellectual enlightenment and in the tremors of the industrial revolution, that the classics that gave the discipline as it has come down to us its first characteristics and orientation. Without going into much detail, we can point to Durkheim's work on The Division of Labor in Society (1895, 1939) as a perfect example of the thrust of the discipline: and we say "perfect" for in addition to representing the primacy of the economic dimension which is the common denominator in all sociological inquiry that was shaping by the end of the nineteenth century, it also displays a less characteristic sensitivity for the moral implications of the material transformations underway. Our thesis is that Sociology, like the emergent disciplines of the time, arose on the crest of the positivist materialistic wave which defined the climate of opinion as much as the phase of historical evolution in Europe at the time. Eventually, the new discipline shifted its emphases and assumed new points of departure, whether in the direction of a greater empiricism or of a more privileged access to interpretative inquiry as opposed to the quest for causality. Yet, throughout the flux, mainstream sociology has continued to bear the indelible marks of its historical conception and its founding assumptions within a reductive matrix of positivist cognition.

If we carried this analogy of historical conception of the Old Sociology to the New Sociology, we could relate the latter to the growing prominence of the histories and cultures of the non-Western peoples and, even more, to the tensions that are born of the clash of cultures brought on by the historical encounter with the West, or to be more exact, to the intrusion and imposition of the West on the non-Western world. This encounter has not gone unrecognized in the Old Sociology where it has been articulated in terms of the impingement of modernity on tradition, with the generalized assumption that the West represented the former and the non-West the latter. In the course of this articulation, and carrying with it all the marks of the parent affiliation, the new sub-field of development studies was born. Evidently too, it is within this diversification and fragmentation of a field of social inquiry that the shaping discipline of women's studies has been developing in the past two decades or so as a token of the initial division of labor which gave sociology its genesis, and in deference to the progressive differentiation and specialization that is the mark of rationality in the modern age.

What the New Sociology contests is neither the rationality nor the genesis of the Old Sociology. Rather, it questions the adequacy of its premises and its relevance in the context of the socio-cultural dialectics of other historical traditions and other peoples. Indeed, it questions the adequacy and relevance, or sufficiency/autonomy, of the Old Sociology given the historical evolution of a post-industrial society in the trans-Atlantic communities. The clash of cultures between the West and the non-Western world has merely underlined the salience of factors other than those of an exclusively materialistic and positivist prominence in shaping societies and, by extention, in defining the epistemological frontiers of relevant and meaningful social inquiry. It is the pressures of the historical transition within Western societies themselves as they move from the nineteenth century industrial model to a post-industrial, technetronic, or communications model at the turn of the twenty first century that is inducing a re-examination of the premises of the Old Sociology within the profession. The latter however continues to operate within its original constraints, and is thus ultimately thwarted in its attempts at restructuring the field. Women's Studies, as a privileged niche in the academy, is shaping and impacting at the cross-roads of this transition in society and the profession, and it is similarly bounded and hedged by the same operating constraints which limit its horizons and its reach. However, the climate induced by this transition and by the frustrations it engenders should sustain the momentum which is vital to any breakthrough in the Old Sociology and its affinates. This too should constitute the edge of a critical awareness and a reflective self-consciousness which should dispel complacency and urge self-transcendence.

This is where the New Sociology which is steadily crystallizing on the horizons of the historical encounter with the non-Western peoples and cultures can give an impetus to critical reflection in an established field. I want to make a comment on the character of that encounter, on its intensity and potential before I go on to identify something of the content of the New Sociology.

First. In principle, the encounter between the West and the non-West has had the generalized and common impact of underlining the significance of culture as a composite of values and beliefs and practices which signify an integrated way of life that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of an economy and its commodity centered categories.

Second. The impact for the West of the encounter with the Other has varied according to the degree of geo-historical and cultural proximity. The more remote, the less the friction and ensuing tensions, and the easier it was to isolate and insulate the implications of the "cultural" discovery, and in consequence, to reduce its `disruptive' implications for the Old Sociology and its metrics. The reverse is true.

Third. The nature of this encounter and its implications have been exacerbated in the specific case of the encounter with the Muslim non-West, especially, in the Mediterranean societies of the Middle East and North Africa and their continental extensions in the Islamic heartlands. Here the historical legacy of the complex relationship between Islam and the West has come to bear fully on events as well as cognition. It was natural that there should come into prominence the crisis of the Old Sociology and its affiliates, including comparative politics, developmental studies and women's studies. On the positive side, it is not surprising that the elements of the New Sociology should emerge in the ensuing momentum of the encounter here.

 

Fourth. The foregoing observations draw attention to the fact that while the New Sociology may be developing in the specific context of addressing contemporary social realities in the Muslim world, and while it is evidently inspired and influenced by an Islamic worldview, its relevance transcends its immediate context. This is so by virtue of both a historical and cultural affinity with other societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America - the continental expanse of the `third world' as it is conceived in a Euro-centric power political bearing. (Or, the hemispheric `South' as it is conceived on a vertical North/South axis defined in terms of a relatively more global developmental bearing). This extended relevance is emphasised by the nature and scope of the Islamic worldview that conceptually and historically defies any ethnocentric delimitations and contains within it the seeds of an imminent universality. It is by virtue of these arguments of a historical and cultural affinity, and given the substantial worlview at hand, that the benefits of the New Sociology are potentially relevant to the self-understanding and revivification of the West as well.

Fifth. It might be further suggested that if modernity has brought with it the structures and mechanisms of globalizing the world community at the technological and the market level (ie. exchange, production, consumption), it is these very structures and mechanisms that are also undermining the bases of the Old Sociology and paving the ground for the new concepts and for an alternative rationality and agenda implicit in the New Sociology. The New Sociology would thence be a timely and more congenial cognitive contribution to the shaping global economy of rationality, meaning, and community.

 

On this last point some brief elaboration might contour the outlines and indicate the character and the direction of the New Sociology. Instead of the key categories such as the `division of labor' which makes for the efficiency of an industrial society, and instead of favoring such privileged options as the capital intensive modes of investment which maximize productivity - and profit for the units of production to the benefit of privileged vested interests, the quest here is for the values that can re-integrate a fragmented and disintegrating social order which has been the by-product of the successful implementation of an earlier agenda. Success having bred its own lapses, it might be noted, now comes to set in motion the recuperative or defense mechanisms of a threatened system. With the New Sociology the priority shifts to the qualitative dimensions of social organization which, in turn, depend on rehabilitating the community and reclaiming its humanistic dynamic, as opposed to the naturalistic and mechanistic features hitherto identified with and accentuated by the commodity-fetishness of the dominant market orientations.

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While the New Sociology is predicated on the restitution of community-building values and on the recovery of human personal bearings by its emphasis on culture, it is not a substitute theology in a post-modern or a post-traditional society. If anything, it is a substitute and supersession of the Old Sociology which was developed as a discipline to meet the requirements of a specific historical condition. The New Sociology postulates such categories as the moral community which is conditioned on a moral economy and calls for a moral polity. Here, the cornerstone for a viable society and for a competent social organization is no longer predicated on the materialistic relations of production, to use a familiar idiom in the field, but it is predicated on renegotiating the moral boundaries of social transactions and relationships in society.

In this framework of inquiry, it would still be useful to deploy some of the conventional tools of analysis and some of the current approaches and levels of analysis in so far as we might deal in social constructs and variables, structures and functions, systems and processes, patterns and dynamics of socialization, and so on. In other words, modern sociology will have provided a necessary kit for scientific inquiry. What differs will be the underlying assumptions about society which will in turn present us with new categories of analysis as well as with new priorities and emphases all as part of a new outlook and a new raison d'etre and purpose of inquiry. Instead of underlining social stratification and highlighting the differences and contradictions or conflicting interests within a given society, the new sociology would underline the integrative mechanisms and identify difference as a legitimate and potentially `functional' diversity that can be seen as enhancing the moral dynamic and the achieving potential of society. It is this qualitative and purposeful orientation of activity in society that constitutes the end of social inquiry, the task of which would go beyond diagnostics to prognostics.

The task of the sociologist would not be confined to identifying patterns of causality and providing explanatory or interpretative analysis, or engaging in prediction of future trends in the light of current analysis, above all it would not be reduced to simply data collection for computerization, as a ready stock for whatever policy action that might be in view of contingent power interests. Rather all these processes of social inquiry would be part of an effort that also included within its scientific purview and mandate of inquiry the investigation of the most effective means to bring about certain ends. The ethics of community would be embedded within the structure of inquiry and would make of it an instrument of knowledge as well as an instrument of effective and moral action conducive to realizing the values intrinsic to the cohesion and meaningful direction of the community. The fact-value dichotomy would be transcended in so far as science becomes the domain of ethical inquiry and social knowledge ceases to be isolated from social morality. The New Sociology would in a nutshell be constituted on foundations that would enable it to overcome the endemic cynicism that has attended the Old Sociology ever since its inception and pursuit in a morally diffident fin de siecle climate qualifying turn of the century Europe:

The New Sociology draws on the wellsprings of a tawhidi episteme. For the benefit of a general audience this might be succinctly described as an ethical code that subscribes to the tenets of a "unitarian universalism" and a theistic or a "theocentric humanism" both the one and the other referents concretely represented in a living tradition of divine revelation. As such it has within it the makings of a universal and rational normative code that can accommodate a diversity and a plurality of `branch codes'. While it is conceivable that the parameters of the prevailing social morality that persists within a particular society at any time might be open to a measure of debate and consensuality, the New Sociology at least defers to such a moral category and validates the debate and incorporates the ensuing dimensions of value and meaning within the parameters of legitimate social inquiry. The underlying assumption throughout identifies all human communities as moral communities and sees in society as a medium for realizing the potential of its moral communities. The second assumption is that divine revelation or its moral equivalent is a category that is within the living memory and collective consciousness of all historical communities. The third assumption is that while divine revelation might be acknowledged as a category of collective experience, the teachings and values associated with it are not to be confused with the institutional expression that might have been historically identified with a particular revealed tradition. The fourth assumption is a corollary of the latter: namely that the values enunciated in revelation are commonly accessible to the public; they are community values and are not to be monopolized by any privileged access without deference to the consensus of the interested community, or to the equivalent of this consensus, in the agreed upon forms of representation and expression concerning these values. Fifth, significantly, in re-appropriating the area of social morality within the matrix of social inquiry, there is an understanding that we are dealing with an area of relative proximations to a domain of absolutes. This includes an area of wide-ranging flexibility where the boundaries of the phenomenal world operate within a framework of enduring "essences" or constant meaning and transcendental immanence.

The New Sociology can be developed within any of the living historical traditions. As it is here being presented it is evolving within the self-renewing historical tradition of community and rationality represented in the legacy of the youngest, the most `historical', and the most persistent of the Abrahamic traditions of divine guidance to humankind. As such it incorporates Revelation through the institution of prophethood and the legacy of scripture and historical precedent as an original source of knowledge which is mutually complementary and in part reinforced and in part arbitrated by human reason. This is the radical departure at the methodological and the conceptual levels between the New Sociology and the Old Sociology. It seeks its `signs', its signifiers of meaning and direction, particularly in the ethical realm, in the domain of social and individual morality in the guidance revealed and articulated by the prophets and preserved in their "proofs" for a discerning posterity to reflect on and to learn from and to actualize in its history.

It thus sees itself as predicated in its knowledge and reasoned values upon a specific reading of the revealed text as well as the more general reading of the open universe. Each source yields a valid and useful, or socially relevant kind of knowledge, even though each might be `domain specific'. Each source exacts its critical methodology, as well as its grounding axioms, or its `faith' component and, in this sense, the valid knowledge that it yields is potentially scientific knowledge fully relevant to social inquiry and to social organization/action. It is therefore possible to identify the parameters of the unitarian universalist and the theocentric humanist ethical code that draws on a cognitive tradition that is rooted in a symbiotic nexus of reason and revelation. It is perhaps equally significant to note that the New Sociology is as much of a practical and applied discipline as it is a theoretical discipline precisely because it appropriates a source of knowledge that is universally morally compelling. It is this which contributes to resolving the character of the New Sociology and making of a practical and useful knowledge as much its domain as a purely theoretical and contemplative knowledge. Its orientation is therefore to both to understanding and to praxis: or to a praxis predicated on human and social understanding, and to an understanding oriented to a practical morality.

A telling indicator of the range and meaning of the New Sociology can be readily sought in the literature on Women in Islam. In this context I shall merely recap on some of the generalities or findings on some of my earlier work in this field. (Eg. "Understanding Gender in Muslim Socieities" and A Supplementary Reader to Women in Islam: IIIT Curriculum Resources Unit) There is little doubt that despite the amount of field work and study on this subject in current western scholarship, the barriers to understanding remain. Here is one area at least where knowledge and understanding do not necessarily coincide, and where the more the data the more the opaqueness, the more complex and the more confused the whole picture becomes. The reason for this incongruence lies in the inadequacy of the matrix of inquiry where the research agenda and the lines of inquiry are set up in advance on the basis of the underlying assumptions of the dominant paradigm in the social sciences: namely western sociology and anthropology, which happen to be further reinforced and compounded by Orientalist and feminist biases. The field nonetheless retains its own authority in the face of individual voices of qualified and intermittent dissent.

Before an inhibiting combination of the pervasive forces of a cognitive/ psychic coercion and seduction the student in the field is overwhelmed, and it is a wonder that some valuable work emerges from the fray. Whatever insights gleaned, they come piece-meal and remain of limited value on account of their fragmentation and the fact that they cannot be related to a whole. The empirical orientation of mainstream American academy may make it possible to accept such limitations, but it cannot serve to justify our intellectual complacency: This is true especially when one is aware of the possibility of an alternative perspective on knowledge that can bridge the gap between what we observe and how we can interpret our observations to enhance our understanding and our learning. To take a practical example of the skewed scholarship that results from applying questionable criteria to the study of women in Muslim societies, one has only to point to the standards and yardsticks that are commonly applied to assessing women's position there. There, not only is emancipation from the oppressions of patriarchal societies postulated and imposed on the field as the prime defining value of social action and social organization among Muslim women. But this overall assumption is reinforced by a subsidiary set of operational values that direct the agenda of policy as much as of the research. 

Thus it is possible to scale attitudes against an achievement index premised on such notions equating or deriving women's liberation and human worth in such societies with their wage-earning potential and opportunities or with their commodity exchange, or market value conflating the quantitative growth in the economy with the moral worth of the individual women (and men) concerned. When it is found out that the majority of Muslim women might not have a market value laid on them, then it is automatically assumed that this amounts to a negation of social status or human worth within that society. Conversely, it is possible to live with the contradictions which emerge when the greater urbanization in Muslim society and its attendant growing scale of labor recruitment across gender boundaries statistically discloses a growing incidence of social dislocation in which women (as well as the children and the family) are the primary victims. The computable and incomputable losses in this transitional society are dismissed as the necessary cost of the transition to modernity: which is then more readily accepted as an end destination without further inquiry into its merits.

Whatever the case, in this agenda of inquiry, an entire dimension of the reality of women's condition in Muslim society, and of what that reality means for them and for their society, is overlooked or ruled out for want of the matrix and the categories that would make such a dimension meaningful or even an object deemed accessible to scientific observation and worthy of research. In the absence of the dimension that is socially relevant and meaningful for the women that are the object of inquiry, and for the society that constitutes their meaningful and relevant frame of reference and of action, the loss to social inquiry occurs at least on two fronts: First, if studying the sociology of Muslim societies is a means for their better understanding, or for enhancing their self-understanding, then a study which focuses on an outside agenda is at best futile and at worst subversive. Secondly, if such a study is a means for the outsider to gain an insight on other ways and other peoples, as would appear to be a legitimate objective in anthropology, then learning about Muslim women and Muslim societies by an imposed arbitrary prism of understanding which entails a projection of one's own values and priorities is surely a self-defeating exercise.

If the end purpose is to gain some self-understanding of one's own society by learning about the other, and comparing experiences, this has clearly not occurred. The same is true, if the purpose is to glean something from the experience or the ways of the other in order to learn something that might be adapted to enhancing one's own adaptability to the social environment. Whatever the purpose of social inquiry, and of engaging the resources of analysis and research, there is little to reap from indulging in the practice of a skewed scholarship: Frequently however, such scholarship is blinded by ego-centric tendencies which make it difficult to see the flaws at hand. The persistence too in such misconceived courses of inquiry frequently end up by reducing knowledge, wittingly or otherwise, into an insidious instrument of manipulation and control with regard to the target societies. It is here where the redemptive virtue of the New Sociology as a means of breaking out of the arresting and distorting or repressive grasp of the dominant paradigm comes to add to its intrinsic epistemological value as a more efficacious medium of learning and understanding.

To take another example of the constraints inherent in the dominant matrix of sociological inquiry when it is applied to understanding or explaining women in the Muslim world we might turn to the obsession with the veil. The veil is taken as a powerful symbol of two sets of conflicting systems of value decoding and interpretation. It is powerful because of its visibility and because it is seen to be central to the construct of woman in Islam. It is even more powerful because of the more invisible and pervasive structure of values and identity that it is conceived to represent - or to veil and protect from the prying curiosity of outsiders. The most widespread misapprehension is to identify the veil with a systemic and gender specific oppression and repression victimizing women. In a sociology which is postulated on the centrality of power and of such power related categories as domination and exploitation, privilege, exclusion and repression, there is ample room to invest in the phantasies of veiling in Muslim society. When a Freudian psychology comes to the aid of a Marxian or pseudo-Marxist sociology it possible to further invest valuable energies and imagination in exploring sexuality in Muslim society and analysing some of the persistent features it retains in common with some archaic honour and shame cultures. At best, a western sociologist addressing the issue of the veil might come to see it in terms of "modesty" . But then, in order to save her professional reputation, she will in all likelihood concede this residual value to be just another primordial preoccupation in a changing Muslim world - and tacitly dismissed as such.

Working within the framework of a positivist sociology, it is indeed difficult notwithstanding an author's intentions, to grasp the significance in a given socio-cultural context of elements of an implicate moral order to which it is intricately bound. Such categories as modesty with its associated semantic field covering notions of piety and God-consciousness become analytically ( or should we say synthetically too ?) inaccessible. This is why attempts to explain the phenomenon of the "return to the veil" persist in exploring the politics and economics of individual identity and the tensions of modernization and the various imaginable utilitarian and conformist motives, all the while insisting on the sociological integrity of their inquiries. "Piety" evidently is discounted as neither a meaningful nor a sociologically relevant category, and the barriers to unveiling the effective dynamics and dialectics of a society in mutation are consequently further entrenched.

There are `good' reasons from a western sociologist's perspective for discounting what for a Muslim social actor might well represent a crucial identity and socializing category. There is foremost the obvious cynicism and positivism endemic to the western sociological tradition which together reinforce a foundational hermeneutics of suspicion. This is frequently filtered through an arrogant and dogmatic bias associated with a materialistic culture. There are other equally compelling constraints which prevent such a sociologist from taking seriously any such categories as "personal piety" or the belief in the "Unseen" and in an ultimate accountability on "the day of judgement", even where these are categories which are demonstrably responsible for their tangible consequences and computable repercussions within the political economy. The language or the idiom of inquiry that might accommodate such perceptions simply does not exist any more than the prevailing modes of inquiry would accommodate such perceptions. Conventional sociology is bred on a highly abstract rationality and contemporary empirical sociology operates within a pragmatic framework: Neither the one tradition or the other is hospitable to a concrete ethical orientation that could bridge the gap between belief and action, or knowledge and being. A concept such as modesty which falls along this precarious rift separating two worlds would therefore be an embarrassment to the modern sensibility as much as an encumbrance for the dominant matrix of sociological inquiry.

With the New Sociology which takes the idea of the moral community for its founding category and orienting concept, the ethical values implicit in demeanor and temper, or, the general modesty associated with the veil take on a new world of meaning. By definition a moral community constitutes more than a surface-depth category, it conveys an implicate order. It signifies the launching of a hermeneutical discourse that starts from an inner center and radiates outward; a discourse that takes the visible as an extension and a signifier of an invisible realm of reality which it both veils and mediates, symbolizes and articulates. If morality is to signify anything at all it has to begin from within: from an inner realm and center of allegiance and identity from which it activates the energy to will. It is this inner realm that also constitutes the active receptacle and vehicle for accessing values in the process of socialization. For this reason it is sociologically an integral arena for inquiry and identification.

Beyond that the actualization of the moral realm occurs in a field of purposeful action and in a context of social relationships that call for the institutionalization of certain roles and mechanisms to activate and translate the impact of the inner realm of valuation and meaning. Only then can the moral community constitute a sociologically intelligible category. Against this perspective, all the ostensible fragments of the sociology of women in Muslim society fall into place and acquire a coherence and consistency which is unthought of in the prevailing matrix. Veiling constitutes but one logical variant of a comprehensive code of modesty which is predicated on a whole pattern of behaviour in the complex of differentiated and differentiating roles and patterns of expectation within society. Honour is part of this code, but so is trust and confidence and faith, and no one value is exclusive to one domain of human conduct and not the other, or to one set of human relationships in isolation from the other. The idea of a sanctified domain that is not to be trespassed is not confined to its spatial expression, but is intrinsic to a role assumed as much as to a relationship engaged in - again in the social context. Hence, modesty is a token of an entire community and not simply of the women who practice it: it is a factor of cementing the cohesion within the larger community and not simply a means of safeguarding the honour and reputation of the individuals who observe it, or of enhancing the prevailing "patriarchal" structures and norms in a given society.

The idea of the moral community presupposes a consensual modicum on the parameters of right and proper conduct and virtue - and vice - operate along a continuum that knows no boundaries between a private morality and a public morality. In a unitarian matrix of belief and action, any plurality in ethical standards is dismissed as duplicity not relativity. This is reflected at the organizational level and is reinforced by the "law" as another domain of the visible that provides the sanctions of last resort in the conduct of social relations and transactions. In such a context, modesty is central in upholding a comprehensive structure of morality that transcends the individual to the community and the private to the public and the domestic economy to the political economy and it operates as part of a more comprehensive code of social conduct that encompasses the range of social interaction within the community. Only then too can the proper symbolism of the veil in contemporary Muslim discourse and representation be adequately understood as a source of pride and identity, as much as an expression of loyalty and allegiance not simply for the women who wear it, but for the men who identify with the practice and the gesture. The unthought of, and the seemingly `irrational' acquires a rationality and a meaning that is all too distinct. 

For instance, as with a recent incident that is not untypical of its kind. An Arab (male) poet from some relatively remote corner of the Muslim ummah comes to identify with those emigrant Muslim women living in Europe who by taking up the veil out of a recovered sense of piety are reportedly defiant of the new social conventions in which they have grown and are heedless of the pressures of conformity, even at the peril of their own educational and career opportunities in competitive and hard times. He begins from the reported cases and generalizes on the virtuous actions of their gender wherever they happen to be and takes pride in a recovered sense of identity and dignity for himself and his ummah. These women are clearly personally unknown and physically unrelated to him but from an action or a stance exclusive to them and exclusively possible for their gender, and he derives a sense of honor and pride which goes far beyond the connotations circulated in the textbooks of anthropology celebrating the human species as a primarily sexual animal. 

In the New Sociology, there would be little room and less ground for any reductive interpretations of human conduct and human motivations, for the human being is taken whole as an integral being who is primarily a moral being and whose range of experience and capacity for self-expression is multi-dimensional. Consequently, the social relationships in which individuals engage, and the institutions that lend an element of continuity and coherence to their interactions in society are equally geared to this level of moral attainment. Moreover, in any sociological diagnostics of a given social condition, the onus of responsibility is seen to lie as much on the conscience of the individual and on his or her individual training and moral conduct as on the kind of institutions and laws that exist in that society. The refrain is the same: morality is not the preserve of the individual but constitutes a collective good; righteousness and propriety are not the private business of the individual nor the terrain of the privileged few but every one within a given society has a stake in these qualities and it is therefore the business of the collective representative of the community to ensure that the boundaries of social morality are safeguarded from the delinquent and irresponsible conduct of the few. While the inner is ultimately answerable in the beyond and at can only be fully accountable at the level of the unseen, and as such there will always remain an essentially margin of personal responsibility and personal freedom that is not amenable to the sanctions of the laws of society, yet there is another plane at which the New Sociology becomes relevant. There is a conception of the inner that makes it impinge on the outer. In this conception, it is not insular and independent of the outer, but there is a reinforcing momentum of mutuality and an impact between the two domains that can be either positive or negative: but cannot be neutral. It is the concern of the New Sociology to attend to this area of contiguity and extension in order to assure the maximum opportunities for moral attainment at the level of the collective as well as of its constituent units beginning with the family and not ignoring the individual.

One final point I would like to make in a more general vein that relates the New Sociology to the current concerns in women's studies. In shaping this field of knowledge against the tawhidi matrix of knowledge and values, many of the concerns which fall within the emerging variants of feminist scholarship are likely to find their natural niche at the center of the concerns of the New Sociology. In postulating the moral community as a founding category in its analysis and orientation to social studies, and in proposing the family as opposed to the individual, or to some reified abstraction like social class, as the primary unit of society, gender is taken as a key constituent both in any historical community as well as in any intellectual discipline which addresses that community. This is not simply an ontological proposition: it has its implications for the ethical and jurisprudential framework that structures the group as any authentic text on Islamic sociology or any manual in classical Islamic jurisprudence will show. It is up to the New Sociology to develop the implications of the established centrality of gender to social structure. It can begin by relating the manifold concerns that emerge in the context of group activity and organization to a meaningful framework. To be meaningful this framework should enable constructive and novel interpretations and extrapolations relevant to the constitution and dynamics of the viable and moral community which begins with the family but does not end there. With the integration of gender in the concerns of a mainstream sociology the relocation of woman away from the margin where she presently hovers in the dominant sociology, and her restitution to the center is complete.

In this process of re-centering and rehabilitation within the central structures of society, and in the course of promoting the values and concerns to which she can readily relate without straining herself or denying her nature and subverting her disposition, 'sociological woman' can attain to a felicity that is hardly conceivable in her present state in limbo. Her fulfillment as an interactive subject in the world of 'Real Soziologie' is secured in the very actions she simultaneously assumes to perfect the community with which she identifies. With her activity defined by its ends-orientation, the engendering of community, the roles assumed to this end can be as versatile, diverse and changing as the situation may warrant. In reclaiming an identity and recovering a purpose, the rediscovered / redefined subject of our New Sociology does so as a moral and responsible being who is fully cognizant of her privileges to act as a full partner in a joint human venture of which she is a dynamic agent as much as an integral cornerstone. More concretely put, as a believing woman whose deeds are the proof of her faith, as a Muslimah, this cognizance translates into an acknowledgement of a God-given prerogative that in its praxis is extended as a morally binding vocation.

As a consequence of lending credence to the above conception, the New Sociology as a discipline comes to be anchored in a textured matrix that takes rationality, agency and responsibility for the foundations of the moral community. In this way too, we can speak of engendering sociology as the other side of engendering community. An engendered sociology becomes a more realistic and effective access to the study of an engendered community, and the moral economy of gender becomes more tractable to systematic inquiry in a discipline that is ennobled through its reconstituted premises. Typically, in the tawhidi episteme efficacy is not bought at the expense of meaning and the modalities of an empirical sociology are reinforced by its constitutive morality.

     This essay is initially developed against the background of the Western Thought Project's section focusing on  ' Women in Islam - Structuring the Curriculum'