Functionalism and Stratification, Socio-Cultural Evolution and Revolution

Abstract

In the previous chapter we argued that the conception of creatio ex nihilo is the determinant of hierarchy and stratification in Judaism and Christianity; Islam teaches that God created divisions as a way for human beings to recognize each other. The metaphysical origin of sociality and the reality of tribal and clan structure are reflected in the Islamic conception of community, gamaat; on a larger scale it is called ummah. Members in Islamic ummah are set apart from non-Muslims. This is dissimilar to the ancient Judaic racial and ethnic symbiosis which came to be known as the “chosen people,” an early manifestation of stratification in monotheistic religions. Among the Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages, Ibn Khaldun approached the objective foundations of sociality, attending to an implicit conception of stratification by appropriating detached observational methods to explain the rise and fall of dynasties. Principally, his work demonstrates the possibility of synthetically a posteriori, based on his personal experience and analytical a priori by which he asserted that the rise and fall are part of the definition of all dynasties. However, since Ibn Khaldun's day, our notion of the objects of structure and function of societies requires that we distinguish many variables in order to understand Islamic societies – particularly the way that their stratification systems are affected by globalization, or their transition toward, or their opposition to modernity. Using geometry metaphorically, it is true that we have departed from Euclidian theorems with the advent of various geometries. Yet Euclidian geometry still has many functions, a point that amplifies the intersections of both Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries. Notwithstanding the various intersections among political, economic, religious, cultural and social matrices that provide multiple logics to understand the operations of societies, the Khaldunic notion of rise and fall has survived to this day.