Accepting the post-colonial challenge: Theorizing a Khaldûnian approach to the Marian apparition at Medjugorje

Abstract

This article seeks to expand the sociology of religion’s conceptual toolkit beyond the focus on religious belief and on organizational structures inherited from Western Christianity. After criticizing these origins, I use Ibn Khaldûn’s notion of al ‘assabiyyah or “group-feeling” to analyze the events surrounding the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, Bosnia, in the 1980s and the later events in the same region during the 1990s Bosnian wars. This concept’s strength is its ability to treat religious and ethnic solidarity as part of the same phenomenon—something that previous literature on Medjugorje and the Bosnian war failed to do. Its weakness (for this case) is its focus on centripetal (attractive) solidarity rather than solidarity created by heightened social boundaries. The solidarities at Medjugorje were more often of the latter kind.