Une République islamique sans mosquée

Abstract

Mosques in Iran imply primarily a set of means or physical facility readily available to users or bystanders on a daily basis. It also suggests religious rituals performed on a regular basis, in the presence of authorities who have the privilege or monopoly over a certain form of Islamic knowledge.In the first case the mosque is a rest stop, a shelter or a home where no one – male or female – should feel excluded or rejected. In the second case the faithful may prefer one place of worship over another, depending on intellectual or religious, community, professional, or even generational criteria. Such a dual purpose role – material and spiritual – has undoubtedly made it possible for mosques to resist both monopoly and isolation. In other words, while mosques have been used as a framework for the centralization of the State, they have also been elements of resistance to the State’s claim to monopoly. We shall attempt to study the coexisting spiritual and material processes, which reinforce and complement each other, based on the new organization of mosques and new practices taking place inside mosques or their vicinity. Considering the changes of the past two decades, it would be better to speak of religious centers rather than mere places of worship.

Keywords

• religious field
• religious public space
• citizenship
• bureaucratization
• rationalization