Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2015 number

The objective of this article is to show how post-secularist social and cultural realities differ from the previously known perception of religious service as a mechanism for cultural values and meanings preservation, and as a possible way for a society to acquire its identity. This phenomenon has intensified research interest in the new trends observed in the sphere of religion. The problem field, generated by studies in desacralization of the classical Islamic socio-cultural model in a post-secular era, embraces a huge shift in understanding and interpreting the basic components of human development, such as “society”, “modernity”, “identity”, “religion”, “sacred/profane”. These changes are typical of the worldwide reality during the transition period from modern to postmodern at an escalating globalization pace. A particular attention is paid to the problem of forming the virtual reality, which is defined as a sphere of social construction of both individual and group forms of religiosity (cyber-community), which, in turn, has a special ontological status and is used for acquisition of new forms of identity. The article’s conclusions are based on studying the evolution of social construction in the sphere of the sacred Muslim texts interpretation. It is shown that the old notion of interpretation as sanctioned by a group of experts of the Holy Tradition (ulama) has been replaced by the idea that this type of activity should be viewed as an individual intellectual task performed by each Muslim. Theoretical conceptualization of this evolution has allowed the author to support the concept of emerging “new Islam” as a “modern societal phenomenon, a product and an integral part of globalization trends, in which theological component is not a producer, but a reason and means”.