The use of mass media to shape public opinion, disseminate public information, and transform political culture, has grown tremendously in developing countries during the last two decades. Many of these countries have raised the slogan of “creationg a new man,” that is, one with skills, attitudes, and values that are conducive to development. In this respect, they have relied on mass media as a major purveyor of modern influences and as one of the most effective agents of political resocialization.

The seizure of the grand mosque of Mecca on 1 Muharram 1400/20 November 1979 by a group of Muslim fundamentalists protesting alleged religious laxity in Saudi Arabia raised the issue of Islamic revival in the very birthplace of the Islamic faith. This dramatic action and the ensuing battle for control of the holiest site in Islam, the Kaaba, caused concern and anxiety among hundreds of millions of Muslims. It turned the minds of many to the phenomenon of religious revival. The attack on the Meccan Haram also showed that the revival of Islam was an issue for all Muslim countries, for Saudi Arabia was already one of the most publicly devout and religious nations in the world. If the Saudi government could be seriously accused of a lack of religious fervor, even though the accusers in Mecca were few in number and ultimately unsuccessful in their military action, then other Muslim states might well be liable to even more severe challenges.

Even now, seventy years after publication, the significance of Becker's article “Der Islam als Problem”1 is still very difficult2 to realize completely. The article is short but it presents a historical and cultural perspective more dense in meaning than many thick volumes could be. It was an attempt to bid resolute farewell to a great number of previous conceptions about the nature of the Muslim religion, which had acquired an almost axiological status

In his extensive work on Iranian society and its problems, Aḥmad Kasravî (1890–1946), Iranian scholar, jurist, and social thinker, identified much of Classical Persian poetry as a major source of those problems. He discussed his views in a series of articles, in public lectures, and in two books dealing exclusively with the subject.1 In addition, he touched on the subject, in passages short and long, in many others of his hundreds of articles and dozens of monographs and books, published between 1934 and 1946, when he was assassinated.2

Throughout its history, Islam was influenced by the nature and extent of its contacts with other religions. It began as a relatively simple set of beliefs and practices fully circumscribed by Quranic injunctions and the example (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad. But because it was cast into an adversary position with Byzantine Christianity, many of its institutions were developed from early times on in response to the intellectual confrontation thus generated. Consequently, by the tenth century Islam had evolved a highly refined theological foundation.

The sixteenth century may be regarded as the “turning point” in the evolution of the murābiūṭūn tradition in the Maghrib.2 The crisis of Iberian imperialism in the Maghrib brought to the surface, by way of reaction, latent forces within the Maghribian social womb; the result was a social revolution which may be characterized as the “murabitun revolution” because of the rise to prominence of the murabitun in Maghribian society from the sixteenth century onward. Integral to the murabitun revolution was the religious ferment or renaissance generated by the anti-Christian reaction, a renaissance that was expressed in the effervescence of maraboutism, the characteristic Maghribian variety of oriental sufism.

“Zein,” as friends and colleagues knew him, practiced an interpretive anthropology that, like the writing of history, is a craft in which the best work is realized only after long years of field experience, study, and the development of concepts and themes through teaching and writing. Zein's sudden death on 13 August 1979 at the age of 44 cut short his work just as it began to achieve its fullest form.

Zein's professional career was divided between two remarkably distinct periods. The first of these lasted for roughly the decade prior to 1966, during which he mastered the conventions of what might be called a standard, functionalist anthropology and applied them to ethnographic research in Egypt. The second period began in 1966 with his participation in the formative period of symbolic anthropology at the University of Chicago.