Magic and Religion in North Africa

...that he is incapable of thinking and acting otherwise than his peers: from which it follows that all social phenomena there have the same constraining, that is to say religious, character; religion is everything there, unless one prefers to say it is nothing, if one wishes to consider it as a special function. For a savage, hunting, fishing, eating, daily relations, war, dancing, etc., all of this has a ritual, mandatory, immutable, in a word, "sacred" character, and corresponds to equally invariable intellectual representations: for him, all of life is religious. Little by little, however, certain beliefs cease to be mandatory, but the practices corresponding to them continue to be so, sanctioned by the power of the State (law) or by public opinion (morality); sometimes it is the belief that remains mandatory while the practice is forbidden (witchcraft) This is only truly accurate in extreme cases, such as in Catholicism and Islam. Cf. Hubert and Mauss, "General Theory of Magic," in Année Sociologique, VII, p. 91 and infra, chap. VI.; more often, belief and practice are free (science, art, techniques). Facing these different categories of social facts, religion is characterized by the doubly imperative character of doctrine and worship, but its domain is shrinking day by day.

In this regard, and although one cannot label Muslim civilization as inferior as a whole, the world of Islam approaches less differentiated societies. Not only have the peoples who are Muslim today—and who naturally passed through the same phase of confusion of institutions as all other civilized peoples—retained more completely than them...