Anthropology of Religious Organization. A Case of the Ihlas Mosque’s Parish in Tatarstan

Abstract

How can a culture based on principles of openness and inclusion be formed in an organization? We will study the experience of the team of Insaf-hazrat, the imam-khatib of the regional mosque Ihlas (sincerity). The basic values of the leaders of the mahalla (community) served for constructing closed relationships among fellow believers and creating corporate culture with the elements that are characteristic of efficient innovative market companies. Under the new conditions, with the use of modern means of communication and social networks, the mosque has quickly accrued the status of a spiritual, social and cultural center, going beyond local boundaries. The article presents the results of the Ihlas’s mosque parish organizational ethnography which relies on Edgar Schein’s conceptual framework of theory of organizational culture. According to Schein’s theory the deciphering of organizational culture phenomena should be carried out by “slow” qualitative research methods in three stages, corresponding to the three levels of the organizational culture formation model: artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions. We then relate some elements of this mosque’s corporate culture to the so-called “green” ideal type within the typology of the Clare Graves’s spiral development theory.