RELIGION & COMMUNICATION
Year:2017 | Volume:24 | Issue:1 (51)|Papers Count:6

Today, the concept of culture is used in close association with other terms in various fields of humanities such as philosophy, psychology, semiotics, and policy making. Meanwhile, when it comes to human and Islamic sciences point of view, it becomes necessary to adopt a method which, next to an accurate understanding of it in humanities, could seek it in religious texts as well. In other words, understanding the concepts developed in humanities, together with a knowledge of religious texts' view of those existing concepts and ultimately, a recognition of the relations between these hold a high importance. The aim of this study is, therefore, explaining the method of seeking modern concepts in humanities and sociology in religious texts. We have here a case study of expounding on culture as a modern concept in the Holy Quran. Additionally, we try to comprehend the concept of Ummah as a Quranic term that has common features with culture. This is a significant step towards adapting humanities to our own conditions through seeking modern concepts in religious texts. The process we have gone through from the point of content and methodology is as follows:1- Step one: use of historicity in expounding on culture in order to recognize its constituents' development.2- Step two: Seeking extracted components from the Holy Quran using traditional semantics (dictionaries) and coming across the concept of ummah.3- Step three: structural semantics of ummah in order to reach the main constituents and semantic system of the concept.4- Step four: an analysis of the relation between ummah and culture concepts.

In recent years, the question of the relation between religion and the media has become a matter of serious concern among religious scholars on the one hand, and media professionals on the other. Meanwhile, the experience of picturing the sacred and the transcendental has been shown more than others, especially in TV religious programs. Therefore, the serious question is whether representing the sacred is basically possible or not. In this article, we have tried to both enumerate the obstacles and to provide solutions to get out of them as much as possible. The results of the study show that two main solutions for representing the sacred in the form of image are “transcendental style” and “utilizing symbols”. These two solutions are at both ends of an axis, with the sacred on the one end, and the human on the other. The transcendental style takes the audience from the human to the sacred and divine side, and makes them experience it. Utilizing symbols brings the sacred matter in the form of human to the audience. Both of these solutions will end in misdirection, if they are not developed from an accurate understanding of the religion which is associated with rationality.

Social capital is among the most important issues in sociology, management, political science, etc. in today's world. This concept can improve the society's efficiency through simplifying social relations and decreasing interchanging expenses. Meanwhile, it comprises some other features, namely trust, norms and network. The present study aims at explaining and introducing the most important structural, cognitive and correlative components of the sura Al-hujurat (The Chambers) using library and documentary method and descriptive- analytical approach. This sura incorporates communicative principles that can provide a healthy communicative environment. It contains communicative skills and its detrimental obstacles. The components mentioned here can boost social capital at structural, cognitive and correlative levels. Examples such as the observance of etiquette and civility, fulfilling things according to religious criteria, avoidance of surpassing Allah's and His Prophet's instructions are but the same as our being permanently under God's supervision. One must add other traits such as social discipline, fraternity, unity, assessing the news reliability, etc. to the list. Among detrimental obstacles we can refer to acts such as suspicion, faultfinding, backbiting, derision, and slander.

The Islamic Republic of Iran television is at the core of promoting the Islamic discourse that centers upon monotheism; a role prescribed by the Iranian constitution as well. Meanwhile, the ability of the media and its produced serials in developing their audience's empathy with the fictionalized characters- a special discourse making feature- has directed our study to seek a response to this question that whether the prevalent discourse in serials, including Setayesh as our case study, corresponds to the practical monotheistic discourse. To provide a discursive comparison and evaluation of practical monotheism in the serials, a reference to the verses of the Quran and Tafsir al-Mizan helped to derive these monotheistic commands in terms of practical unity models in six dimensions, namely religious, political, moral, social, economic and ideological. To answer the question, the superstructure representation theory and especially Foucault's discourse theory were used using a combined method of Fairclough, Bashir and Soltani's discourse analysis. The results show that the characters of the specified serial range from semi- monotheistic to fully polytheistic ones, and among these, the less monotheistic characters are depicted in a more pessimistic manner.

Lifestyle is a major contemporary issue in sociology and its correction is the challenge of most societies because "how to live" is as important as the living itself. Islam, in its turn, incorporates many norms and values about Muslims' way of life. Hence, the objective of this study was to explain and anticipate the social and cultural factors affecting the attitudes of the secondary school students towards the Islamic lifestyle in the public high schools in the city of Shiraz. The study has used the survey method. The statistical population was 50980 male and female students in their 1st to 4th year of studies at the public high schools in the city of Shiraz, of which a sample of 381 people were selected based on the Lin table, increased to 400 in order to improve the precision. A multistage random cluster sampling method was applied. The data was collected through questionnaires developed by the researcher utilizing Kaviani's normalized questionnaire (2012). To determine the validity and the reliability, we utilized the face and construct validities with the help of factor analysis for the former, and the internal consistency with the method of Cronbach's alpha for the latter. Six hypotheses were examined in this investigation. According to the findings, there is significant relationship between socio- economic status variables, internal and external media usage, parents' religious commitments, and priority in reference group on the one hand, and Islamic lifestyle on the other. But the availability of leisure facilities and respondents' gender differences haven't shown any meaningful relationship with adopting an Islamic lifestyle.

Today, software programs, as determining structures, are playing a considerable role in humans' various life dimensions. Among these, one can refer to Quranic software programs produced by Quranic institutions for the sake of improving religious communities' understanding of the holy Quran. The present study has adopted a super structural social approach to the issue seeking the impact of that on children's understanding of the Quran. The research methodology is qualitative and has used ethnographic method as well. The qualitative data are, therefore, gathered through free observation and semi-structured interview technique. Based on targeted qualitative sampling method and also theoretical saturation criterion, 20 mothers using this type of software were selected and their views on the impact of that on their children were analyzed. The findings which are based on grounded theory consist of five general categories as follows: facilitation, optimism, expanded thought, normative structure, and empowerment. The core section of this issue is the transcendental one which incorporates other major issues.