Iranian Journal of Sociology

Abstract Visibility is a new topic that is linked to the issue of minorities in today's societies. Minority groups attempt to enhance visibility and make the other groups recognize them in their own societies. This research tries to study Zoroastrians visibility as a religious minority in Tehran. The main question is that how is the visibility of Zoroastrian minority as one of the three legal religious minorities in the public space of Tehran city? For this purpose, we applied different research techniques, including observation, Participant observation, in-depth interviews and documentary studies methods. The research results showed that according to four indicators as place, rites, media, and coverage, Zoroastrians are barely visible in the public space of Tehran. Consequently, unlike the religious minorities in other countries, such as European societies, Zoroastrians do not want to improve the visibility of their religious minority in the public space of Tehran.
 

Abstract The aim of this paper is to conduct a sociological analysis on the Arab approaches to the question of civil society. It is a documentary study based on the literature of civil society. The study initially seeks to present an overview of the essential issues concerning the possibility of realization of civil society in the Moslem Arab countries of the Middle East. In conducting the analysis, the paper first exposes main questions that the Western social thinkers frequently ask when the subject of civil society comes under discussion. Then, the author presents an analysis of the native Arab approaches that attempt to answer these questions as discussed by the Western social thinkers. All these approaches can be said to be striving to explain the ambiguities that have come to appear in the literature. The non-Arab perspective supposedly recognizes the civil society as a feature of the modern Western society. In this view, the realization of civil society in the Moslem Arab countries is impossible for a variety of reasons. A summary of such reasons can be summed up as:  the alleged paradoxical, or contradictory, relationship between Islam and democracy; predominance of a hierarchal social structure in the Arab world; weakness of society versus power of religion and the state; and mere survival of the absolute state in these societies. In contrast to the non-native approach, there are three other perspectives adopted toward an exposition of the Arab civil society in the Moslem Arab countries; we call these perspectives Islamic, Liberal and Socialist ones. Although none of these is in accord with the Western model of civil society in all its dimensions, yet a negation of the Western model is not attempted either. On the contrary, these perspectives, declare the necessity and possibility of an Arab civil society due to extensive social and political changes in the Moslem Arab societies, changes that have occurred in the recent decades.