Scenarios on the establishment of Islamic social science: possibility and impossibility

This issue that where would be a good starting point for research on the objective situation of religiosity and its developments has been remained controversial since the founding of such researches. Is it possible to investigate the actual dimensions of religiosity based on a prior definition? Possibility and alteration of such definition in the beginning of sociological research has been the ground of continued disputes in this field of science due to the necessity for the reliance of that definition to the observations in one hand and the impossibility of formulating the problem without presenting any prior definition of religion on the other hand. In this research paper, first, the related sociological literature is reviewed and then problems concerning determination of relationship between religion and religiosity are explored. It seems that taking an empirical approach at the beginning of examining actual and objective dimensions of religion without regarding internal requirements of a religion does not ensure high reliability. For this purpose, it is tried to evaluate the dimensions of religiosity including fundamental beliefs, rituals and moralities with regard to their status in Islam and investigation of their methodological implications in assessment of religiosity dimensions. These dimensions have common relationship with other monotheistic religions. This helps to the minimal efficiency of religiosity assessment models in which those dimensions were used. In religiosity assessment models, the most problematic aspect was morality. Moral aspect here means social pervasive conducts and characters which gradually change to collective habits. Unlike ontological patterns, religiosity indices in sociological researches are gradual and a researcher in this field needs mixed methods to test the hypothesis of research.