English to Serbian Social Sciences Religion Islam and civil society

Muslim societies in the first four
centuries were pluralistic societies with many philosophical, theological,
mystical, and legal trends. No single school of thought equated
itself with Islam. In the fifth Islamic century, the great thinker al-
Ghazali launched a conservative revolution that stifled this pluralism
and transformed Islamic culture and society according to an absolute
and state-enforced doctrine: Ash'arism in theology and Shafi'ism in
law. All other schools of thought were marginalized, criticized, or
anathematized.