The prologue to the great Chinese autobiographical novel of the eighteenth century, Dream of the Red Chamber, contains the following passage, in which the author sets the scene for the story:

Chen Shih-Ying was without aspirations to fame or fortune. He devoted his time to planting bamboo and watering flowers and sipping wine and writing poems. He led an idyllic life. Unfortunately he lacked one thing to complete his happiness: he was over half a hundred years of age and had no son. Only a three-year-old daughter named Lotus filled his bosom (p. 9).

Islamic society is ever intriguing. Across broad territories and over millenia of time, it maintains a constant identity; yet it is always elusive, varied, and changing. The study of Islamic urbanism, like so many Islamic topics, oscillates between attempts to define what is fundamental and universal in Islamic city life, and what is ineffably individual about each locality; the contradictory perspectives seem equally valid. While topography, culture, and history have given each locality a unique identity, by the middle ages, Middle Eastern towns between the Nile and the Jaxartes—the core area of Islamic society—shared common features of social organization. Small communities, such as families, neighborhood quarters, and fraternities were the fundamental units of society. Town populations were gathered into loosely organized religious bodies, such as schools of law, Shirite sects, and Sufi brotherhoods, who were dominated by ethnically alien elites organized into slave armies and slave-maintained governments, and who garrisoned and extracted revenues from the towns while remaining separate from local community life. Characteristically, then, Middle Eastern Muslim cities operated on three levels-parochial groups, religious communities, and imperial regimes. Organized urban life depended on the relationships between person and groups within this three-tiered institutional pattern.

The venerable but underdeveloped assumption that modern urbanization is comprehensible in terms of social struggles for control of great cities' dominant institutions and its corollary that these struggles, in turn, helped shape further urbanization may still bear fruitful suggestions. Abundant evidence, moreover, makes exploration of this proposition eminently feasible in respect to London, Paris, and New York while as the foremost of the world's megalopolises they were acquiring their modern technical and social characteristics between the 1850s and, let us say, 1910. Notwithstanding the uniqueness of many developments in each of them, the complex social conflicts and the roughly similar climates of opinion often marking their evolutions, encourage certain comparisons among them. Such comparisons, hopefully, may illuminate some of the lingering consequences of the megalopolitan middle classes having to protect their new power not only against the potentialities of the working classes but also against the forces of provincialism operative inside as well as outside of their urban bailiwicks.

In each of the three cases presented, the changing role of the folk saint as well as the development of the movement indicate that a four-stage transformation is in operation:

(1) The ‘call’ by means of a supernatural experience or ‘vocational struggle’ occurs in the future folk saint's life and initiates his career.

(2) Offering a practical religion with solutions to physical and personal problems, the saint attracts individuals who are seeking such solace and remedy. Common purpose, journey and encampment near the curer foster group identity.

(3)Myths about the miracle worker grow in the group and circulate abroad, intensifying group solidarity and attracting new adherents. Administrators and would-be exploiters enter. A transcendent ideology is introduced with social, political, and religious ramifications. These may be at once restorative and innovative. The success of the folk saint spawns other saints who also attract followers.

(4) External, traditional power structures are threatened, and retaliate by applying political pressure, so that the last stage sees the decline and eclipse of the movement, and the loss of its innovative elements. The saint, no longer a potential secular power, devotes himself to curing, thus reemphasizing the culturally defined, traditional role of curandero or hitolio.

There are parallels to the North Mexican folk saints in Western Europe. What differences there are seem to follow naturally from the different context of Western Europe: the more pervasive influence of scientific medicine; the comparative stability of Western Europe governments; and above all, the more effective presence of the institutional Church.

Throughout the past two millennia or more the Jews of Diaspora have persistently maintained their religious and cultural identity in spite of many vicissitudes. Also, as manifested in Jewish history, where favorable conditions exist, politically and economically, Jewish communities have rarely experienced what may be described as a complete assimilation into their surrounding sociocultural milieu. An exceptional case, however, has been noted in China, where a once prosperous and burgeoning community of Jews did indeed experience that fate.