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8 A. Salvatore / Sociology of Islam 1 (2013) 713

and at the end of human development, through a wide bow linking archaiccommunities to modern societies. Religion was identied as the red thread

unfolding from ancient cosmological cultures and communal life to secularcivic life and the social division of labor. Far from erasing religion, moder-nity appropriated its force in a disguised form, often dened as civil reli-gion, a provider of civic morals. The quintessentially secular, modernmanifestation of religion is therefore less its disappearance than its nurtur-ing of civility. Within this background, Islam has constituted since the riseof sociology a powerful countermodel representing a potential of resis-tance, both in history and the present, to this Western matrix of modernitythat postulates an increasingly diferentiated role of religion as a provider

of sense and moral cohesion.It goes without saying that the importance of a purportedly anti-modern,

or at least modernity-resistant, role of Islam is itself a symptom of the limi-tations of Western sociology, particularly in its classical shape. It revealsthe sociological reluctance to attribute a transformative potential to non-Western social formations, with a corresponding devaluation of their reli-gious and more broadly cultural traditions. Therefore the potentialsignicance of the sociology of Islam cannot be reduced to the applicationof mainstream sociological approaches to Muslim (or, as the more politi-

cally correct attribute goes, Muslim majority) societies and cultures. Thesociology of Islam by necessity tackles the tensions and antinomies thatunderlie the sociological project of modernity, and questions the specicyet crucial role it ascribes to religion. Such tensions represent both a chal-lenge and a point of departure for the project of a sociology of Islam.

Sociology itself has been dependent on orientalist knowledge for quite along time in its need to incorporate a conveniently distorted view of Islam(Stauth 1993, Salvatore 1997). The most resistant such bias, well representedby a relatively recent book by Bernard Lewis (2002) written just after 9/11,tells us that an all-encompassing doctrine of divine authority decisivelycontributed to withhold a full legitimization of political authority by theMuslim cultural elites, especially by those cultivating religious knowledge(the so-called ulama), and so prevented a truly modern state formation. Inparallel, the alleged cultural self-limitation inherent in the religious orien-tation of Islamic civilization was seen as working against the presupposi-tions to capitalist growth which enlivened the early modern socio-politicalformations of Western Europe. Accepting this approach, the Western colo-

nial encroachment upon Muslim lands that unfolded particularly throughthe 18 and 19 centuries is often interpreted as a necessary consequence(almost a deserved outcome) of a culturally determined imbalance ofpower between the Western and the Islamic civilizations.


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A. Salvatore / Sociology of Islam 1 (2013) 713 9

Remarkably it wasnt a sociologist, but an historian of Islam, MarshallHodgson, to become the most prominent challenger of the dominant bias

that denied the capacity of Islamic civilization to articulate the knowledge-power equation in dynamic and even creative ways (Hodgson 1974).Ultimately by reframing Hodgsons approach through sociological notionsbased on a combination of social theory arguments, the sociology of Islamcan tackle the well-entrenched paradigm, running through the Westernpolitical and intellectual traditions, consisting in identifying Islam withOriental despotism and religious-moral authoritarianism. The way forwardfor the sociology of Islam starts by questioning the hegemonic discoursethat propounds a standard, package-like model of modernity modeled on a

supposed Western prototype that never existed in a pure form. In thissense, the project challenges the idea itself of a compact civilization, be itWestern or Islamic, and focuses on both mutual and inner entanglementsof knowledge, culture and power.

The sociology of Islam also questions the idea of an end of history, in theguise of the advent of a worldwide civilization erasing all cultural difer-ences and innervated by homogenizing notions of power and governance.Nonetheless the project acknowledges the reality of the many facets ofmodernity approximating a sort of global condition, irrespective of cultural

diferences. Yet this condition, however inuenced by Western hegemony,can never be its neat reection. This is what makes the exploration ofmodes and norms of global civility coordinating connectedness on theground with governance from above; a challenging task for empiricalresearch. However dicult the analysis might be, it also needs a concomi-tant efort at reconceptualizing the framework of an increasingly globalcivilizing process, originating in Western Europe, but sensibly alteredthrough its embracing a variety of cultural traditions and civilizational leg-acies. The sociology of Islam does not need to discard the notion of globalcivility and global society altogether, but can contribute to identifying themain points of friction in global processes. It evidences what makes themsubject to contestations, compromises and civilizationally specicarticulations.

The sociology of Islam has become a vital track of original research,in both historical and contemporary perspectives, on Muslim majoritysocieties and Muslim minorities since the 1980s, through establishing sig-nicant links to wider conceptual debates in social theory and cultural

studies. The Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam, which for a decade (1998-2008) pioneered this trend, explicitly put at the core of its project the inves-tigation of the antinomies of Western sociology as revealed by its view ofIslam, as well as the ambiguities of Islams positioning within global society.


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This research program paralleled a larger sociological trend that privilegeda comparative and civilizational perspective in the exploration of modern

developments and dilemmas in the West, East Asia, and the Muslim world,while also questioning (and reconstructing) the controversial notion ofcivilization.

Yet while the sociology of Islam certainly benets from a comparativeperspective and a corresponding theoretical revision of Eurocentric postu-lates, it cannot be completely satised by them. In my view and based onthe just mentioned experience of a decade-long collective work on thesociology of Islam, this eld of study is bound to unsettle evolutionist con-ceptions of modern society even more than purportedly anti-Eurocentric

approaches and immanent critiques of modernity within social theoryand philosophy are able. This specic potential of the sociology of Islam isimplemented by questioning the comparative perspective itself, which hasshown prophylactic merits but also intrinsic limits, to the extent it focuseson parallelisms and diversities more than on the complexity of entangle-ments (which are as much cultural as they are economic and political)between articulations of Western modernity and concurrent developmentsin the Muslim world.

The events of the Arab Spring have shown a potential to strongly, yet

ambivalently, inuence an approach that relativizes and potentially de-centers Western hegemonic notions of modernity. The question should bereassessed, once more, in a broader theoretical perspective which takesinto account the specic postcolonial predicament of the Muslim worldvis--vis Western hegemony. Yet as stressed by Talal Asad long before theArab Spring, this shift of perspective should not be guided by the old motiveof anti-Western resistance, but rather by the analysis of new institutionaland discursive spaces (themselves not immutably xed) that make difer-ent kinds of knowledge, action, and desire possible. As evidenced by him,one should not remain caught in the polarization between two standardways of accounting for the emergence of such new spaces, namely either as evidence of a failure to modernize properly, or as expressions ofdiferent experiences rooted in part in traditions other than those to whichthe European-inspired reforms belonged, and in part in contradictoryEuropean representations of European modernity (Asad 2003: 217).

One should indeed take charge of what is specic to Islam and Muslimactors vis--vis the parameters of Western-centered modernity without

exceeding in any anti-essentialist immunisation, which if pushed toohard (as many scholars and analysts wish to do exactly under the impactof the Arab Spring) would bring us almost back to square one, i.e., to an


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absolutism of stale Western parameters of political, economic and culturalmodernity. Therefore the sociology of Islam cannot limit itself to look at

modern and contemporary developments, but should also pay attention tothe memory of how, arising and keeping its main centre of gravitationwithin a specic geo-cultural area of the Afro-Eurasian landmass, Islamreassembled and gave an unprecedented impetus to the heritage of a num-ber of civilizational components and in particular to the cosmopolitan andlargely egalitarian orientation of the Irano-Semitic traditions. It providedthem a new transcivilizational reach by investing its expansive orientationinto the depths of the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere or the Old World.Islamdom (a term coined by Marshall Hodgson) quickly became a compos-

ite ecumene that reached its zenith of power and knowledge at the end ofthe epoch that Hodgson called the Middle Periods (10 to 15 centuries),and which orientalists before (but also after) Hodgson have mainly depictedas a phase of decadence and lack of creativity.

Hodgsons approach is important for the sociology of Islam since it entailsa sustained criticism of the provincialism of Western orientalist views onIslam, privileging not only its Mediterranean projection (most notably due tothe long drawn-out rivalry of Western Christendom with the OttomanEmpire and the resulting Turkish Threat, which featured so central to the

fears of early modern Europe), but even more its Arabian origin, with theresult of disregarding the key fact, in the construction of a big picture of Islamas a civilization, that from the beginning not just its expansive ourishingbut also its intrinsic vitality presupposed crosscultural borrowings with othercivilizational realms located further East in the Afro-Eurasian landmass.

The approach of Hodgson, who in his scholarly career interacted closelywith representatives of world history and modernization theory, is particu-larly precious in order to subvert and revise teleological assumptions con-cerning why the Islamic civilization nally succumbed to the hegemonicpower of the West. Instead we need to investigate in a theoreticallyinformed and comparatively inspired framework the distinctive Islamicapproach to building patterns of life conduct and sociability in connectionwith highly variable and often exible institutions of governance articulat-ing in original and malleable ways the civilizational equation of knowledgeand power, including through the tense interaction between commonersand elites across urban, agrarian and nomadic milieus. In light of such acomparatively oriented and historically informed sociology of Islam, the

dialectic of cultural traditions and civilizational dynamics expresses thebroader interaction between knowledge and power which characterizessocieties across civilizations.


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Through uncovering more complex entanglements than mainstream,Western-centered sociology is able to do, the sociology of Islam plays a

crucial role in developing a sociological approach to entangled, multipletraditions and varieties of modernity by taking into account alternative,non-Western genealogies. Yet this angle alters the comparative perspectiveitself and facilitates a more plastic dealing with religion, politics, and secu-larization. It starts from the classic, primary parameters of sociological con-ceptualizations of such phenomena but rewrites them by taking intoaccount the originality and strength of an Islamic perspective on world his-tory and society. More than a specic sociology of religion or culture appliedto Islam, the sociology of Islam explores the way knowledge, culture and

power are shaped by Muslim actors who draw on a combination of tradi-tional and modern repertoires and enact largely original patterns of socia-bility, solidarity, and civility.

Ultimately, the sociology of Islam has not only the potential to providecoherence to the new, post-orientalist wave of studies on Islam and Muslimsocieties, but is also able to disturb the conventional wisdom of sociologyitself, by going beyond the critique of sociological notions of modernityperformed by debates on postmodernism and postcolonialism. The criticalangle opened by the sociology of Islam in the often self-referential para-

digms of sociology as a discipline allows not only to look at Western moder-nity as if from the margins, but also to problematize the idea of a xed coreof modernity within a rapidly evolving global order, to the extent Islam andMuslim societies provide, both historically and in the present, an alternateperspective on such an order. In this way Western modernity can free itselffrom its illusions of having imprinted an incomparably radical social rup-ture and can open up to more pluralistic and cross-civilizational concep-tions of society which are less ethnocentric and more suitable to meetglobal challenges. A welcome collateral efect of work at the sociology ofIslam consists then in recognizing that the Western exceptional path withinEurasia, far from following a smooth evolutionary track marked by a pro-gressive rationalization of social relations, economic behavior, and politicalorganization, was characterized by complex, contradictory, even antino-mian tendencies.

References

Almond, Ian (2010)History of Islam in German Thought. New York and London: Routledge.Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press.


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Hodgson, Marshall G. S. (1974) The Venture of Islam, vol. 1-3. Chicago: The University ofChicago Press.

Jackson, Roy (2007)Nietzsche and Islam. London and New York: Routledge.

Lewis, Bernard (2002) What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Mazusawa, Tomoko (2005) The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: The University ofChicago Press.

Salvatore Armando (1997)Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity. Reading, UK: IthacaPress.

Stauth, Georg (1993) Islam und Westlicher Rationalismus. Der Beitrag des Orientalismus zurEntstehung der Soziologie. Frankfurt and New York: Campus.

Stauth, Georg and Bryan S. Turner (1988) Nietzsches Dance: Resentment, Reciprocity andResistance in Social Life. Oxford: Blackwell.

Turner, Bryan (1974) Weber and Islam: A Critical Study. London and Boston: Routledge and

Kegan Paul.

the sociology of islam si

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