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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Blackwell Manifestos
- Sprache: Englisch
Discover the essence of the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit and what it has contributed to societies across the ages In Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, author and expert, Bruce B. Lawrence, delivers a spiritual elan filtered through cultural practices and artefacts. Neither juridical nor creedal, the book expresses a desire for the just and the beautiful. The author sets out an original and fascinating theory, that Islamicate cosmopolitanism marks a new turn in global history. An unceasing, self-critical pursuit of truth, hitched to both beauty and justice, its history is marked by male elites who were scientific exemplars in the pre-modern period. In the modern period, these exemplars include women as well as men, artists as well as scientists. The Islamicate Cosmopolitans have had special impact across the Afro-Eurasian ecumene at the heart of civilized exchange between multiple groups with competing yet convergent interests. The Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit is a boundary busting challenge to those who think of the world merely in terms of an "Arab" Middle East. Readers will also benefit from: * A thorough introduction to the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit across time and space * An exploration of premodern Afro-Eurasia and Persianate Culture in the Indian Ocean * A practical discussion of the future of the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit Perfect for all students of Islamicate civilization, both traditional and progressive, Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit will also earn a place in the libraries of general readers of world history and those grounded in the larger history of Islamicate Asia will find a perspective that centers their own contribution to the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit.
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Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit
Bruce B. Lawrence
Duke UniversityDurham, USA
This edition first published 2021
© 2021 Bruce B. Lawrence
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lawrence, Bruce B., author.Title: Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit / Bruce B. Lawrence. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2021. | Series: Wiley-Blackwell manifestos | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: Overview : a manifesto in 3 words and 6 chapters -- Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit across time and space -- Eastward into India -- Westward into Spain -- Premodern Afro-Eurasia -- Persianate culture across the Indian ocean -- Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit beyond 2020 -- Conclusion. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058488 (print) | LCCN 2020058489 (ebook) | ISBN 9781405155144 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118779996 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118780008 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Islamic civilization. | Cosmopolitanism. Classification: LCC DS36.88 .L395 2021 (print) | LCC DS36.88 (ebook) | DDC 909/.09767--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058488LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058489
Cover image: © Alberto Manuel Urosa Toledano/Getty Images
Cover design by Wiley
Set in 11.5/14 Bembo Std by Integra Software Services, Pondicherry, India
To Alber HusinGun-less Warrior for PeaceExemplar Cosmopolitan for the Ages
Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preamble
Overview: A Manifesto in Three Words and Six Chapters
Chapter 1: Tracing Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit Across Time and Space
Chapter 2: Eastward Into India
Chapter 3: Westward Into Spain
Chapter 4: Premodern Afro-Eurasia
Chapter 5: Persianate Culture Across the Indian Ocean
Chapter 6: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit Beyond 2020
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Different distribution models evolved.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 3 Capitals of Islamic Art.
Figure 4.2 Iznik plate.
Figure 4.3 Hafiz plate from Damascus.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Dashing the Allah plate.
Guide
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preamble
Overview: A Manifesto in Three Words and Six Chapters
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Acknowledgments
The roll call of colleagues who helped shape this manifesto extends back several decades and crosses generations as well as continents. I would be remiss not to begin with the 1980 conference on Islamic studies organized by my late friend, Richard C. Martin of Arizona State University. Rich brought together older colleagues, such as James Kritzeck (my first teacher on Islam), Jacques Waardenburg, and Muhammad Abd ar-Rauf, along with younger scholars like William Graham, Marilyn Waldman, and Fred Denny, to rethink the field of Islamic studies beyond Orientalism. Said’s book had just been published 2 years earlier (1978) and one of the several scholars invoked to chart a way beyond Orientalism was Marshall Hodgson. Fast forward 25 years and Rich Martin, along with Carl W. Ernst, organized a conference on Islam in Theory and Practice that centered on my work, and it highlighted Hodgson as the harbinger of a Muslim/Islamic/Islamicate cosmopolitan alternative to Orientalism. All the participants of that 2006 conference, later contributors to a book titled Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism toCosmopolitanism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), deserve recognition and thanks: Ernst and Martin at the head of the list, followed by Vincent J. Cornell, Katherine P. Ewing, A. Kevin Reinhart, Omid Safi, Jamillah Karim, Charles Kurzman, Ijlal Naqvi, David Gilmartin, Abbas Barzegar, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Tony K. Stewart, Scott Kugle, and Ebrahim Moosa. In 2008 I was awarded a Carnegie Scholars of Islam grant, allowing me to travel not just to Egypt and Ethiopia but also to Indonesia and the Philippines. My experience of minority Muslim communities expanded owing to the vision and support of Patricia L. Rosenfield and Hillary S. Wiesner from Carnegie Corporation. Among the scholars I met from Southeast Asia, two—the late Alber Husin (to whom the manifesto is dedicated) and Jowel Canuday—came to a conference on Muslim cosmopolitanism I was able to convene in Doha in December 2010, thanks to the generosity of Sheikha Al Mayassa Al Thani, then head of the Qatar Museum Authority, who had invited miriam cooke (my spouse) and me to be scholars in residence at the Museum of Islamic Art. My thanks are due not just to Sheikha Al Mayassa Al Thani but also to others who attended and contributed to that conference: Walter Mignolo, Kevin W. Fogg, Sita Hidayah, Dereje Feyissa, Jonathan Cross, Afyare Abdi Elmi, Anthony Shenoda, Andrew Simon, Amira Sonbol, Sulayman Khalaf, Mohammed Ali Abdalla, and, of course, miriam cooke. miriam has also provided me with countless hours of proofreading and correcting the manuscript, just as she joined me in the lunch conversation of 2019 at the University of Exeter, recounted in the Preamble. Other colleagues at Exeter enhanced the horizons of my work: Robert Gleave, Sajjad Rizvi, Ian Netton, William Gallois, Istvan Kristo-Nagy, Mustafa Baig, Emily Selove, and Rasheed El-Anany, while back in North Carolina, other scholars added to the chorus of support: Anne Allison and Charles Piot, with spirited commentary, Michelle Lamprakos and Steven Kramer, by close reading, and Leela and Baba Prasad as audacious critics. I am also indebted to the Abdullah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School for hosting a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Hodgson’s demise. Titled “Marshall Hodgson and the Contested Idea of a Discernible Islamic Civilization” it convened on November 9, 2018 and included along with myself these participants: Richard Bulliet, Richard M. Eaton, Wael Hallaq, Hedayat Haikal, David Nirenberg, Ahmed El-Shamsy, Nile Green, Carol Hillenbrand, Kevin van Bladel, and Frank Griffel. Anthony T. Kronman, Owen Fiss, and Bradley Hayes made the event sizzle, and I begin the Preamble with reflections that they inspired, though neither they nor any of the above-mentioned supporters are responsible for the case I make, and the arguments I advance, for an Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. I am finally indebted to the three outside reviewers for Wiley-Blackwell, all of whom sharpened the tone and expanded the scope of my manifesto, while miriam cooke added her voice to theirs in foregrounding my own voice throughout what follows.
Preamble
Why Islamicate, why now, why me? These three questions will occur to anyone who picks up this manifesto. They deserve a prompt answer, a brief self-disclosure.
Islamicate is a neologism for what pertains to Islam and Muslims. It was coined by the American historian Marshall Hodgson. Islamicate defines the arc of Islam beyond religious boundaries. It is at once a cultural and an ethical term. Though not devoid of religious tones, it registers them as subtle undertones rather than explicit dicta. Hodgson introduced this term in the 1960s but he died suddenly in 1968, his work unpublished. It was only 6 years later in 1974, thanks to the tireless labor of his colleague, Reuben Smith, that there appeared a posthumous publication titled The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. It consists of three volumes, published by the University of Chicago Press.
I never met Hodgson nor did I ever study at the University of Chicago. I had been in India when the book appeared, and I first read it in the summer of 1976 after my return to the United States. Enthralled, I began to teach all three volumes in a year-long Duke University undergraduate course titled “Islamic Civilization.” I taught the course for more than three decades, till my retirement from Duke in 2011. Though many students were engaged by Hodgson, others found his mode of reasoning, as also his labored writing style, difficult to fathom. Yet even some of these dissidents later shared with me his profound influence on their world view and career choices.
A decade ago, I proposed to write a manifesto for Wiley-Blackwell on Muslim cosmopolitanism, but 4 years later in 2014 I was invited to contribute a reflection on The Venture of Islam and its author for the LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), and began to explore not Muslim but rather Islamicate cosmopolitanism. I noted: “it involves not just Muslims but all those who are engaged by Muslim others. Islamicate pluralism has emerged, and deserves analysis, as the unexpected yet evident consequence of Hodgson’s moral, cosmopolitan vision.”1 I discovered that more and more scholars were starting to engage with Hodgson, his methodology (hemispheric history), and his vocabulary (neologisms, including Islamicate, but also Islamdom, Nile-to-Oxus, Persianate, and Afro-Eurasian ecumene). The notion of Islamicate cosmopolitan became inescapable and compelling. In spring 2015, I gave a lecture at Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute titled: “Islamicate Cosmopolitan: A Past without a Future, or a Future still Unfolding?” In that lecture, I further explored the legacy of Hodgson’s approach and his challenge to binary notions of Muslim identity and hackneyed surveys of Islamic history.2
At that time, I noted in many quarters a reluctance about the man, his mercurial career, and now his longer impact on world history. That reluctance was in full display when Yale Law School announced a further tribute to Hodgson, a 50-year retrospect in November 2018. I had been invited, along with eight other senior scholars, to present working papers on aspects of Hodgson. (Two commentators summarized four papers each in morning, then afternoon sessions, with a keynote address at noon.)3 Some presenters were highly critical, especially of the neologism Islamicate and the key term civilization. But Hodgson also has his proponents, many of them outside the Euro-American academy, notably younger scholars. Since 2012 I have been teaching in Istanbul. Several of my students there, and also some colleagues, notably Ercüment Asil and Huricihan Islamoğlu, convinced me that more could and should be said in defense of Hodgson. Someone needed to explain the continuing value of his insights, not least his neologisms, for a new generation of scholars attuned to his civilizational vision, especially its ethical as well as analytic import. Why not me, and why not now?
And so, this book evolved as a different manifesto, with an accent on Islamicate/Persianate trajectories shaped by a common cosmopolitan spirit. Because the topic is deeply lettered, there are references that must be traced, acknowledged, lauded, or critiqued, but above all, framed in a manifesto on Islamicate, which is also cosmopolitan and which resonates as spirit. I will say more about Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit in the pages that follow, but this book would have been completed much earlier had the number of publications relating to the Persianate world, and Persianate elements in Islamicate history, not exploded during recent years. I deal with the major edited volumes in Chapter 5, but the one caveat I offer to the inquiring reader is: be alert to Persianate themes and evidence of a Persianate stratum of Islamicate influence, far beyond what I examine in the pages that follow. The answer to my 2015 question is now clear to me: Islamicate cosmopolitan persists, its future still unfolding.
Notes
1
See
http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/larb-channels/genius-denied-reclaimed-40-year-retrospect-marshall-g-s-hodgsons-venture-islam
.
2
Available online at:
https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/islamicate-cosmopolitan-past-without-future-future-still-unfolding
.
3
The full program with paper titles and presenters is provided at:
https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/yale-law-school-events/marshall-hodgson-and-contested-idea-discernible-islamic-civilization
.
Overview: A Manifesto in Three Words and Six Chapters
In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the blogger Riverbend observed: “What is civilization? It’s not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers, and McDonalds. It’s having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs …”1
How do we define civilization as the deepest recognition of mutual and interactive sanctities? Riverbend’s shibboleth is mine: finding the connection and fostering the opportunity to recognize, then engage seeming opposite, even hostile others who are no less human for being unlike us.
No global civilization can exclude Islam, but how to include it? The search for an inclusive civilizational ethos worthy of the name reached a tipping point for me in the United Kingdom last year. It was mid-February 2019. I was at the University of Exeter as a visiting scholar in residence. We had just completed a 2-hr lunchtime workshop. I got to pick the topic and the title for the talk. My title: “Islamicate Cosmopolitan?”
The title, posed as a question, was intended to be provocative. What is Islamicate? And who qualifies as an Islamicate cosmopolitan?
After an intense exchange that went beyond the usual lunch hour, we were about to disperse when a senior colleague asked: “So what?”
“So what?!” I rejoined, in surprise.
“You have made our lunch hour into two hours,” he joked, adding “You have reflected on all the options and argued for a new tongue twister—Islamicate cosmopolitan. But do you really feel that this phrase is an epistemic turn worth pursuing? Where can one find a guide for the perplexed, some text illumining our understanding of both Islamicate and its coordinate term, cosmopolitan?”
This manifesto is my answer to my colleague’s challenge. My motive is also my hope: to enliven each term with the other, Islamicate as cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan as Islamicate. But each needs a further referent, and so I am introducing a still broader trope: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, itself the entry way to civilizational options at once inclusive and enduring.
Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit
Since a manifesto is an extended general essay rather than a specialized monograph, I want to stress each word in my chosen topic: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. At the most basic level each connotes a surplus: Islamicate is more than Islamic or Muslim, Cosmopolitan is more than congenial or civil, and Spirit is more than subject or agent. Together Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit projects the presence of a tidal wave in world history that remains hidden for most, opaque for many, and misunderstood even by experts.
Each of these three key terms requires a brief history. But they also elicit a prior question about history itself: is historical revision desirable, even necessary? If so, is it possible without revising the categories or key terms in which history is framed?
For Islam, there is a need for revisionist terminology. I would argue that the need is even more urgent because “Islam” has become encumbered with misinterpretation in public discourse since 1979 and the Iranian revolution but even more since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and two wars in largely Muslim countries: first Afghanistan, then Iraq. What must be foregrounded at the outset is stubborn resistance, from many quarters, to moving beyond “Islam” or “Muslim” in order to describe the 1,400-year experience that marked the birth, growth, and expansion of a 7th-century Arabian political-religious movement into a transregional presence. Islam did originate from Arabia but it quickly extended westward to Spain and eastward to China. Far from being Arab centered, the Islam movement redefined much of Africa and Asia, while itself being redefined by Africa and Asia, before impacting what became Western Europe and North America. The nagging question persists: what has been the surplus of value beyond Arab origins and Arabic language in its continued expansion and adaptation to multiple contexts in myriad cultures? In cultural studies, “Islamic music,” “Islamic literature,” and “Islamic art” persist as labels. In philosophical studies, “Islamic philosophy” continues to be invoked, while in historical studies one must look hard to find alternatives to “Islamic history.” Even revisionists balk at changing their key terms, but I want to argue from the outset that unless that change is made, and unless it is consistently applied, there can be no revisionism worthy of the name. Old habits die slowly but die they must if a fresh vision is to emerge. A new day is dawning for understanding the long shadow of early 7th-century Arabia. The path will not be just through micro-analysis or regional studies but through meta-discourse, at the heart of which is salient and defensible key terms. A meta-discursive provocation is the goal of what follows.
What is Islamicate? Islamicate is neither a first nor a second but a third order of identity beyond “Muslim” and “Islamic,” its two precursors, both crowded with religious valence. Despite its prevalence, religion itself can become a veil rather than a catalyst for understanding broad historical movements. Neither “Muslim” nor “Islamic” because of their close association with “religion” can reveal the tapestry of culture and cultural networks, and without being revealed that tapestry remains occluded, undervalued, too often minimalized, or ignored.
“Muslim” marks a religious but also a social identity. In 2020 “Muslim” is the first order of identity for about 2 billion out of nearly 8 billion of the world’s population. One can be a Muslim by birth or by decision. In Arabic there are no capital letters, yet in English one is able to distinguish between two kinds of Muslim/muslim, one capitalized, the other not. In a revisionist vocabulary one should be able to note the distinction. Who is a muslim with a small “m”? Who is a Muslim with a capital “M”? In the latter case, to be Muslim is to avow Islam as a pious, practicing individual but one can also be muslim, in the lower case, by association as the member of a collective, whether family, country, region, or the globe, that has been marked by Islam without professing or practicing Islam. Non-Muslims, of course, can also be muslims. If I were a thoroughgoing revisionist, I would distinguish between both categories in what follows, but since English does not yield to such lexical subtleties without constant bracketing in inverted commas, that endeavor would distract from my major purpose: to underscore the need for an alternative to religious monikers, both “Islamic” and “Muslim.” In what follows, I will refer to Muslim, even though “muslim” remains an undertone of Muslim for those who are non-Muslim but also for many who may be neither devout nor observant as Muslims yet are routinely assumed to be cradle-to-grave believers in Allah as God, Muhammad as His last prophet, and the Qur’an as the final revelation for humankind.
Equally valuable but also ambivalent is “Islamic.” Reflexively, “Islamic” serves as the second order of identity for one who is Muslim. To be Muslim is to connect with Islam across centuries and borders, always acknowledging the norms and values linked to Islamic texts, leaders, and institutions. Yet the intrusion of English and the now commonplace usage of “Islamist” with a violent connotation makes it imperative to rethink the larger contour of Islamicate history. Over 1,400 years Islam has often been portrayed with negative stereotypes, from the medieval Crusades to modern colonialism but added to that multiply layered identity of Muslim/Islamic is the recent history of Islam, often defined by headlines of violence during the past half-century. The 1970s were marked by two eruptions: the Iranian Revolution (February 1979), followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979). These two events inaugurated a series of wars and crises that highlight Muslims and Islam as, in Elaine Sciolino’s phrase, “the Green menace,” replacing the disappearing (but now reappearing) “Red menace,” that is, the Soviet Union or Greater Russia.
While I oppose the contemporary or presentist bias, I also cannot ignore its pervasive influence. It produces a stigma, the stigma attached to Islam and, by extension, Muslims—too often riffed as Islamists—in 21st-century Euro-America. Unavoidable is the gaze of global media that defines events and actors through soundbites and images, usually negative. With the ubiquitous instant info world that we now take for granted, where tweets often count more than books, newspapers, or even television, one must ask: can Islam ever be free of the weaponizing proclivity of terror images? There are more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide, and few have anything to do with terror, yet if every Muslim is deemed a potential Islamist, can Islam itself be retained as a category of analysis without further exceptionalizing, minoritizing, and negativizing Muslims? For “Muslim” cosmopolitanism to work, it must extract the category “Islam” from the baggage it has acquired through daily, media saturation with negative images of Arab/Muslim/Islamic. If bad or violent, “Muslims” will appear in headlines, TV news, and tweets, but if good or cosmopolitan, they are relegated to the bylines or omitted, not just from essays and articles but also by visual media.
I would like to make the case for exceptions. They do exist, but their very paucity, and the reason for their paucity, underscore how “negative” Islamic/Muslim have become as labels in 21st-century America. Beyond Muhammad Ali, a sports hero to all, and Kareem Abd al-Jabbar, a basketball superstar, there are two Muslima Americans who were recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives: Rashida Tlaib from Michigan and Ilhan Omar from neighboring Minnesota. I applaud these women, as do many other Americans who are alert to a pluralist, progressive public square of debate and compromise but above all representation and advocacy. Yet these two Midwestern Muslima pioneers have been critiqued as well as lauded, by Muslims as by non-Muslims. More than mere politicians, they, unlike their non-Muslim counterparts, are seen to carry the weight of co-religionists with whom they share little other than the label “Muslim.”2
Why Cosmopolitan? Because it Values Bi-location in Two Worlds
Islamicate both complements and qualifies cosmopolitan because “cosmopolitan,” like Islamicate, is a category in flux. It has often been linked to Europe or the European enlightenment as an encompassing expression of mobility, generosity, and tolerance, yet cosmopolitan is broader than Europe, having an ecumenical reach that literally encompasses the Afro-Eurasian ecumene; that is, the inhabited world as it was known for more than two millennia.7 There are so many competing definitions of cosmopolitanism that it seems preferable to list some of these scholars before declaring which I choose to present and defend in this manifesto. All are acknowledged leaders in social scientific engagement with cosmopolitanism, and since one collected volume has included their analyses, I list six options from Vertovec and Cohen in order to highlight the enigma they collectively pose:
Cosmopolitanism may be a cultural, and cognitive, orientation, specifically, “the ability to stand outside a singular location (the location of one’s birth, land, upbringing, conversion) and to mediate traditions.”
8
But cosmopolitanism may also be the social experience of difference without threat, above all, in urban locations, where one moves through offices or zones of the city “reconciling alterity and rigidity, or alterity and rationality, with a notion of temporary identification.”
9
Cosmopolitanism may also not be individual but collective, an awareness oriented toward an agonistic democratic process, one that involves communities who find themselves “in that open space that requires a kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism is then not about an individual life style nor a universalist morality nor global political institutions, but rather it is about the “vision of a cosmo-
polis
, a global community of citizens.”
10
More specifically, cosmopolitanism might project an inclusive democratic strategy. While cosmopolitanism is presumed to be inherently urban, elitist, and consumerist, might it not also involve redefining social solidarities to engender mutual commitment and responsibility from the greatest number of citizens? In this case, “cosmopolitan democracy depends on finding ways to relate diverse solidarities to each other rather than trying to overcome them.”
11
Implicit in all the above is what has been openly stated by other social scientists: the cosmopolitan has to engage nationalism, and so for two other theorists, it is not just citizenship but nationalism, as also redefining national identity as a modern reflex of global capitalism, that must be at the core of any cosmopolitan project. Yet nationalism itself is not a consistent or constant analytical referent; it reflects at least two tangents of cosmopolitan sensibility.
Cosmopolitanism must be “modern” and national and that means: Option One. “There is no opposition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. They emerged together, and they belong together in the context of an emerging capitalist world-system.”
12
Or else:
Cosmopolitanism must be modern and “global” and that means: Option Two. Cosmopolitanism is simply globalism writ large, that is to say, “the self-definition and public reflexivity of transnational ways of life and situations, not only at the top but also at the bottom and in the middle of an emerging society of world citizens.”
13
Despite their seeming disagreement, Options One and Two converge in their focus on the necessity of national markers: every cosmopolitan must have a national identity, but at same time s/he needs to be committed to working against exclusive forms of national, ethnic, or local identity. What is presupposed and promoted is the vision of a cosmopolis, a global community of like-minded citizens, and that runs the risk of alienating or subjugating minorities, as Hannah Arendt has argued. It is precisely a resolute, if often unacknowledged, nationalist spirit that made cosmopolitanism impossible because it created the nation in terms of what it is not, that is, newly minted minorities without the rights of the majority. Cosmopolitanism becomes a form of neo-tribalism for elites only, caught between an imperial past and a totalitarian headwind.
14
Suffusing all these definitional efforts is the thrust of a cosmopolitan ethos, and because it is an aspiration, like every ethical norm, it is more readily sensed in its adjectival than in its nominal form; the
-ism
suggests an ideological closure that the adjective resists. In the interest of openness, I speak of Islamicate cosmopolitan, not Islamicate cosmopolitanism. The frame in which I locate each Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit is the historical trajectory and capacious context of Islamicate civilization.
Why Civilization? Because Every Cosmopolitan Has Civilizational Roots
While there are many elements to Islamicate cosmopolitan, its central inescapable core is an interactive, civilizational framework. “Civilization” as a category has been, and will continue to be, disputed, but what is beyond dispute is the linking of civilization with civility and so with polis or city. Without civilization, civility, and cities there would be no cosmopolitan ethos, whether Islamicate, Persianate, Italianate, or Christianate.
