The Sociology of Islam E-Book

Armando Salvatore

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 625

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Sociology of Islam provides an accessible introduction to this emerging field of inquiry, teaching and debate. The study is located at the crucial intersection between a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. It discusses the long-term dynamics of Islam as both a religion and as a social, political and cultural force. The volume focuses on ideas of knowledge, power and civility to provide students and readers with analytic and critical thinking frameworks for understanding the complex social facets of Islamic traditions and institutions. The study of the sociology of Islam improves the understanding of Islam as a diverse force that drives a variety of social and political arrangements. Delving into both conceptual questions and historical interpretations, The Sociology of Islam is a transdisciplinary, comparative resource for students, scholars, and policy makers seeking to understand Islam's complex changes throughout history and its impact on the modern world.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Sociology of Islam

A brilliant, pioneering effort to explain the cosmopolitan ethos within Islamicate civilization, The Sociology of Islam encompasses all the terminological boldness of Marshall Hodgson, making the Persianate and Islamicate elements of civic cosmopolitanism, across the vast Afro-Eurasian ecumene, accessible to the widest possible readership in both the humanities and the social sciences.

Bruce B. Lawrence,author of Who is Allah? (2015)

Sociologists of religion have long been awaiting a successor volume to Brian Turner's pathbreaking but now dated Weber and Islam (1974). Armando Salvatore's new book provides just this update and much more. Ranging across a host of critical case studies and theoretical issues, Salvatore provides a masterful account of religious ethics, rationalization, and civility across the breadth of the Muslim world, from early times to today. The result is a book of deep intellectual insight, important, not just for the sociology of Islam, but for scholars and students interested in religion, ethics, and modernity in all civilizational traditions.

Robert Hefner,Boston University

The sociology of Islam has been a late and controversial addition to the sociology of religion. This field of research has been the principal target of the critique of Orientalism and after 9/11 the study of Islam became heavily politicized. Terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut have only compounded the long-standing difficulties of objective interpretation and understanding. In the first volume of what promises to be a major three-volume masterpiece, Armando Salvatore steers a careful and judicious course through the various pitfalls that attend the field. The result is an academic triumph combining a sweeping historical vision of Islam with an analytical framework that is structured by the theme of knowledge–power. One waits with huge excitement for the delivery of the remaining volumes.

Bryan Turner,City University of New York

THE SOCIOLOGY OFISLAM KNOWLEDGE, POWER AND CIVILITY

ARMANDO SALVATORE

This edition first published 2016 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Salvatore, Armando, author. Title: The sociology of Islam : knowledge, power and civility / Armando Salvatore. Description: 1 | Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005808 (print) | LCCN 2016006680 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118662649    (hardback) | ISBN 9781119109976 (paper) | ISBN 9781118662625 (pdf) |    ISBN 9781118662632 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Islamic sociology. | Civil society   Islamic countries. | BISAC: RELIGION / Islam / General. Classification: LCC BP173.25 .S34 2016 (print) | LCC BP173.25 (ebook) | DDC 306.6/97--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005808

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Khaju bridge, Esfahan, Iran. © Aurora Photos / Alamy

CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

References

INTRODUCTION

Knowledge and Power in the Sociology of Islam

Knowledge/Charisma vs. Power/Wealth: The Challenge of Religious Movements

Civility as the Engine of the Knowledge–Power Equation: Islam and ‘Islamdom’

References

PART I PATTERNS OF CIVILITY

1 THE LIMITS OF CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE PATH TO CIVILITY

The Origins of Modern Civil Society

Civil Society as a Site of Production of Modern Power

Folding Civil Society into a Transversal Notion of Civility

References

2 BROTHERHOOD AS A MATRIX OF CIVILITY

Between Networking, ‘Charisma,’ and Social Autonomy: The Contours of ‘Spiritual’ Brotherhoods

Beyond Sufism: The Unfolding of the Brotherhood

Rewriting Charisma into Brotherhood

References

PART II ISLAMIC CIVILITY IN HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

3 FLEXIBLE INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND THE EXPANSIVE CIVILITY OF THE ISLAMIC ECUMENE

The Steady Expansion of Islamic Patterns of Translocal Civility

Authority, Autonomy, and Power Networks: A Grid of Flexible Institutions

The Permutable Combinations of Normativity and Civility

References

4 SOCIAL AUTONOMY AND CIVIC CONNECTEDNESS

New Patterns of Civic Connectedness Centered on the ‘Commoners’

Liminality, Charisma, and Social Organization

Municipal Autonomy vs. Translocal Connectedness

References

PART III MODERN ISLAMIC ARTICULATIONS OF CIVILITY

5 KNOWLEDGE AND POWER

From the Mongol Impact to the Early Modern Knowledge–Power Configurations

Taming the Warriors into Games of Civility? Violence, Warfare, and Peace

The Long Wave of Power Decentralization

References

6 COLONIAL BLUEPRINTS OF ORDER AND CIVILITY

The Metamorphosis of Civility under Colonialism

Court Dynamics and Emerging Elites: The Complexification of the Civilizing Process

Class, Gender, and Generation: The Ultimate Testing Grounds of the Educational-Civilizing Project

References

7 GLOBAL CIVILITY AND ITS ISLAMIC ARTICULATIONS

The Dystopian Globalization of Civility

Diversifying Civility as the Outcome of Civilizing Processes

From Islamic Exceptionalism to a Plural Islamic Perspective

References

CONCLUSION

Overcoming Eurocentric Views: Religion and Civility within Islam/Islamdom

The Institutional Mold of Islamic Civility: Contractualism vs. Corporatism?

From the Postcolonial Condition toward New Fragile Patterns of Translocal Civility

References

INDEX

EULA

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The sociology of Islam is an emerging, strategic field of inquiry, teaching, and debate located at the delicate intersection of a variety of disciplines, including sociology, history, Islamic Studies, anthropology, comparative religion, and comparative civilizational analysis. It deals both with conceptual questions and historical interpretations as they originated back in the 1970s, particularly in the pioneering work of Bryan S. Turner and his commentary on Marshall Hodgson's monumental trilogy The Venture of Islam. Covering this field of study is a longer-term undertaking that cannot be completed in one volume. This is why this book was born with an introductory intent and use value.

While the beginnings of the sociology of Islam should be traced back to Bryan S. Turner's Weber and Islam (Turner 1974), my own entry into the field as a scholar goes back to the early 1990s and coincides with the beginning of my PhD dissertation, which I completed at the European University Institute, Florence in 1994 and published in 1997 (Salvatore 1997). Yet my baptism of fire into the sociology of Islam occurred when I taught my first graduate seminar, in the winter of 1995, at Humboldt University, Berlin. The seminar was titled, in a kind of self-indulgent provocation, ‘Is a Sociology of Islam Possible?’

Clearly, whatever the sociology of Islam was by the mid-1990s, it still appeared fragile, dependent on scattered contributions and intermittent collaborations among individual scholars. Still absent, or at best latent, was the sense of a nexus between historical and empirical work, on the one hand, and whatever we happen to call ‘theory,’ on the other. In the summer prior to that graduate seminar, right after my arrival in Berlin, I convened a small panel on the sociology of Islam at an international conference sponsored by the leading social science journal Theory, Culture and Society. The event took place, by sheer coincidence, in Berlin. The journal editor, Mike Featherstone, had months earlier suggested to me that I invite Bryan Turner and Georg Stauth as speakers to the panel. I had never met them before, though I had read a lot of what they had published, including their co-authored works. These included Nietzsche's Dance (Stauth and Turner 1988) which, though devoted to a philosopher, was largely an alternate reading of the genesis of sociology which was to have an impact on my own understanding of the sociology of Islam. During the panel, I was struck by the difference between Bryan's and Georg's papers (and, more generally, approaches), since I had until then strictly associated their names as scholars with each other, and both of them together with the sociology of Islam. Even more, from that point onward, I admired what they had accomplished together, by being able to build powerful synergies and by combining their different sociological geniuses. Twenty years later, I am still profoundly attracted to the scholarship of both Bryan Turner and Georg Stauth and my debt to them in my own venture into and across the sociology of Islam is correspondingly high.

Since the summer of 1995, Georg Stauth has been an invited speaker at every institution I have worked for. His assiduous presence and our serial conversations have fed into my endeavors to develop an original yet balanced approach to the sociology of Islam. Georg has consistently responded to my cultivation of his rich and complex scholarship by offering me the chance to co-edit with him the Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam until it ceased publication in 2008, and by inviting me to be a member of the research group he directed at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, on ‘Islam and Modernity’ between 2003 and 2006.

This trajectory of twenty years culminated in a conference that took place in June 2015, just a few weeks before this manuscript went into production. The conference's topic was quite straightforward, ‘Sociology of Islam: Reflection, Revision, & Reorientation’ and I contributed to it a paper on “The Sociology of Islam and the Rise of China.” It was convened by the Sociology of Religion section of the German Sociological Association and took place at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) of Ruhr University, Bochum. The event was inaugurated by a keynote given by Bryan Turner which looked back at forty years of development in the field. Georg Stauth was not present and we missed his critical mind. His absence was for us a healthy warning on how the incessant, climactic politicization of Islam-related themes within the global public sphere presents a serious challenge to the sociology of Islam.

Yet this politicization is also a major reason why a viable sociology of Islam is urgently needed. As Bryan Turner reminded us in his introductory keynote, this field of study, born in the 1970s parallel to—yet independent from—the critique of Orientalism, was propped up by 9/11, alongside other academic fields dealing with Islam from the angle of modernity. The sociology of Islam should avoid being suffocated by this politicization while aiming to retain a scholarly significance and contemporary relevance by also speaking to the concerns of colleagues and students within political science and international relations, as much as it entertains key dialogues with scholars from history and anthropology. Not by chance does this introductory volume address the key dimension at stake in the majority of such conversations, namely power. I hope that this book, due to the consistent interdisciplinary porousness of the sociology of Islam from its beginnings, will attract the attention of practitioners of all academic disciplines concerned with power as well as that of a lay public interested in what—with a crude shorthand similar to those I tried to deconstruct in my PhD thesis more than twenty years ago—we often call ‘political Islam.’ This construct increasingly depends on Western—and more recently Chinese—perceptions and interests more than on the inner and outer complexities of the diverse social dynamics variably associated with Islam. The sociology of Islam does not ignore this interpretive syndrome but works to shield its object—namely the nexus of religion and civility produced by social forces associated with Islam—from the risk of a preventive, and potentially devastating politicization determined by the interests of powerful observers more than by the concerns of embattled actors.

In pursuing the goal of investigating the nexus of religion and civility, this introductory volume adopts a combined historical, theoretical, and comparative perspective, while it privileges key entanglements that push forward the classic boundaries of comparison. Historical references in the book are of crucial importance, yet by necessity selective. They reflect key periods, characters, or formations and illuminate particularly significant, long-term, and transregional processes of transformation. The main emphasis is on how social relations produce associational bonds and institutional configurations: therefore I opted to explore the unfolding of what I call ‘the knowledge–power equation’ and the way it produces patterns of civility. The book refers most consistently to the core ‘Nile-to-Oxus’ area of the Islamic ecumene and to its Central Asian and Mediterranean extensions.

While absolute comprehensiveness is unrealistic in a single, introductory volume, the trilogy that it intends to introduce (also in association with the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, a textbook that I have been editing together with Roberto Tottoli and Babak Rahimi over the last few years) will rebalance such initial regional and thematic foci. Ideally, the present volume should be followed by one dedicated to The Law, the State, and the Public Sphere and by a concluding study on Transnationalism, Transculturalism, and Globalization.

The book is primarily addressed to the same type of audiences and thematic discussions that generated it in the first place: classes of advanced undergraduate and graduate students on the one hand, and interdisciplinary explorations and debates with fellow scholars on the other. Social activists and policy analysts might also find inspiration in the proposed sociology of Islam for facilitating an understanding of Islam as a longer-term force providing a socio-cultural nexus and an institutional glue to a variety of relations and arrangements.

The Introduction situates the sociology of Islam in its historical and disciplinary context and provides a first discussion of the basic concepts used in the volume. Chapters 2 and 3 refer to the epoch that Marshall Hodgson (whose majestic historical trilogy provides the main source of inspiration for the sociology of Islam) called the Middle Periods (mid-10th to mid-15th centuries). Chapters 5 and 6 embrace early modernity and the colonial stage of late modernity. Chapters 1 and 7 discuss theoretical questions directly relevant to the analysis, while Chapter 4 adopts an explicitly comparative perspective. The Conclusion summarizes the results of the exploration while also providing an initial bridge to future studies and volumes.

Thanking all the colleagues who have directly or indirectly enriched my path through the sociology of Islam would appear as a replica of my email inbox of the last twenty and more years. In what follows, I remember as many as I can among my key interlocutors and I apologize for those omitted due to lapses of memory. I owe thanks to Setrag Manoukian, Fabio Vicini, Tom Troughton, Johann Arnason, Dale Eickelman, Klaus Eder, Arpad Szakolczai, Hatsuki Aishima, Benoit Challand, Khalid Masud, Gianfranco Poggi, James Piscatori, Şerif Mardin, Prasenjit Duara, Bruce Lawrence, Volkhard Krech, Levent Tezcan, Recep Şentürk, Michael Feener, Faisal Devji, Mark LeVine, Fabio Petito, Massimo Galluppi, Gennaro Gervasio, Enrico De Angelis, Andrea Teti, Mohammed Bamyeh, Jeanette Jouili, Schirin Amir-Moazami, Michael Gilsenan, Reinhard Schulze, Jamal Malik, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Alessandro Pizzorno, Charles Hirschkind, Ruth Mas, Sami Zubaida, Kathryn Spellman, Pnina Werbner, Chiara Bottici, Ian Chambers, Talal Asad, Jose Casanova, Craig Calhoun, Ali Zaidi, Meena Sharifi-Funk, Werner Schiffauer, Bob Hefner, Michael Gasper, Amyn Sajoo, Rouzbeh Parsi, Mohammad Tabishat, Joel Kahn, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Agnes Horvath, Alexander Caeiro, Tommaso Trevisani, Linda Herrera, Asef Bayat, Saba Mahmood, John Bowen, John Esposito, John Voll, Badouin Dupret, Hussein Agrama, Irfan Ahmad, Satoshi Ikeuchi, Ruba Salih, Margot Badran, Mona Abaza, Sigrid Nökel, Valerie Amiraux, Irene Becci, Nadia Fadil, Said Samir, Riem Tisini, Emilio Spadola, Frederic Volpi, Gabriele Marranci, Rouzbeh Parsi, Benjamin Soares, Martin van Bruinessen, Luca Mavelli, Abdulkader Tayob, Ebrahim Moosa, Filippo Osella, Pnina Werbner, Caroline Osella, Massimo Campanini, Albrecht Hofheinz, Georges Khalil, Jörn Thielmann, Michelangelo Guida, Claudio Lojacono, Mara Tedesco, Bo Stråth, Stefano Allievi, Vincenzo Pace, Olivier Roy, Andreas Christmann, Naveeda Khan, Brinkley Messick, Dyala Hamzah, and Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi. I am also grateful to all the students who attended my classes, seminars, and summer schools over the last twenty years at various institutions and who contributed to the exploration and discussion of key transformations within the Islamic ecumene.

I should not forget to show my appreciation of the endeavors of the editors and administrators of a cluster of new academic initiatives within the sociology of Islam. Right after the cessation of the publication of the previously mentioned Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam an increasingly successful listserv and newsletter on the sociology of Islam saw the light, followed more recently by an academic journal, published by Brill, entitled Sociology of Islam. These fora have provided an uninterrupted supply of fresh fuel igniting kaleidoscopic debates and corroborating the contemporary relevance and transdisciplinary scope of the sociology of Islam.

In conclusion, I would like to offer my special thanks to the institution that has hosted me during my last year of mostly integrative endeavors on the manuscript, namely McGill University. I remember here in particular Ellen Aitken, the painfully missed Dean of Religious Studies, and I thank all the colleagues from the Institute of Islamic Studies, particularly Rob Wisnovsky and the Institute's Director, Rula Jurdi Abisaab, who have been consistently supportive from the first minute. I have always associated the Institute with the teachings of two towering scholars who have influenced my scholarly trajectory since I was working on my PhD dissertation, namely Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Toshihiko Izutsu. Even more, I thank the Keenan Foundation and particularly Barbara Keenan for believing in the idea of reviving and renewing the heritage of those seminal teachings at McGill, whose significance clearly transcends the study of Islam to embrace the multiple entanglements between various religious traditions and their nexus with cultures, societies, and politics.

Armando Salvatore Montreal, September 2015

References

Salvatore, Armando. 1997.

Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity

. Reading: Ithaca Press.

Stauth, Georg and Bryan S. Turner. 1988.

Nietzsche's Dance: Resentment, Reciprocity and Resistance in Social Life

. Oxford: Blackwell.

Turner, Bryan S. 1974.

Weber and Islam: A Critical Study

. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

INTRODUCTION

Knowledge and Power in the Sociology of Islam

The project of the sociology of Islam is first indebted to the main paradigms of sociology. Sociology is, in several ways, the queen of the social sciences, but also a discipline interfacing with several crucial subdivisions and dimensions of the humanities, most notably with philosophy and history. One key trait of sociology is its rise as a scholarly reflection of (and on) modern- ity and its constitutive and transformative processes. It is the discipline not only inquiring into but also theorizing about modern society and its genesis. How we understand modernity probably depends more on sociologists' understandings and definitions of the term than on the work of historians or philosophers. While sociology is characterized by such a strong focus (sometimes bordering on obsession) on modernity, the discipline has often allowed for waves of transdisciplinary opening toward other horizons of scholarship. At a more recent stage of its development, sociology has also shown a capacity to question the supposed Western monopoly on the definition and management of modernity and ultimately some of its own certainties, or at least paradigms (see e.g. Eisenstadt 2000; 2003). This step has coincided with a reflexive turn within sociology led by the initiative of rereading several key authors both within the heart of sociology as an academic discipline and at its margins, often with a view to better contextualizing their works and intellectual biographies (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992; Szakolczai 2000). While this ‘reflexive turn’ cannot be considered representative of the discipline as a whole, it has certainly affected the trajectory, if not the genesis, of the sociology of Islam.

The reason why the sociology of Islam dovetails with the reflexive turn is also due to the initial challenge that the study of Islam has presented to solidified sociological categories, including, if not mainly, modernity. During the 19th century a wide array of academic disciplines targeting an increasingly comparative study of religions, cultures (primarily languages), and civilizations have constructed Islam as a powerful yet sinister countermodel representing a potential of resistance, both in history and the present, to how Western modernity tamed and appropriated the force of religious traditions (Masuzawa 2005: 179–206). This process occurred prior to the rise of sociology, which only saw the light as an academic discipline between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Yet sociology inherited this biased view of Islam for the simple reason that as a new discipline it initially depended on the findings and ideas of linguistic, textual, and historical disciplines. This is particularly evident in the German case, which also witnessed a continuous role of philosophers in mapping the global relations between cultural and religious traditions (Stauth 1993; Johansen 2004). However, the idea that Islam simply does not fit into modernity, though still popular among Western media professionals and policy-makers today, could not hold for too long once sociology took over. Yet Islam's full normalization and its folding into the ‘sociological normal’ did not work either. Thus Islam was bound to remain a force able to permanently unsettle sociology's never-renounced ambitions to explain the factors and impediments of social transformations and social cohesion on a global scale. It goes without saying that the quality and weight of this purportedly ambivalent role of Islam, along with the extent to which this characterization embarrassed rather than bolstered sociological paradigms during the 20th century, are themselves manifestations of the initial paradigmatic limitations of Western sociology.