The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam E-Book

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

Seitenzahl: 1532

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A theoretically rich, nuanced history of Islam and Islamic civilization with a unique sociological component This major new reference work offers a complete historical and theoretically informed view of Islam as both a religion and a sociocultural force. Uniquely comprehensive, it surveys and discusses the transformation of Muslim societies in different eras and various regions, providing a broad narrative of the historical development of Islamic civilization. This text explores the complex and varied history of the religion and its traditions. It provides an in-depth study of the diverse ways through which the religious dimension at the core of Islamic traditions has led to a distinctive type of civilizational process in history. The book illuminates the ways in which various historical forces have converged and crystallized in institutional forms at a variety of levels, embracing social, religious, legal, political, cultural, and civic dimensions. Together, the team of internationally renowned scholars move from the genesis of a new social order in 7th-century Arabia, right up to the rise of revolutionary Islamist currents in the 20th century and the varied ways in which Islam has grown and continues to pervade daily life in the Middle East and beyond. This book is essential reading for students and academics in a wide range of fields, including sociology, history, law, and political science. It will also appeal to general readers with an interest in the history of one of the world's great religions.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

List of Contributors

Preface

Introduction: The Formation and Transformations of the Islamic Ecumene

The Notion of a Transcivilizational Ecumene

I. Late Antique Beginnings (to ca. 661)

II. The High Caliphate (ca. 661–946)

III. The Earlier Middle Period (ca. 946–1258)

IV. The Later Middle Period (ca. 1258–1453)

V. Early Modernity and Civilizational Apogee (ca. 1453–1683)

VI. Facing the Global Rise of European Power (ca. 1683–1882)

VII. Colonial Subjection and Postcolonial Developments (ca. 1882–present)

References

Part I: Late Antique Beginnings (to ca. 661)

1 Agrarian, Commercial, and Pastoralist Dynamics in the Pre‐Islamic Irano‐Semitic Civilizational Area

Introduction

Demographic Trends in the Irano‐Semitic Civilizational Area

Agrarian Societies

Commerce and the Urban Economy

Nomads in the Wider World

Conclusion

References

2 Imperial Contests and the Arabs: The World of Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam*

The Great Powers and Their Arab Allies

Tribal Origins

Urbanization

Religion

Languages and People

Conclusion: The Historical Legacy

References

3 Pre‐Islamic Patterns of Social Organization and Cultural Expression in West Central Arabia*

Introduction: Sedentarization and Trade

Mecca

The Nomadic Flux

Kinda’s Monarchical Experiment

Epilogue: The Collapse of the Transtribal Order before the Rise of Islam

References

4 Muhammad’s Movement and Leadership

Introduction

The First Revelations

Islam and Monotheism

Muhammad the Holy Man

Conclusion

References

Part II: The High Caliphate (ca. 661–946)

5 The Trajectory of the High Caliphate: Expansion and Contraction

Introduction

The Umayyad Caliphate

The ‘Abbasid Caliphate

Conclusion

References

6 Developments within the Religious Sciences during the Rise and Decline of Empire

Introduction

The Caliphs as Religious Authorities

The ‘Abbasid Caliphs

The Caliphate under Attack: Rebellions and Loss of Religious Authority

The Triumphal March of the

Hadith

Party

Epilogue: The Subsumption and Marginalization of the Victors under a Consolidated Institutional Landscape

References

7 Shi‘is, Sufis, and Popular Saints

Introduction

Shi‘i and Khariji Counter‐Visions

Renunciants, Pious Fighters, and the Karramis

Sufis

Popular Saints

Epilogue: The Overlap Among Sufis, Shi‘is, and Popular Saints

References

8 Contested Fields, Knowledge Mobility, and Discipline Crystallization

Introduction

Governance and Learning

Language, Theology, and the Culture of Rule

Conclusion: The Expansive Culture of Islam as a Religion and Civilization

References

Part III: The Earlier Middle Period (ca. 946–1258)

9 Cosmopolitan Expansion and the Fragmentation of Governance

Introduction

The Rise of Regionalism and New Political Structures

The Saljuqs

The Islamic West: The Maghrib and al‐Andalus

References

10 Scholarship, Speculative Thought, and the Consolidation of Sunni Authority

Introduction

The Buyid Period (945–1061)

The Saljuq Period and Beyond

The Emerging Consensus and the Organization of Islamic Scholarship

Conclusion

References

11 Alternative Patterns of Legitimacy: Sunni–Shi‘i Debates on Political Leadership

Introduction

Developments in Shi‘i Doctrine on the Imamate

Clashing Paradigms of Legitimate Leadership:

Sawabiq

and

Manaqib

Propinquity to the Prophet: Blood‐Kinship vs. Spiritual Closeness

The Importance of Knowledge

Conclusion

References

12 The Crystallization and Expansiveness of Sufi Networks within the Urban‐Rural‐Nomadic Nexus of the Islamic Ecumene

Introduction: The Successful Metamorphosis of a Spiritual Quest

From Disciplinary Singularities within Enclave Publics to Mainstream Conduits of Civility

The Brotherhood Matrix

The Enchanted City of Chivalric Civility

Conclusion: Between Diversification and Institutionalization

References

Part IV: The Later Middle Period (ca. 1258–1453)

13

Pax Mongolica

and its Impact on Patterns of Governance

The Transformation of the Islamic Ecumene in the Era of Mongol Conquests

The Conflicts among Mongol Coalitions and the Political Fragmentation of Anatolia and Iran

The Establishment of New Hegemonies and the Revival of the Mongol Tradition by Amir Timur

The End of the Era: The Breakthrough of the Ottoman Sultanate and the Conquest of Constantinople

References

14 Religious Knowledge between Scholarly Conservatism and Commoners’ Agency

Introduction

Talking About God: Religious Elites and Ordinary People

Sermons,

Hadith

, and

Fatwas

as Channels for Circumventing the Scholars’ Conservatism

Conclusion

References

15 The Consolidation of Sunni and Shi‘i Legitimacies

Introduction

‘Alid Millenarianism and Utopian Aspirations

The Turkicization of Anatolia, the Shi‘itization of the Sunnis, and the Consolidation of Sunni Islam

Conclusion

References

16 Organizational Patterns and Developments within Sufi Communities

Introduction

The Impact of the Suhrawardis

Defining the Appropriate Sufi Master

Countercurrents

Epilogue: Competition, Institutionalization, and the Rejection of Norms

References

Part V: Early Modernity and Civilizational Apogee (ca. 1453–1683)

17 Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy

Introduction

Saint‐Philosopher‐Kings

Shi‘i Sufi‐Shahs

Millennial Sovereigns

Conclusion

References

18 The ‘

Ulama

’ as Ritual Specialists: Cosmic Knowledge and Political Rituals

Introduction

The Mongol Impact on Early Modern Islam

A Case Study: The Timurid (“Mughal”) Successors of the Mongols

Comparisons and Contrasts with the Safavid and Ottoman Empires

Conclusion

References

19 New Sociopolitical Formations and the ‘Renaissance’ of Philosophy

Introduction: The Timurid Inheritance

Defining Philosophy in Iran

Philosophers in Shiraz

Conclusion

References

20 The Apogee and Consolidation of Sufi Teachings and Organizational Forms

Introduction

Circulation, Translations, and the Renewal of the

Rihla

The Expansion of the Sufi Orders

The Hierarchy of Saints, Pilgrimages, and Celebrations (

Mawalid

)

New Literary Genres and Contestations

Conclusion

References

Part VI: Facing the Global Rise of European Power (ca. 1683–1882)

21 Global Transformations in the ‘Muslim World’: Connections, Crises, and Reforms

Introduction

Europe and the Muslim World

Transformation of the Ottoman Order

The Collapse of the Safavid Empire and Nader Shah’s Eurasian Claim

From Mughal to British India

New Orders, Revolutions, and European Dominance

Epilogue

References

22 Intellectual Creativity in a Time of Turmoil and Transition

Introduction

18th‐Century Antecedents

Reformers and Ideologues in the Early 19th Century

Emerging Intellectuals and Opposition

Conclusion

References

23 Islamicate Knowledge Systems: Circulation, Rationality, and Politics

Introduction

The Problem of Islam, Reason, and Science in the 1880s: Jamal al‐Din al‐Afghani and Ernest Renan

The Transmitted and Rational Sciences 

Islamicate Scholarship, Decline and Cosmopolitanism: Historiography and Periodization

Conclusion

References

24 From Saints and Renewers to

Mahdi

s and Proto‐Nationalists

Introduction

Battles and Debates at the End of the 17th Century

18th‐Century

Tariqa

s and Renewal

Renewers and New Organizations: Transition to the 19th‐Century World

Sufism in the World of Western Imperial Domination

Conclusion

References

Part VII: Colonial Subjection and Postcolonial Developments (ca. 1882–present)

25 Struggles for Independence: Colonial and Postcolonial Orders

Introduction

The Colonial Order

The Progress Narrative

Cultural Progress: A Tale of Two Generals

Nationalist Narratives of Authenticity

Reforming Islam

Islamist Imaginaries of Reform

Postcolonial Orders

Conclusion: Amid the Ruins of Sovereignty

References

26 The ‘

Ulama

’: Challenges, Reforms, and New Patterns of Social Relevance

Introduction: The Challenge of Educational and Institutional Modernization

Madrasa

Reform

New Intellectuals and the Rise of Islamism

Decolonization (1945–1970)

‘

Ulama

’ and State Power

State

Mufti

s

Shaykh

s in the Media

New Opportunities

Conclusion: ‘

Ulama

’, Moral Authority, and the Vision of the Civil State

References

27 The Role of Intellectuals within Late‐Colonial and Postcolonial Public Spheres

Introduction: Intellectuals and Modern Knowledge, Alienation vs. Organic Relationships

Emerging Examples of Intellectual Intervention

Epilogue: The Continual Metamorphosis of the Intellectual Role

References

28 The Sociopolitical Entanglements of Sufism*

Introduction

Trajectories of Sufism vs. State Elites

Sufism in Muslim‐Majority Areas

Sufism in Muslim‐Minority Contexts

Overlapping Fields between Sufism and Islamism

Conclusion

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Wiley Blackwell Histories of Religion

The Wiley Blackwell Histories of Religion is a new series of one‐volume reference works providing comprehensive historical overviews of religious traditions and major topics in religion and theology.

Each volume will be organized along chronological lines, and divided into a series of historical periods relevant to the subject. Each of these sections will provide a number of essays looking at the major themes, ideas, figures, debates, and events in that period. This approach has been chosen to offer readers a way of tracing the developments, continuities, and discontinuities which have shaped religion as we know it today.

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Published

The Wiley‐Blackwell History of Jews and JudaismEdited by Alan T. Levenson

The Wiley Blackwell History of IslamEdited by Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi

The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam

Edited by

Armando Salvatore

Associate Editors

Roberto TottoliBabak Rahimi

Associate Editors

M. Fariduddin AttarNaznin Patel

This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Names: Salvatore, Armando, editor. | Tottoli, Roberto, editor. | Rahimi, Babak, editor. | Attar, M. Fariduddin, editor. | Patel, Naznin, editor.Title: The Wiley Blackwell history of Islam / edited by Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, Babak Rahimi, M. Fariduddin Attar, Naznin Patel.Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2018. | Series: Wiley Blackwell Histories of Religion | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2017022077 (print) | LCCN 2017037254 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118523629 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118523568 (epub) | ISBN 9780470657546 (cloth)Subjects: LCSH: Islam–History.Classification: LCC BP50 (ebook) | LCC BP50 .W56 2017 (print) | DDC 297.09–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022077

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List of Contributors

Asma Afsaruddin is Professor of Islamic Studies and former Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author or editor of seven books, including her most recent Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press 2015) and the award‐winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press 2013). She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005.

Anna Ayşe Akasoy is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, City University of New York. Her research interests include the intellectual culture of the medieval Muslim West and contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures. Her current research project concerns the religious functions of Alexander the Great in the Islamic tradition.

Johann P. Arnason is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Professor of Historical Sociology, Charles University, Prague. His research has focused on the comparative analysis of civilizations and on theories and varieties of modernity. He has written or edited books about the Soviet model, the dual civilization of Japan, the Greek polis, and the Eurasian world in the 10th–13th centuries, as well as theoretical works such as Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Brill 2003).

M. Fariduddin Attar is currently pursuing his PhD at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. His main research focus is post‐Avicennian philosophy and theology in the Islamic East. He has taught philosophy in a number of universities in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Mohammed A. Bamyeh is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and the editor of the International Sociology Reviews. He is the author of Anarchy as Order (Rowman & Littlefield 2009), Of Death and Dominion (Northwestern University Press 2007), The Ends of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press 2000), and The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (University of Minnesota Press 1999). He has also edited Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris 2012), Palestine America (Duke University Press 2003), and Literature and Revolution (as a special issue of the Arab‐American journal Mizna, 2012). His latest book, Lifeworlds of Islam, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Amira K. Bennison is Professor in the History and Culture of the Maghrib at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Magdalene College. Her teaching and research interests include the medieval Islamic West (Islamic Iberia and Morocco), Maghribi modes of legitimation and cultures of power, and 18th‐ to 19th‐century Muslim religiopolitical discourse and engagement with modernity. She is the author of The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh University Press 2016), and The Articulation of Power in Medieval Iberia and the Maghrib (Oxford University Press 2014). She has also edited The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the ‘Abbasid Empire (I.B. Tauris 2009), Cities in the Premodern Islamic World (with Alison L. Gascoigne; Routledge 2007), and Jihad and its Interpretations in Pre‐Colonial Morocco (Routledge 2002), as well as numerous articles.

Michele Bernardini is Professor of Persian Language, Literature, and History at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Among his publications are various works on the Mongol and Timurid periods, including Mémoire et propagande à l'époque timouride (Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes 2008) and I Mongoli. Espansione, imperi, eredità (with Donatella Guida; Einaudi 2012). He is the editor‐in‐chief of the journal Eurasian Studies and a member of the editorial board of Series Catalogorum, devoted to cataloguing collections of Oriental manuscripts.

Caterina Bori received her PhD from the University of Rome La Sapienza and is currently Associate Professor in the History of Islam and Early Modern Muslim Civilizations at the University of Bologna. Before that she was Teaching Fellow in the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. She has published extensively on Ibn Taymiyya and his historical milieu, and is currently exploring the transmission of the doctrines of siyasa shar‘iyya into the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods.

Rachida Chih is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a member of the Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies (CETOBAC), École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. She is currently completing a book on Sufism in Egypt in the 17th and 18th centuries. Her published works include Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane/Sufism in the Ottoman Era (with Catherine Mayeur‐Jaouen; Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire 2010), Le soufisme au quotidien: Confréries d’Égypte au XXe siècle; Le saint et son milieu (with Denis Gril; Sindbad/Actes Sud 2010), and Sufism, Literary Production and Printing in the Nineteenth Century (with Catherine Mayeur‐Jaouen and Rüdiger Seesemann; Ergon 2015).

Devin DeWeese is a Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. He earned his PhD at Indiana University in 1985 and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Guggenheim Foundation, and Carnegie Scholar program. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (Pennsylvania State University Press 1994) and Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, Vol. I: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (with Ashirbek Muminov; Daik‐Press 2013). His numerous articles on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and Iran focus chiefly on problems of Islamization, on the social and political roles of Sufi communities, and on Sufi literature and hagiography in Persian and Chaghatay Turkic.

Bruce Fudge is Professor of Arabic at the University of Geneva. He is the author of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: al‐Tabrisi and the Craft of Commentary (Routledge 2011) and editor‐translator of A Hundred and One Nights (New York University Press 2016).

George Hatke received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and is currently Senior Lecturer in Ancient South‐Arabian History and Epigraphy at the Institut für Orientalistik, University of Vienna. His areas of research include pre‐Islamic South Arabia, ancient and medieval Ethiopia, and Indian Ocean trade.

Paul L. Heck, Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University, publishes on the intellectual history of Islam and the nature of Christian–Muslim relations both sociologically and theologically. His most recent monograph is Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of Confusion (Routledge 2014).

Ahmet T. Karamustafa is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His expertise is in the social and intellectual history of Sufism in particular and Islamic piety in general in the medieval and early modern periods. His publications include God’s Unruly Friends (University of Utah Press 1994) and Sufism: The Formative Period (Edinburgh University Press/University of California Press 2007). He is currently working on a book project titled Vernacular Islam: Everyday Muslim Religious Life in Medieval Anatolia (co‐authored with Cemal Kafadar) as well as a monograph on the history of early medieval Sufism titled The Flowering of Sufism.

Jamal Malik is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt. After studying Islamic Studies and Political Science in Bonn, he received his PhD in 1988 at Heidelberg and conducted his postdoctoral studies (leading to a professorial Habilitation) in 1994 at Bamberg. Before joining the University of Erfurt in 1999, Jamal Malik worked in different positions at the Universities of Bonn, Heidelberg, Bamberg, and Derby. His current research interests focus on da‘wa movements, Sufism, and madrasas, along with Islam in South Asia and Europe.

Matthew Melvin‐Koushki received his PhD from Yale University and is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid‐Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world.

Ethan L. Menchinger is Lecturer in Early Ottoman History at the University of Michigan, where he received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies in 2014. He was a Fellow in the program “Europe in the Middle East—the Middle East in Europe” at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto. He has published articles on Ottoman political thought, philosophy, and intellectual history as well as translations and is the author of First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vâsıf (Cambridge University Press 2017).

A. Azfar Moin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Columbia University Press 2012).

Jane H. Murphy is Associate Professor of History at Colorado College. She is currently working on a study of the rational sciences in the life and times of ‘Abd al‐Rahman al‐Jabarti.

Naznin Patel is a graduate student at the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. Her research interests include Renaissance Italian and early modern intellectual history, with particular emphasis on its interaction with Islamic philosophy and theology.

Babak Rahimi is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture, and Religion at the Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego. He earned his PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, in October 2004. Rahimi has also studied at the University of Nottingham, where he obtained an MA in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy in 1997, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, 2000–2001. His book, Theater‐State and Formation of the Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590–1641 C.E. (Brill 2011), studies the relationship between ritual, public space, and state power in early modern Iranian history.

Sajjad Rizvi is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. An intellectual historian trained at Oxford and Cambridge, he has published extensively on the course of philosophy in the Islamic East in the early modern period and is currently writing a monograph on the intellectual history of Islamic philosophical traditions in 18th‐century North India and Iran.

Armando Salvatore is a sociologist and a scholar of comparative religions. He is the Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies (Society and Politics) at the School of Religious Studies, McGill University. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” the National University of Singapore, and, more recently, the Australian National University and the University of Leipzig. He is the author of The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (Wiley Blackwell 2016).

Jakob Skovgaard‐Petersen is Associate Professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Department of Cross‐Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. His field of research is contemporary Islam, with a particular focus on the establishment of a modern Muslim public sphere, the role of the Muslim ‘ulama’ in modern Arab states, and the articulation of Islamic topics in the new pan‐Arab television networks. Key publications include Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: Muftis and Fatwas of the Dār al‐Iftā (Brill 1997), Global Mufti. The Phenomenon of Yusuf al‐Qaradawi (co‐edited with Bettina Gräf; Hurst/Columbia University Press 2009), and Arab Media Moguls (co‐edited with Donatella della Ratta and Naomi Sakr; I.B. Tauris 2015).

Devin Stewart earned a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He has been teaching in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, Emory University, since 1990. His research has focused on the Qur’an, Shi‘i Islam, Islamic legal theory, institutions, and education, and other topics in Arabic and Islamic studies. He is the author of Islamic Legal Orthodoxy: Twelver Shiite Responses to the Sunni Legal System (Utah University Press 1998) and editor and translator of Disagreements of the Jurists (New York University Press 2015).

SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He has published extensively on various aspects of Muslim reform, colonial modernity, and secularism, with a focus on South Asia.

Isabel Toral‐Niehoff studied History and Arabic Studies in Tübingen where she earned her PhD in 1997 with a thesis titled Kitab Ǧiranīs. Die arabische Übersetzung der ersten Kyranis. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und Kommentiert. She acquired her professorial habilitation in 2008 at Free University, Berlin. Her main research and publishing fields are Arabia and the Near East in Late Antiquity, cultural identity, cultural transfer processes, Arabic occult sciences, and classical Arabic literature and historiography. She has published the monograph Al‐Ḥīra: Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext (Brill 2014).

Roberto Tottoli is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department of Asian, African, and Mediterranean Studies, University of Naples “L’Orientale.” He was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2016–2017. He has published studies on the Biblical tradition in the Qur’an and Islam such as Biblical Prophets in the Qur’an and Muslim Literature (Routledge 2002) and The Stories of the Prophets of Ibn Mutarrif al‐Tarafi (Klaus Schwarz 2003), and on medieval Islamic literature. His most recent publications include Ludovico Marracci at Work: The Evolution of His Latin Translation of the Qur’ān in the Light of His Newly Discovered Manuscripts (co‐authored with Reinhold F. Glei; Harrassowitz 2016), and Books and Written Culture of the Islamic World. Studies Presented to Claude Gilliot on the Occasion of His 75thBirthday (co‐edited with Andrew Rippin; Brill 2015).

John O. Voll is Professor Emeritus of Islamic History at Georgetown University. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the author of Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Syracuse University Press 1994) and numerous other books and articles on Islamic and world history.

Ali Yaycioglu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and the early modern Muslim world at Stanford University. His book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press 2016) is an attempt to rethink the Ottoman experience within the global context of the revolutionary age of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Preface

The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam is a collective project whose beginnings go back to the Summer of 2008, when I received an invitation to provide a proposal for such a volume to Wiley Blackwell. Ever since, the project has required an ongoing exchange with a variety of scholars of Islam with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. From the beginning, both the publisher and I shared the goal of providing a reference work based on fresh scholarly findings, while taking into account relevant research traditions and their underlying, if contended, scholarly approaches. The outcome of almost a decade of work and exchange is a volume addressed to a composite academic audience, ranging from advanced undergraduates to professionals who aspire to acquire a knowledge on the history of Islam which is comprehensive, up to date, and manageable. Yet the volume might also contribute to scholarly debates not confined to Islamic Studies: most notably through the analysis of the transformations that marked the transition of the Islamic ecumene from premodern to modern sociopolitical conditions.

Published histories of Islam are either single‐authored studies that reflect the author’s individual approach or collective works with an encyclopedic ambition and/or a multivolume range. They therefore risk overstating either the unity or the diversity of Islamic history. This volume is a cohesive collective undertaking based on an originally unitary yet articulate conception. This has been executed through distributing the task of dealing with discrete aspects and periods of Islamic history among a selected group of intellectually motivated scholars within history, Islamic Studies, and historical sociology—both within the English‐speaking academia and outside of it—who share the need for reasonable conceptual innovations. Our goal has been to strike a balance between older and younger scholars and to achieve a fair degree of geographical distribution, with one third of the contributors (and one of the main editors) coming from non‐Anglophone institutions. This diversity was also achieved in response to a specific request by the publisher, back in 2008, to provide a comprehensive representation of scholarly traditions in the study of Islam. This also includes the self‐renewal of the time‐honored continental orientalist ‘schools.’

This is why The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam can help absorb and redeploy basic analytic concepts which are mostly taken for granted by both the specialist and by a larger academic audience. We provide a well‐studied selection of key topics that are neither confined to the taste and skills of a single author nor reflective of the encyclopedic ambition of covering the entire ‘world of Islam.’ We have addressed the unity and diversity of the history of Islam, both as a religious tradition and as a civilizational process, by blending historical analysis and theoretical reflection. Our main goal has been to help our readership to understand a complex tradition‐cum‐civilization the knowledge of which is essential for making sense of the wider transcivilizational dynamics of the Afro‐Eurasian hemisphere—including the far western exceptionalism of the ‘Occident.’

Against the background of teleological assumptions concerning why the Islamic civilization finally succumbed to the hegemonic power of the ‘West,’ the book illustrates the distinctive Islamic (and Islamicate) unfolding of the dialectic of ‘commoners’ and elites across urban, agrarian, and nomadic milieus. It shows how the related patterns of life conduct were shaped in connection with highly variable and often flexible institutions of governance. The particular key to presenting an articulate yet cohesive history of Islam consists in consciously focusing on the ongoing dynamics linking religion and culture to power and civility. This focus puts a premium on a rather transcivilizational approach, whereby the Islamic ecumene is seen both in its internal articulations and in its external openness and permeability, rather than through the lens of a more narrowly conceived area study perspective.

The volume consists of seven parts. Part I deals with Islam’s overlapping, relevant ‘beginnings’ out of the older and wider dynamics of the Irano‐Semitic civilizational area. Part II covers the classic era of the caliphate from the middle of the 7th to the middle of the 10th century CE: this epoch played a formative role especially in setting the terms of the future continual interaction between the shari‘a tradition (oriented to life conduct and juridical regulation) and the adab culture (radiating from the courts of the rulers and able to shape the character of statecraft and administration, but also decisively influencing the enactment of cultured life forms): they interacted and competed in shaping key notions of the Islamicate order, ranging from the subject to the state. Part III embraces the formative epoch of what comparative civilizational analysts have called the “ecumenic renaissance” occurring throughout the Afro‐Eurasian landmass during the early second millennium CE, within which the expanding Islamic ecumene played a crucial role, notably through the spread of Sufism (from the collapse of the power of the caliphate in the middle of the 10th to the wave of Mongol conquests in the middle of the 13th century). Part IV deals with the renewal of the expanded Islamic ecumene from the Mongol capture of Baghdad of 1258 until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople of 1453. Part V encompasses the early modern period, lasting until the end of the 17th century and the Battle of Vienna. Part VI covers the 18th and most of the 19th century, an epoch coinciding with the global rise of European powers, during which Islamic movements of revival and reform saw the light. Part VII explores the era of anti‐colonial resistance and postcolonial reorganization carried out by sociopolitical (including “Islamist”) movements and new elites, animated by a variety of patterns of mobilization and organization (both national and transnational), up to the present era.

This chronological subdivision represents a partial revision of the approach of the most important work in the history of Islam to date by Marshall G.S. Hodgson (see the Introduction to this volume) and of other conventional periodizations, in that it shifts the beginning and end of some epochs and intervenes in the overall logic that delimits and connects successive eras. It particularly suggests a tripartition of the larger epoch we identify with modernity into an early modern yet largely precolonial era, a colonial period, and a long (yet ongoing) phase of exit from colonial domination toward problematic attempts to reconstruct sociopolitical autonomy in the era of postcolonial nation‐states, culminating in their crisis between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Similarly, the unity of the seventh period cuts through the late‐colonial and postcolonial phases (a type of labeling that, if taken too literally, along with the underlying periodization, is too blatantly modeled on the Western trajectory of colonial modernity) and envisions a rather unitary epoch of movement‐based resurgence and corresponding attempts to build independent states—a period that has been increasingly characterized by centrifugal processes, especially from the 1970s until today. This tripartition of the modern age has the merit of rejecting the still dominant narrative postulating the existence of a Western monopoly on the birth of modernity from its inception, and which is based on reductive and homogenizing assumptions about linear alignments of Reformation, Enlightenment, and the commercial and industrial revolutions of Northwestern Europe.

Each of the seven parts consists of four chapters that cover the more strictly geopolitical and the wider civilizational dimensions of Islamic history, as well as the theological‐juridical field, more exclusive forms of elite culture, and the fundamental dimension of Sufi and ‘popular’ traditions and practices: sometimes representing the ‘lines of flight’ from the consensus but more often reinstituting it in new ways. This assortment is necessary to provide systematic unity to the materials, though it has been obviously molded by the specific orientations of the chapter contributors. While in some cases a certain amount of background knowledge by the reader can be assumed, the chapters are generally written to be accessible to broader audiences. Each author treats a given topic from a specific perspective, allowing a modest overlap among chapters on dealing with key events, characters, or themes. The intention has been to strike a suitable balance in preserving the scholarly autonomy of each author and chapter while guaranteeing a degree of cohesion to the volume as a whole which aims to improve on what we can find in comparable collective works, however excellent their scholarly quality.

After my proposal for the book was approved by Wiley Blackwell in late 2008, I started inviting contributors from different backgrounds, and in the years 2011 and 2014, respectively, I asked Roberto Tottoli and Babak Rahimi to collaborate in the editorship. I am grateful that they accepted and also joined the task of inviting contributors, winning over to the project a pool of authors whose chapters play a particularly critical role in the balance of the entire volume, most notably with regard to the highly contentious fields dealing with early Islam and early modernity. In the distribution of preliminary editorial work, Roberto took care in particular of Parts I and II, Babak of Parts V and VI, and I dedicated myself to Parts III and VII, while Babak and I collaborated on Part IV. On the latest stage of work, which started around 18 months ago after Roberto Tottoli had collated and ordered the individual chapter drafts, I took over the entire manuscript anew and submitted it to substantial, yet sustainable revisions.

It goes without saying that without Roberto’s and Babak’s contributions to the editing work, this volume would have never seen the light. Qualitatively, the editorship of this volume is theirs as much as it is mine, while I tried to preserve and nurture, through several ups and downs, a sense of continuity, purpose, and standard from those increasingly remote beginnings of the project. This endeavor also entailed keeping fidelity to the project as originally discussed with the publisher and further channeled by four anonymous reviewers, to all of whom I owe thanks. In the final phase I particularly benefited from an intensive six‐month collaboration with M. Fariduddin Attar and Naznin Patel at McGill University, where we all received the graceful and constant support of Professor Daniel Cere, Director of the School of Religious Studies. Farid’s and Naznin’s sharp acumen in reading and commenting on all chapters helped me in particular with the work of conceptual and architectural homogenization of the volume. Last and really not least, I have immensely benefited from the continual advice of the leading comparative historical sociologist and social theorist Johann P. Arnason, whose co‐authorship of the Introduction only partly reflects his essential contribution to shaping the volume.

Armando SalvatoreUtrecht, June 2017

Introduction: The Formation and Transformations of the Islamic Ecumene

Armando Salvatore, Johann P. Arnason, Babak Rahimi, and Roberto Tottoli

The Notion of a Transcivilizational Ecumene

The particular complexity of the historical study of Islam is nowadays a given for scholars in the broader field. This acknowledgement contrasts sharply with crass generalizations in public and media discourse on Islam, not only in the West. The project underlying this volume, belonging to the Wiley Blackwell History of Religions series, explores the diverse ways through which the undeniably religious dimension that is at the core of Islamic traditions (or simply Islam) innervates a distinctive type of ‘civilizing process’ in history. This process crystallized in institutional forms at a variety of levels: broadly social, specifically religious, legal, political, cultural, and, transversally, civic.

No doubt the scholarly interest in studying this expansive civilizing process has acquired a new boost due to late 20th‐century developments associated with what has been roughly called a “re‐Islamization process” occurring in the context of the most recent wave of globalization, whose beginnings should be traced back to the 1970s. Debates on globalization did not always take a historical turn, but when they did, the question of earlier globalizing waves—including premodern ones—was bound to be posed, and the exceptional success of the premodern Islamic expansion stood out as a prime example. Correspondingly, the applicability of modern concepts to the macro‐civilizational formation created by this process could be considered.

Apart from a relatively brief early stage, the Islamic ecumene was not a unified empire, and it never became a world economy. It was always to some or to a large extent intertwined with multiple economic worlds, centered on the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and Central Asian trade routes. But the notion of an Islamic world system sui generis has been suggested (Voll 1994) and several elements seem to speak in its favor: an exceptional importance of international trade, high geographical mobility, a notable degree of legal uniformity, and widely shared cultural codes. Several such trends have been the object of study of a historically and theoretically informed sociology of Islam (Turner 1974; Stauth 1993; Salvatore 2016), a field of research taking shape in the wake of the intellectually most challenging yet comprehensive single‐authored oeuvre within the field to date. This work was produced precisely at a time, in the late 1960s, when the complexity of the wider field of Islamic Studies started to be recognized through an increasingly diversified set of investigations (Donner 2010: 641–2). I am referring to Marshall Hodgson’s posthumously published three‐volume The Venture of Islam (Hodgson 1974, I–III). Hodgson was Professor of World History and Chair of the prestigious interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

In his scholarly career Hodgson interacted closely with representatives of both world history and modernization theory and his approach clearly transcended the conceptual limitations of Islamic Studies. A retrospective reading of key motives from his oeuvre has been recently facilitated by its reception among historians, historical sociologists, and civilizational analysts within a broader comparative perspective. Particular attention has been devoted to how religious traditions are supposed to feed into the broader civilizing process through which societies and states take form. Moreover, Hodgson can be credited for anticipating interpretations that only became familiar to a larger academic public from the late 1970s onward, ranging from the critique of the bias of orientalist worldviews to a pluralizing approach to the issue of modernity. In spite of writing during the zenith of modernization theory between the 1950s and 1960s, Hodgson warned us of the dangerous extent to which concepts applied to Islam and its history came to depend on the hegemony of Western modernity.

References to Max Weber, few in number but contextually significant, show that Hodgson was aware of classical social theory as well as of the need to go beyond such references, although in his work there is no trace of contact with the sociological debates that toward the end of his life and career were beginning to significantly alter received understandings of Weber’s work. Hodgson’s own reasons for being enticed to take into account sociological concepts were directly related to the broader historical setting within which he wanted to situate the Islamic “venture.” His starting point was namely a perceived shortcoming of scholarship dealing with “pre‐modern citied societies … from Sumer to the French Revolution” (Hodgson 1974, I: 31). As he saw it, anthropologists had developed a systematic framework for the study of premodern non‐citied communities, and sociologists had done something comparable for modern societies; but apart from exceptions like Max Weber, he lamented that the long period in‐between had not been tackled on that level. For Hodgson, a systematic approach to the premodern citied world would, first and foremost, have to account for the structures and dynamics of world history, and in the first instance those of the Afro‐Eurasian macro‐civilizational area. His idea of civilizations and their ongoing processes linking urban centers to rural and nomadic sectors needs to be understood in this context, as referring to units partly demarcating themselves, but also, and most importantly, interacting with each other and developing innovative capacities within an encompassing and ultimately global space. Thus, even if he never used the concept of civilizing or civilizational process, civilizations were conceived by him very much in process‐like terms.

Let us take stock on analyzing this civilizational approach. Hodgson begins with a definition of “culture … as a pattern of lifeways received among mutually recognized family groups.” In a more explicitly historical perspective, this pattern represents “a relatively autonomous complex of interdependent cumulative traditions, in which an unpredictable range of family groups may take part” (Hodgson 1974, I: 32). A civilization then appears as a “wider and more rarefied level” (Hodgson 1974, I: 33) of cultural identity. Civilizational patterns depend on “dominant lettered traditions,” whose cultural imprint tends to be accompanied by a continuity of social institutions. Yet, as Hodgson stressed, “each civilization defines its own scope” (Hodgson 1974, I: 33), so that the interconnections of cultural and institutional factors will differ in both degree and kind. Further warnings against reading too much into a general concept of civilization follow from reflections on its interpretive and explanatory reach. The ways of demarcating and understanding a civilization “must differ with the grounds for singling it out” (Hodgson 1974, I: 34); Hodgson’s prime example of such variations is the case of Byzantium, widely seen as a distinctive civilization but also as a phase in the history of Hellenic culture or part of a wider Christian world. This is not to suggest that no demarcation is more appropriate than other possible ones; to stay within this thematic range, the idea of three civilizations emerging from the transformation of the Roman world—Western Christendom, Byzantium, and Islam—has decidedly proved more fruitful for comparative research than the notion of one monotheistic complex.

If long‐term civilizational patterns have a role to play, that role must be defined according to Hodgson within this perspective: “Historical change is continuous and all traditions are open and in motion, by the very necessity of the fact that they are always in internal imbalance. Minds are always probing the edges of what is currently possible” (Hodgson 1974, I: 37). Hodgson’s most basic working hypothesis for comparative studies thus follows: “The difference between major traditions lies not so much in the particular elements present within them, but in the relative weighting of them and the structuring of their interplay within the total context” (Hodgson 1974, I: 37). The next point to note is the connection between the above claims and the specific features of the “venture of Islam,” to the extent Hodgson saw the latter as a creative transformation and integration of multiple legacies. This is where a clarification of Islamic variations on this theme is needed, drawing on Hodgson’s insights but moving toward a more explicit theoretical and comparative stance. One obviously distinctive feature of the Islamic experience is the very close interconnection between the “internal imbalance” (Hodgson 1974, I: 37), which Hodgson sees as a reason for openness and ongoing change, and external dynamics.

This is due to the fact that the unfolding of Islamic civilization to an exceptionally sustained record of expansion requires paying due attention to different aspects of that process: religious, imperial, and civilizational. The expansive process involved multiple encounters with other civilizations, with varying outcomes on institutional as well as regional levels. The changing balance of expansion and interaction also set the scene for internal differentiation, as between the permanently shifting patterns of a quite open‐ended relation between political and religious authority. This is not to deny that the Islamic forms and directions of the religiopolitical nexus are distinctive, but they have to be defined in terms of historical trajectories. Their specific features are due to the characteristics of the religious message (as it developed during the formative periods), the successive phases of expansion, and the encounters with other civilizational trajectories.

This realization clashes against orientalist bias envisioning this relation as particularly rigid, due to Islam’s putative ‘origins.’ Long before Edward Said, Hodgson was critical of unexamined orientalist generalizations. As summarized by Edmund Burke III, “Marshall Hodgson clearly saw that Islamic history was a strategic point from which to undertake a critique of the discourse on Western civilization” (Burke III 1993: xv). To mark both the idiosyncratic and the shared elements characterizing the rise to hegemony of the Islamic ecumene at the very center of the Afro‐Eurasian civilizational landmass, Hodgson’s idea of a civilizational “Islamdom” distinct from Islam proper, that is, as a religious tradition, contributed to open the way to transcend the static idea of Islam as a monolithic civilization developing the themes of its origins between Mecca and Medina. Islamdom effectively described the unstable yet creative crystallization of an ecumene comparable in principle with Latin Christendom but actually deploying much more fluid and malleable civilizational characteristics. Islamdom was kept distinct from Islam by Hodgson for a variety of reasons, but most notably for its potential to create synergies among previously distinct cultural worlds and religious traditions. For Hodgson, it represented the specific “complex of social relations” or “the milieu of a whole society” embodied by Islamic civilization, being the perpetually shifting outcome of complex interactions with Islam’s core religious traditions (Hodgson 1974, I: 58).

Thus the nature of Islamic civilization appeared to Hodgson as sui generis, if compared with China, India, or the West, precisely for being able to trigger off a new type of synthetic, even transcivilizational dynamics across the Afro‐Eurasian depths. He never used the term “transcivilizational ecumene” or any equivalent one, but his emphasis on Islamdom’s unprecedented ability to impose a significant degree of cultural unity across regional boundaries, and to expand to the Eastern and Western extremities of Afro‐Eurasia, points in that direction. Alternatively, if we follow Shmuel N. Eisenstadt in theorizing modernity as a new type of civilization, distinguished—among other things—by a very high capacity to transcend regional origins and formative contexts (Eisenstadt 2004), Islamdom was in this regard indisputably its most significant predecessor. For much of the “Middle Millennium” (Zedar and Wiesner‐Hanks 2015: 667), as the editors of the fifth volume of the The Cambridge World History call the period from 500 to 1500 BCE that saw the unfolding of a “proto‐globalization” (Olstein 2015), the “centrality of Islamic civilization” (Cook 2015) was a basic fact, which started to change, and only slowly, during the early modern era.

The uniqueness of this proto‐global centrality of Islamdom was rendered by Hodgson in terms of transcivilizational circulation, cosmopolitan opening, and institutional flexibility. According to him, the civilizational complex of Islamdom innervated by Islamic traditions inherited and creatively recombined the cultural characters and the political specificities of a vast and more ancient geocultural region that he called the “Irano‐Semitic” civilizational area. Prior to the rise of Islam this region embraced rather heterogeneous religious communities sharing ideas of prophetic monotheism but divided by a long history of competition and conflict. The civilizing process occurring within Islamdom inherited and brought to a common denominator both the religious characteristics of the Irano‐Semitic area and their impact on the management of the worldly realm. For Hodgson, “[t]he Irano‐Semitic prophets analyzed neither the inner self nor the outer world”; they “summoned the personal conscience to confront a cosmic moral order, which expressed itself in the contingencies of social history” (Hodgson 1974, I: 117–18).

In other words, the rise of Islam brought to the Irano‐Semitic multi‐traditional constellation an unprecedented input from the hitherto peripheral Arabian Peninsula (including a language that became a key bearer of lettered traditions), and centered the whole process on a new religious vision. A markedly pluralistic background thus entered into the making of new civilizational patterns. To sum up, thanks not only to the emergence of Islam but also to the unfolding of Islamdom, “the post‐Cuneiform Irano‐Semitic tradition between Nile and Oxus, from Syria to Khurasan,” brought prophetic monotheism “to a certain culmination,” also by exalting the “communal articulation” of the town commoners most exposed to its message, “while overcoming its divisiveness” (Hodgson 1993: 107).

In parallel to acknowledging unambiguously that the new venture of Islam had been long in the making via monotheistic traditions in different Semitic and Iranian manifestations, Hodgson also stressed the increasingly self‐assertive strength of urban, and in particular mercantile, groups. At the confluence of such combined trends, Islam infused Islamdom with a strongly egalitarian social ethics (Arnason 2006: 32). Thus, rather than the Hijaz (the narrow region of the Arabian Peninsula where Mecca and Medina are located), the cradle of Islam and the platform from which its hemisphere‐wide expansion started should be, according to Hodgson, identified with the wider “Nile‐to‐Oxus” region. He unabashedly stated that “when Islam was announced there, the new doctrine did not seem strange,” since it was quite well aligned with earlier developments of the Irano‐Semitic realm (Hodgson 1993: 105). The new call met the aspirations of townspeople facing agrarianate dominance over societies strongly stratified in classes or castes.

Further developing Hodgson’s vision of Islam’s venture requires nowadays a concerted scholarly engagement on a quite broad scale, entailing more than simple interdisciplinary collaborations, namely the adoption of a transdisciplinary perspective matching history with theory. The present volume, building on the strengths of Hodgson’s approach, intends to accomplish a step in this direction requiring in some cases a distancing from Hodgson and the exploration of alternative interpretive paths, among those the increasingly diversified and methodologically reflexive field (rather than discipline) of Islamic Studies has produced over the last four decades.

I.  Late Antique Beginnings (to ca. 661)

There are various keys that may help us to decipher the intricate process that generated the seeds of the Islamic ecumene in the Near East during Late Antiquity (ca. 200–600), a label coined by Peter Brown (1971) which has helped to recontextualize several strands of historical research on the Euro‐Mediterranean and West‐Asian regions. The interpretive questions here at play concern the economic, cultural, and political developments of the 5th and 6th centuries CE