UNDERSTANDING ISLAM AS A CIVILIZATION
In this essay, I will explore what I see as the most persuasive and accurate pictures of the Islamic venture from a civilizational standpoint. These accounts view the social and historical experience of Islam from a world history perspective informed by a vision of one humanity of equal and diverse groups. I will begin this exploration by looking at the validity of civilizational approaches for understanding the contemporary world before moving on to a specific consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of viewing Islam as a civilization and the degree to which generalizations about Islam are valid. Then I will discuss what Islamic civilization is and what distinguishes it from other civilizations.
We generally talk about Islam in civilizational terms, just like we talk about Western, Chinese, and other civilizations. But is it helpful to speak like this? Or are we generalizing far beyond what is warranted? In the worst cases, are we merely going along with media perceptions and making Islam into a convenient adversary? Western media tends to promote simple and unflattering images of “Islam” and some Western academics still confidently hold on to outdated ideas about Islam that go back to colonial times. The simple notion still lingers that Western civilization stands for democracy, individualism, equality, and rationality, whereas Islamic civilization is characterized by authoritarian governments, extreme communal passions, hierarchical societies, and violent religious politics.
A first step toward overcoming this simple dichotomy between the West and Islam is to view these two civilizations in relational terms. This means recognizing that Muslims are to some degree responding to Western actions and to the history of Islam-West relations. Political and economic factors play an important role that cannot be ignored. A Pew Research Center survey in 2017 showed that 35 to 50% of American adults replied that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, American Muslims are extremist to a fair or great degree, half or more US Muslims are anti-American, Islam is not part of mainstream US society, and there is a natural conflict between Islam and democracy (1).
In addition to the overall inaccuracy of such perceptions, Americans fail to take history into account. They do not recognize how Western colonialism and continued interference in the Muslim world and religious prejudice and discrimination have contributed to whatever Muslim violence and extremism does exist as well as negative attitudes toward the United States, democracy, and mainstream American values. Instead of taking a broad historical view of intercivilizational relations, Americans tend to view Muslim motivations in terms of religion alone.
Despite frequent misuse of a civilizational perspective on Islam, I am going to offer a qualified version based on the work of Marshall Hodgson, the trailblazing historian of Islam, and the brilliant contemporary sociologist of Islam, Armando Salvatore, both of whom embrace a type of civilizational perspective. As a starting point, Hodgson and Salvatore have viewed Islamic civilization in its own terms, rather than relying on Western academic standpoints and concepts from the outset. And they have not hesitated to generalize about Islamic history and society on a broad scale. In this regard, their work is part of a move toward big-picture accounts and civilizational analysis in more recent years, an intellectual trend that has not gone unchallenged.. So the advantages and disadvantages of a civilizational approach need to be evaluated before viewing Islam in civilizational terms.
Samuel Huntington, a high-profile scholar, succeeded in bringing civilizational comparisons into the public arena. What attracted the most attention was his comparison between Islam and the West in which he viewed these two major civilizations as having opposite values and therefore likely to clash. The attack on the World Trade Center was taken as confirmation of the essential correctness of Huntington’s perspective by many Western people. I agree with Huntington’s idea that cultures and civilizations are likely to play a greater role than political ideologies in the 21st century. But not with his vision of unique civilizations with highly different values facing off against each other. Huntington ignores the history of relations between the West and the other regions of the world where the sources of many tensions in our contemporary world can be found. We are living in a time where non-Western nations are responding to past injustices, indignities, and cultural disrespect and suppression at the hands of the Western powers by culturally asserting themselves.
Huntington’s belief that civilizations have clearly identifiable characteristics that are little affected by changing historical circumstances is mistaken. The regions that were occupied and dominated by the West underwent great transformations as the West introduced an accelerated modern way of life and integrated these areas into a single global market. But their own cultures were not completely erased, and the task has been to revitalize the treasures of lasting value and integrate them with the modern and postmodern ways of life. Civilizations have always significantly influenced each other, and the extent of their internal diversity means that Huntington’s idea of monolithic civilizations that vastly differ from each other is far too simple and one-dimensional. As Edward Said rightly noted, there is a clash of values within the Islamic world more than a clash between Islamic and Western values. And this internal clash is a product of the upheavals caused by the Western advance into the rest of the world during modern times.
Much anti-Western sentiment within the Islamic world is the outcome of a long period of Western domination that has continued until the present day. Historical circumstances like Western support for dictators who suppressed Islam must be taken into account as well as attempts to assimilate Muslims to Western culture and values. Yet, as Huntington recognizes, Western civilization is only one among several variants and its claims of preeminence will not be recognized by the members of other civilizations. The way forward, though, is not a defensive mentality that focuses on strengthening one’s own civilization in opposition to others, but dialogue among equals which includes an understanding of the historical background, the extensive relations among civilizations, and the cultural similarities as well as differences.
Do Separate Cultures Exist?
Let us briefly trace the development of cultural anthropology since the 1950s to get deeper insight into the merits and demerits of civilizational analysis. For it is within the field of cultural anthropology that the assumptions of civilizational analysis have been most thoroughly examined and criticized. Many of the same issues that cultural anthropology has had to deal with are also those which civilizational perspectives also face: Do cultures and civilizations form relatively unified wholes? If so, what qualities or characteristics make up this unity? How have historical factors affected the development of these cultures and civilizations?
Cultural anthropology during the first half of the 20th century gave human intentions and purposes only minor roles and largely ignored cultural systems of meaning. Human actions were explained in terms of general laws of behavior or social functioning, without taking account of how the research subjects viewed their own lives. In reaction to this trend, Clifford Geertz interpreted individual cultures in terms of beliefs, often religious ones, and meanings. Viewing cultures as largely self-contained units, he studied Java, Bali, and Morocco from the local point of view, focusing on how people understood and responded to the events of their lives.
In Geertz’s essays, he also made explicit how he produced anthropological knowledge and what he was trying to do as an anthropologist. He admitted that his ideal of disinterest and detachment as an outside observer was not easy to attain and maintain. What’s more, he recognized the ethical ambiguities of his position as an anthropologist coming to a poor country from a very wealthy one to study people who often saw his position as desirable, yet out of reach. But he neglected to closely examine the connection between his own work and the history of colonialism and the unequal power relations under which he produced his field research.
Postmodern anthropologists in the 1980s and 1990s took the self-critical path that Geertz had started to explore. They denied the existence of self-contained cultures and the assertion that ethnographers are objective observers and interpreters of the life experience of people living in a self-enclosed and radically different world. In the words of George Marcus, ethnographic researchers are “ever present markers of outsideness.” He adds: “What ethnographers in this changed situation want from subjects is not so much local knowledge as an articulation of the forms of anxiety that are generated by the awareness of being affected by what is elsewhere without knowing what the particular connections to that elsewhere might be. The ethnographer on the scene in this sense makes that elsewhere present (2).”
From a postmodern standpoint, the ethnographer and the subject share a common predicament because they both experience, although in different ways, anxiety, wonder, and insecurity due to their lives being deeply influenced by what takes place far away as well as by what happens locally. Ethnographer and subject each feel at sea in this diverse and complex world where conditions change rapidly in unforeseen ways. The focus of fieldwork is a local area but to understand the experience of its residents, ethnographers must study and engage with the different sites that play an important role in the lives of the subjects. Otherwise, they lack the broader knowledge needed to report on the world of their subjects.
In the wake of many attacks on his highly influential work, Geertz challenged the idea that the anthropological study of culture is irrelevant, biased, illusory, and impractical. Can we deny the existence of worlds of meaning, the products of history, in which people are embedded? Despite the difficulties that the concept of culture has given rise to, by recognizing that others live in often radically different worlds and by understanding these differences, we are taking great steps toward improving our communication with those who are culturally different (3).
Even if we accept that the anthropological idea of culture still has practical value, the strongly held notion of separate cultures, each making up a system with its own clear boundaries, has been shaken. Cultural differences, though important, should be seen as less central and the influence of the field worker’s own culture on the research recognized and questioned. Rather than a focus on cultural systems which implies their relative unity, it would be better to focus on the giving of meaning to experience which occurs in the context of local and global social and political trends and events. Therefore, research subjects are always negotiating power differences while creating meaning within a highly unequal world organized according to various hierarchies. While appreciating the continuing value of Geertz’s contributions, his ideas need to be taken in the more critical and radical direction that postmodern anthropology has explored.
The Value of a Civilizational Approach
Dividing up the world into civilizations went out of fashion among social scientists and historians by the 1970s, but in the 1990s, civilizational analysis made a comeback among sociologists. Big-picture thinking appears once again to offer some advantages, although civilizational thinking still has more detractors than defenders. Quite recently, there has been talk of a “metamodern” era on the horizon, as the postmodern period recedes. Champions of metamodernism are once again embracing large-scale theorizing, refining earlier approaches in the light of postmodern critiques.
In the earlier part of the 20th century, comparative sociologists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and philosophers of history Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee saw the world in terms of civilizations. Instead of just examining the political form of nation states or empires, they touched on ideas and cultural qualities that made civilizations unique and gave them their own special flavor. By taking history into consideration, their accounts were expansive in time as well as space. Unfortunately, their worldview was often Eurocentric, so their work has to be reconsidered and transformed in order to make it truly global in outlook and scope.
The context within which civilizational analysis has been revived is worth examining. With the end of the Cold War, the cultural dimension and identity issues are now playing a more prominent part within the political landscape. It is a time of increasing ethnic diversity and multiculturalism brought about by migration as well as renewed ethnic pride and cultural self-assertion. There is also a movement toward regional integration through associations and trade agreements like the European Union, ASEAN, and other economic blocs. People interact and identify with not just members of the same national or ethnic culture but also with people who see themselves as belonging to the same civilization. The notion of a civilizational identity has resonance.
The postmodern criticism of the idea of separate and bounded cultures also applies to the idea of distinct civilizations. Behind much of the suspicion toward cultural and civilizational analysis is the claim that a culture or civilization is distinguished by its inherent qualities, its “essence.” Critics assert that if we carefully analyze the history of a civilization, we find that there are no such qualities that have continued throughout its lifespan. The characteristics of groups of people come into being in response to certain conditions and diminish as these conditions change. No group can claim “ownership” of these traits; the most it can do is attempt to preserve them, for example, when its members choose to strongly identify with them.
If cultures or civilizations cannot be characterized by certain “innate” qualities, then diligence is not an inherent Japanese trait; love of freedom is not what makes a person American; closeness to nature is not the essence of being Native American; the Arab mind is not distinguishable by its rhetorical flourishes. If a culture or civilization appears to have qualities that have persisted over long periods of time, this is usually due to isolation. But even in these cases, internal developments have taken place leading to cultural change.
Japan serves as a good illustration of such a society, since it experienced almost total isolation from the outside world during the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Yet, the culture continued to change due to internal factors. The imposition of a central government upon the warring feudal factions and the resulting peace strengthened the position of the merchant class. The samurai, in turn, were weakened, having lost their most important social function, that of waging war. Virtues associated with the merchant class such as diligence and rational calculation gained prestige. After the Western intrusion in the later part of the 19th century, lower samurai spearheaded an all-out effort to adjust to the modern world and an amalgamation of samurai and merchant values occurred as Japan modernized quickly creating new institutional structures.
A related criticism of the civilizational approach deals more with its application. The civilizational thinker claims that different cultural groups make up a civilization because they share something in common, whether it is cultural traits, a language, a religion, institutions, or social and political values. But take the example of India. If we consider India as a civilization, what can we point to as “authentically” Indian? In this time of Hindu nationalism, Hinduism is often put forward as the essence of Indian culture. But to what extent do the large Muslim and Sikh populations share a Hindu culture? Hinduism also was influenced by the other religions with which it came in contact such as Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity and underwent modernization under the pressure of British colonialism. Is there a “real” Hinduism that constitutes Indian culture and defines what it means to be Indian?
It is possible to address the weaknesses of both the cultural and civilizational positions. The civilizational approach of Johann Arnason has been a largely successful attempt to come to terms with the issues raised by critics. Arnason shows that cultural, political, and economic factors must all be included in order to understand the make-up of a civilization. In addition, culture and power are interrelated and neither can be understood in isolation. He also views a civilization in terms of its relations with other civilizations. It is created through interactions over time, and these vital encounters make a civilization what it is.
For Arnason, there are no particular qualities that can be said to be the “essence” of a civilization. Yet there are qualities that distinguish one civilization from others, characteristics which change over time. He also does not reduce culture to political economy or the reverse, doing justice to both the material aspects of social life and the realm of ideas and concepts. And by emphasizing that civilizational development is relational, he recognizes the significant degree of exchange and influence among civilizations that has always existed. At the same time, he contrasts those civilizations that encourage and promote such exchange and those that tend to focus more on internal development (4). I see Japan as an example of a civilization that has alternated between these contrasting attitudes with periods of openness to the outer world followed by turning inward and minimizing such contact.
By understanding a civilization through its relations with other civilizations, one important criticism of the cultural approach is effectively addressed. An emphasis on cultural integration and cultural systems, which views cultures as made up of certain distinguishing qualities or traits, gives way to a focus on cultural exchange and studying cultures and civilizations in the context of the world. Civilizations are understood in terms of their histories and how the connections with other parts of the world have played out. This approach gives a more accurate picture of the diversity and abundance of their social worlds, and includes the part that domination and exploitation has often played in giving a civilization its shape and characteristics.
Arnason recognizes the need to incorporate the dimensions of wealth and power which are often in an uneasy relationship with cultural ideals. He also maintains that each civilization has its own worldview but these interpretations of the world are limited by the prevailing economic and political conditions. My example is that urban merchants in both Islamic and Western civilizations have tended to adopt relatively cosmopolitan and egalitarian outlooks that set them somewhat apart from the landowners and aristocracy.
Nevertheless, the cultural sphere of beliefs and values also has a large impact on economic and political institutions and ideologies. For example, in Islamic societies, there tends to be more of a pietist or legalist underpinning to democratic values and in Western societies more of a liberal framing. A cultural standpoint may also at any particular time give relative independence to the economic or political domain so that the impact of culture declines. A case has been made by Armando Salvatore that in modern Europe the nation state has assumed a central role as the influence of the producers of knowledge and culture has declined.
Islam As a Civilization
Can we really talk about Islam as a civilization? Clifford Geertz warns that “any attempt to conceive of ‘Islam’ in sweeping, ‘civilizational’ terms … is in some danger of conjuring up cloudscapes mighty like a whale and concocting Joycean big words that make us all afraid. A descent into the swirl of particular incidents, particular politics, particular voices, particular traditions, and particular arguments, a movement across the grain of difference and along the lines of dispute, is indeed disorienting and spoils the prospect of abiding order. But it may prove the surer path toward understanding ‘Islam’ — that resonant name of so many things at once” (5). What Geertz is saying is that getting the balance between the particular and the general in accounts of any social and cultural phenomena is a fine art, and civilizational approaches have tended to err toward being too general in their descriptions and explanations. But it leaves open the question of whether a more grounded and less sweeping account could still be called “civilizational.
Geertz’s eloquent plea to concentrate on specifics rather than make abstract generalizations based on the fictions of the theorist’s mind needs to be heard. It guards against self-satisfaction with the simplicity and order of elegant ideas at the expense of attending to the concrete details of real life on the ground. Marshall Hodgson attempted to do both in his magisterial three-volume history of Islam. In a review of The Venture of Islam, Geertz, while recognizing the nobility of effort and purity of motives, believes that Hodgson fell short of showing why Islam should be viewed as a civilization. He was not able to establish Sufism as the connecting link that gave a vast collection of territories and cultures its overall unity, since Sufism itself was a heterogeneous mixture appealing to different classes and taking various shapes.
For Geertz, the diversity of Islamic religious positions that was evident in the 1970s cast doubt on whether Islamic societies were organized according to one unified pattern and whether there was cultural continuity with the past. After all, there were fundamentalisms together with more open and eclectic approaches, a strong current of Sharia legalism together with Sufi mysticism, the culturally different Islam espoused by desert tribes and by Malaysians and Indonesians. He suggests that we see resemblances between the varied religious and social forms we call “Islamic” the same way we see different features within a family that crisscross and overlap without being reducible to any single identifiable features. Such a picture of the Islamic experience would be based on fewer broad generalizations, leaving us with “oblique connections” and “glancing contrasts.” A focus on family resemblances would give us a more immediate understanding of the Islamic venture than seeing it, as Hodgson does, as “an extended struggle of a gentle pietism to escape from an arid legalism (6).”
Hodgson’s notion of civilization can be examined more closely. He maintained that Islamic ideals distinguish it from other civilizations, emphasizing cultural factors as the key to understanding Islamic civilization. For example, he saw sharia as spreading deeply into Muslim life by the end of the first major period of Islamic history (945 CE). Sharia gave Muslims ethical and legal guidelines for realizing their religion’s ideal of justice in their own lives and in the world. During the middle period as Islamic civilization reached its height, Sufism came to play a central and unifying role. There was a felt need for an inner experience of the divine to complement the outer practice of the sharia, and Sufi mysticism satisfied this need.
As Hodgson’s leading interpreter, Edmund Burke III has pointed out, civilizational studies have tended to focus on cultural and intellectual factors at the expense of social and economic ones. For Hodgson, a civilizational approach does not deal with the great variety of Muslim experience in different settings and epochs. Instead, it examines the culture of literate urban elites in an agrarian age. He assigns the major role in initiating historical change to the people of conscience who depart from the prevailing conventions, despite the prevailing cultural conservatism that discourages innovation. In addition to the ulama, the guardians of the sharia tradition, he gives extended treatment to Sufism, in particular, its intense cultivation of the inner world, high culture of love mysticism, and associated intellectual and aesthetic developments. In these realms, Hodgson finds some of Islamic civilization’s most sublime contributions.
Burke emphasizes that a civilization is also rooted in the daily lives of ordinary people within a wide variety of social and economic contexts. In his view, Hodgson largely fails to draw the connections between the ideal and material levels. His piety-minded innovators also seem “larger-than-life,” while his treatment of ordinary people of religious devotion and their role in religious history is undeveloped. As a result, in the case of Sufism, he does not faithfully describe the different social stratas of people affected by its teachings, practices, and leaders. He is only describing the outlook and experience of an elite and leaving out those attracted to Sufism for its veneration of saints, healing practices, and folk elements (7).
Hodgson did, however, examine the impact of the earlier Persian-Semitic civilization upon the Islamic world in terms of its prophetic traditions and affinities with monotheism, while recognizing that Islamic civilization was also a considerable departure from such traditions. In addition, he wrote about the importance of the merchant class and the ways in which their more egalitarian and cosmopolitan outlook was incorporated into Islam’s civilizational vision. Rather than picturing Islamic history as a few centuries of creativity and splendor followed by terminal decline, he emphasized the vitality and creativity of Islamic civilization during its middle periods. Islamic civility remained vibrant as its formative ideals were continuously negotiated and renegotiated among the ulama, the ruling elites, the landowners, and urban groups such as merchants, craftsmen, and Sufi masters.
Although Hodgson does not recognize the significance of what we have call “social history” or “people’s history,” he has given us some persuasive arguments for viewing Islam as a civilization for much of its history. He emphasizes that Islamic civilization cohered to a considerable degree despite the diversity of its local cultures. Those who identified with the Islamic religion were able to preserve their religious and to some degree social ties, despite the spread of Islam over a vast region that included parts of Europe and Africa, Central Asia, India, China, and Southeast Asia. The cultural habits and practices that were adopted, although they varied depending on time and place, were consistent enough to merit calling them “civilizational.”
But Hodgson acknowledges that around 1500, important elements of the Islamic civilization began to go their separate ways as the degree of overall unity diminished. The local Sufi brotherhoods and Muslim groups that were woven together through a common allegiance to Islam’s moral and spiritual vision became less influential as the Islamic world moved toward a federation of distinct political blocs. Islamic cultural life became increasingly divided on a geographical basis, and this tendency was accentuated by the consolidation of three powerful Islamic empires: Ottoman (Turkish), Safavid (Persian), and Moghul (Indian).
In Hodgson’s view, when the West developed its rational and technical civilization from the 17th century onward, it destroyed the relative social parity between civilizations that had existed. But this sudden increase in the power of the West was not primarily an internal development. “The great modern cultural mutation presupposed the contributions of all the several citied peoples of the eastern hemisphere: inventions and discoveries, the existence of large areas of relatively dense, urban-dominated populations, tied together in a great interregional commercial network, to form a vast world market which had gradually come into being in the Eastern Hemisphere, and in which European fortunes could be made and European imaginations exercised.” Without this civilizational foundation upon which to build, the West could never have assumed world dominance.
Western colonialism and the sudden and forced entry of Islamic societies into a vastly different cultural universe drastically altered Islamic civilization as nation states gained center stage. In addition to social, intellectual, and economic disruption, both the landowning classes and the religious scholars were partly displaced from their positions of great social influence. And Hodgson saw the continued existence of the Islamic tradition as under threat due to the extent of these transformations. But in recent times, Islamic revival has gathered momentum, and there have been selective retrievals of the religious past and the invention of new customs disguised as the preservation of tradition.
Beyond Orientalist Accounts of Islamic Civilization
Since the time that Hodgson was writing in the 1960s, an important new development within the intellectual world has occurred which has had great relevance for our understanding of Islam as a civilization. In the late 1970s, Edward Said published his provocative and challenging Orientalism, which claimed that the Western understanding of the Islamic world had little to do with Islamic realities. Instead, Western scholarship and writing on Islam was largely an attempt to define Islam in a way that justified and facilitated Western control over that part of the world. Postcolonial thinkers following Said have pointed out that the Western study of other civilizations has proceeded under a set of assumptions that reflect an imperial mentality. Scholars of Islam have been forced to come to terms with this type of postcolonial critique. Still, the process of decolonizing Western scholarship, although it has begun, is far from complete.
Postcolonial thinkers are paving the way for a postcolonial sociology through a close examination of the inherited assumptions, methods, and concepts that dominated the field during the imperial age. They point out that a further critique of Orientalism is needed, and the great impact of colonialism on both colonized and colonizer must be recognized. The important ways in which the colonized responded to and resisted those who attempted to dominate them are also worthy of greater attention. Mainstream sociology tends to divide civilizations into the West and the rest, implicitly viewing the West as the model for progress and development. This imperial standpoint has not been fully overcome, since Western models of social reality are often viewed as universally valid. So sociology must adapt to a plural world undergoing cultural and civilizational renewal as the prelude to a planetary civilization (8).
What is remarkable, however, is the degree to which Hodgson had already gone beyond Orientalist approaches to the study of Islam a decade before the appearance of Said’s influential critique. He had already pronounced that there was no such entity as “the Orient,” and he saw writing world history as an antidote to the idea that any race, ethnicity, or nation was superior. By world history, he meant an account of civilizations that focused on their connections rather than viewing them as having distinct and parallel histories. He referred to interactions with highly disruptive consequences as innovations spread from one region of the world to another. Examples at the material level were the Mongol conquest and the diffusion of gunpowder weapons but there were also profound religious and cultural transformations brought about by the impacts of Islam, the ascetic-monastic ideal in South Asia, and the scientific ethos of the industrial revolution.
Hodgson’s vocation was grounded in spiritual values, in particular, the ideal of human unity, and he believed that his history of Islam would further the realization of the spiritual and moral imperatives of the global age. Strongly opposing the notion that the West could be distinguished from other civilizations on the basis of inherent and unique qualities, Hodgson emphasizes that it was only in the modern age for a little over a century that cultural differences between Europe and the rest of the world were greatly accentuated. But the civilizations subject to Western imperialism and thrust into the modern age adopted Western technical innovations and modernized their institutions as they began catching up in terms of social power. Hodgson also recognized that a major theme of World War II was a struggle on the part of the oppressed for self-determination. This struggle became more open and intense in the postwar years, as nationalist movements increased their strength and influence, leading to decolonization and national independence.
Hodgson created a legacy for those who were determined to study Islamic and other non-Western civilizations from a global rather than orientalist perspective. Armando Salvatore in The Sociology of Islam (2016) has offered a non-Orientalist account of Islamic civilization that was inspired by Hodgson’s pioneering work. He provincializes Western civilization and takes up the challenges that cultural and civilizational analysis have had to deal with over the past 50 years. Yet, unlike some postcolonial thinkers, Salvatore does not throw over the academic discipline of sociology for being irrevocably tainted by an imperial past. Instead, he shows how sociology can become a truly global discipline by integrating the achievements of the classical sociologists into a blossoming field no longer based on Eurocentric assumptions, methods, and concepts.
Salvatore presents Islam as a civilization without inherent qualities or essences. He defines a civilization as“at best contingent crystallizations of an open-ended civilizing process within Afro-Eurasia,” and sees Islam at the forefront of this process in premodern times. There is a stark contrast between this exalted role and Islam’s later status as an eccentric civilization within Western-centered colonial modernity. Salvatore’s view of Islam as a civilization is accompanied by his argument that Islam’s development was quite different from that of the West. “What is remarkable is the relative constancy and consistency of the norms they managed and their related social expectations over distant regions and through a variety of epochs in spite of the absence of a centralized, Church-like organization.” Such civilization unity was not imposed by a centralized government but was due to the flexibility of Islamic institutions and the degree to which people voluntarily embraced Islam.
For Salvatore, the ulama, the arbiters of sharia, and the Sufi brotherhoods were important contributors to this long history of shared values and patterns of behavior over a great expanse of territory. But he emphasizes more strongly than Hodgson the ways in which the brotherhoods aligned themselves with the religious scholars rather than opposed or struggled with them. “The matrix of brotherhood configured a source of power in principle alternative to the one that the guardians of the law enshrined in the relatively high degree of formalization of legal regulations through the administration of the waqf (charitable foundations), the statutes of the colleges, and the manuals of jurisprudence. Yet even the informal patterns associated with brotherhood ultimately fed into the social centrality of the ulama, to the extent that brotherhood itself depended on the same moral idiom managed by them. Not by chance many ulama were also, and not too surprisingly, practicing Sufis (9).”
Islamic Civility
Salvatore uses the notion of civility to compare and distinguish civilizations, each understood in its own terms. No civilization is seen as offering the model of an advanced civilization to which all others ought to aspire. The civilizing process that Islamic societies have undergone during their journey from the days of Muhammad through the modern world has had its own trajectory with highs and lows. The Islamic path to modernity and beyond should not be judged as failing to meet the Western standard of a successful and advanced civilization. In fact, the relatively egalitarian and cosmopolitan character of the premodern Islamic world made it a highly attractive civilization, the most influential in Afro-Eurasia. As Salvatore puts it, “Hodgson convincingly demonstrated how by the dawn of the epoch that we conventionally identified as the modern era this civilizing process writ Islamic had generated the most vital and probably the best articulated civilization in the world.”
According to Salvatore, the civilizing process is the key to understanding any primarily urban group with a literate population, and, following Arnason, he explains civility as the most visible and reliable outcome of the basic tension between power, the currency of politics and economics, and knowledge, produced in the cultural sphere. Power (political economy) and knowledge (culture) do not operate independently, since they constantly interact and are entangled with each other. The cultural elites produce the codes, values, and regulations that pervade family, education, leisure, and politics while having the conditional power to legitimate the actions of the political and economic authorities. Salvatore sees civility as “the specific way knowledge delimits or contains power and power organizes or subjugates knowledge.” The interaction between the arbiters of power (e.g., military rulers, landowners, bureaucracy) and the religious scholars, the major producers of knowledge, leads to a certain type of civility, unique to each civilization.
A major historical achievement of Islam in Salvatore’s perspective is the degree to which it contributed during its middle periods to a society in which humanist values were widely accepted, violence was considerably tamed, and cultural creativity flourished. Unlike the modern West, the civilizing process did not centralize power and produce a disciplinary society; despite military rule, the leading political and economic sectors did not play a dominant social role. There was a crucial countervailing source of authority, the ulama, the religious scholars who provided guidance about human salvation and how to deal with pain and suffering. They provided “a foremost example of a counter-dynamics to sheer power, and have ushered in the creation of forms of the material, knowledge-based, alternate power.”
The cultural elites relied on the authority of both religious and court-based values to carry out the civilizing mission of controlling the unbridled use of power and violence on the part of the military rulers and the landowning class. Muslims viewed some areas of life as not specifically religious so Islamic civility is more than the religious traditions associated with the ulama and the religious endowments. Salvatore notes that the courts of the rulers gained greater importance during the middle periods and that adab, based on pre-Islamic high culture, provided a non-religious code of behavior for the political and administrative classes.
Salvatore defines adab as “the ensemble of the ethical and practical norms of virtuous and beautiful life ideally cultivated by a class of literati. These consisted not only of the cultural embellishments but also of the educational requirements, in communicative terms, associated with the tasks of courtiers and secretaries. Literature and poetry, and the modes of their cultivation, therefore figured prominently within adad.” Within Islamic civilization, abad became an integral part of civility as it interacted with the specifically religious tradition represented by sharia. As a flexible guide to a good life, courteous interaction, and effective relationship building, it was considered a proper extension of the message of Islam’s sacred scriptures.
The Distinctiveness of Islamic Civilization
Islam was able to maintain social authority by retaining its prophetic dimension and by not becoming institutionalized in the manner of the Catholic Church. Instead, the charitable foundations, the colleges, and the Sufi brotherhoods were flexible and adaptable enough toward local conditions to be more in tune with the needs of the general populations. Salvatore concludes: “The idea of Islam as an eminently meta-institutional force should inoculate us against any view of power as essentially impermeable to knowledge and culture at large.” He adds: “The winning formula consisted most of the time in keeping loyal to a flexible yet solid normative idiom while allowing for culturally diverse, local and regional articulations of the knowledge-power equation and attendant patterns of civility.”
In the modern West, the decline of the family and neighborhood, region and religion together with the emergence of the rationally motivated individual opened space for government bureaucracies to step in and ensure social coordination. The nation state functioned to discipline and control atomized individuals and to connect them in order to bring about a stable social order. In Salvatore’s view, the modern West has had great difficulty in subjugating the will to power in order to align it with the universal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And this is the great task of the civilizing process. In contrast, within the Islamic world as late as the 18th century there was a continuation of the ongoing process of “testing and opening up Islamic teachings on the basis of demands determined by evolving needs and matching practice.”
The Islamic approach to the creation of social bonds resisted the formation of a fully sovereign state and remained in relative harmony with its egalitarian and cosmopolitan civilizational premises. Unlike other civilizations, its centers of power never dominated the surrounding areas nor was one particular identity imposed upon the people of the outer regions. This was due to the strength of the ethical and prophetic impulses that had been inherited from the earlier Iranian and Semitic traditions. Islamic civilization relied on the expansive appeal of its religious and moral ideals to maintain a sufficient degree of unity in the midst of a relatively fluid situation in which social forces often promoted decentralization of power.
In the Islamic world of the middle periods, social stability was facilitated by identifying with the larger religious community of Islam. Trust was built up among believers by local communities based on long-standing customs as well as more distant ones set up by Sufi brotherhoods and other non-government Islamic associations.. In addition, there was a relatively flexible but well-established social order maintained through trade-offs between groups with political-economic power and those who relied on religious sources of legitimacy. The powerful interests were always vulnerable to the charge that they were acting in an un-Islamic manner when they contravened the requirements of justice and mercy. Of course, religious scholars were also vulnerable to offers of wealth and luxury from the ruling groups.
It is only in modern times after the coming of Western colonialism that the delicate social balance was fatally disrupted as the Western powers forced changes in the social structure that aligned it more with the modern Western state. The continuity and integrity of Islamic history was shattered by this unprecedented challenge to its way of life. It also meant that the Islamic social world often developed in ways more consistent with Western notions of civility than Islamic ones. The governments of Islamic societies came to exercise power over the religious scholars who largely lost their independence as well as the ability to hold rulers to Islamic standards of moral conduct. For these reasons, Salvatore believes that Islamic civilization went into a long period of relative decline that has continued to the present day. This decline was due more to the shock of the Western intrusion than to any internal factors. He maintains that Islamic civilization flourished, especially in the area of cultural creativity, into the 17th century.
A Civilizational Approach for Our Time
Hodgson thought that the level of civilization is the most fruitful lens through which to view the Islamic world. For him, as I have already noted, a civilization is an expression of formative ideals for judgment, legitimation, and behavior within literate agrarian societies that contain large urban communities. It is characterized by dialogues on a civilizational scale in which cultural traditions in the major areas of human endeavor such as science, religion, and political economy are interpreted and reinterpreted in a cumulative manner. There will be instances where conflict as well as consensus building may occur. These processes unfold on a civilizational scale, and they need to be viewed in a very broad context.
In Hodgson’s view, religion is the central formative ideal because it makes the most encompassing claims on the person and is the source of ultimate meanings and the deepest commitments. But there are areas such as trade and poetry that achieved relative autonomy within Islamic civilization, so Hodgson distinguished between Islam’s religious framework including its moral prescriptions and the values and practices that were not fully explainable in religious terms. High cultural traditions are central to a civilization, and he describes the ways in which they are diffused to the general population or or else challenged by minorities bearing new interpretations of these traditions. As Arnason points out, Islamic revivalist movements are a good example of challenges to the tradition that are best understood at the civilizational level (10).
Besides providing the most accurate framework for understanding social stability and change, a civilizational approach helps us deal with the challenges of our present-day existence. Jeremy Smith sees this as a great advantage. “In a contemporary world context of tensions and conflicts (whether of global inequalities, poverty and increasing ecological calamities, or around violence, war and terrorism), an argument that there is a profusion of webs of social cooperation evident in past societies need not be an indulgence in the innocent pastime of historical curiosity. Instead, it can be a potent argument about a diverse range of social formations and what their connections and conflicts suggest about how to confront the problems that contemporary societies face. In place of perspectives positing a clash of civilisations, such an understanding of the past can better serve the purpose of understanding and responding to the problems of the twenty-first century (11).”
A simple linear and progressive view of history is inadequate. The past is not a repository of errors that have been left behind through advances in our knowledge of the social world. Rather, we can find in the past some hints as to how our present challenges may be addressed. For example, as Salvatore amply demonstrates, the Islamic world during the middle periods was notable for the relatively harmonious coexistence of different social classes and local groups over long distances through a commitment to the moral values and prophetic vision of a shared civilization. And Sufism played an important role in spreading this vision to the far ends of the lands under Islamic rule.
Valuable components of the past can be examined for remix and reuse. The gains that have been made over the past few centuries through technical innovation, the ascendance of the individual, and rational thought have been offset by significant losses: ecological destruction, the decline of cooperation and community life, the lack of psychological equilibrium. Civilizational analysis examines the continuities with the past to uncover the traditions that still have meaning and resilience in the present so that they can serve our needs in a time of transition. In the case of Islam, Salvatore sees the weakened state of postcolonial Islamic societies as favoring “transnational reconstructions of the knowledge-power equation which invariably retrieves, albeit in shortened forms, memories of long-term Islamic patterns of stability and trajectories of expansive translocal connectedness within and across networks supporting knowledge production and dissemination, trade, and the formation of often transversal loyalty patterns.”
For Salvatore, Islamic civilization offers one of the many different ways of being modern. The Western model does not offer a complete package to which only minor adjustments are needed. After all, non-Western civilizations are “more than just potential providers of fragmented civilizational ingredients to standard cultural recipes of modernity.” The diverse forms of civility and their underlying knowledge-power dynamics are linked to various traditions that can be rich sources for original types of modernity, connecting a varied civilized past with a robust and creative future. In particular, the expansive and dynamic form of Islamic civilization with its egalitarian and cosmopolitan outlook during the middle periods can be revived in appropriate ways. Moreover, Islam’s transregional and transcultural orientation can be revitalized due to the kinds of connections and networks that contemporary social media make possible.
Islamic Civilization Reconsidered
Salvatore takes a fresh look at the type of social organization that largely prevailed in the Islamic middle periods. It was a time when group membership was not strictly defined across many organizations like Sufi groups, youth brotherhoods, guilds, and tribal associations, and Islamic practices were not strongly institutionalized. These flexible patterns helped to make Islamic civilization attractive and enduring, facilitating its diffusion throughout much of Afro-Eurasia. In contrast, Western patterns of civility, alleged to be universally valid, have come from the top down through security institutions, NGOs, etc. and then spread through the global hierarchy. But they interfere in the Islamic world with traditional practices that promote local and translocal connectedness. Western models of modernity based on notions of linear progress often serve as obstacles to learning or rediscovering the contributions that other civilizations can make to a sustainable future.
Following Foucault, Salvatore believes that the modern disciplinary system in the West does not reflect a more enlightened and humane way of life than what has existed in other civilizations. This disciplinary system is based on procedures designed to control every aspect of human behavior in order to tame aggressive aspects of human nature as part of the civilizing process. The government with its staff of experts carries out the specialized training that will transform the behavior of individuals in all areas of modern society. Modern individuals have been largely cut off from close affective relations with extended families, neighborhoods, regions, and other forms of community and are vulnerable to educational efforts by the nation state in order to satisfy their need for belonging through a hierarchical relation.
In Salvatore’s account of Islamic civilization’s middle periods, a balance of power was largely maintained for centuries between the landowning classes and the religious scholars and merchants. In addition, religious and secular notions of civility tempered the behavior of the ruling military groups. As a result, a relatively large social space was opened up for ordinary people and local and translocal connections resulted in thriving communities based on Islam’s egalitarian and cosmopolitan spirit. Salvatore believes Islamic civility should be re-examined for the alternatives it provides to the dominant Western notion of civil society. The democratic control of the political economy and the social order promised by Western liberalism has not been realized, as the political system is controlled by remote and distant bureaucrats and the economic sphere by giant corporations with little democratic participation in either domain.
Salvatore parts company with postcolonial critics of Eurocentric approaches to the non-West in his positive espousal of Islamic patterns of civility. Postcolonial thinkers stay within leftwing Western paradigms, viewing premodern civilizations as mired in hierarchical social relations that must be overcome, not revived. In contrast, Salvatore emphasizes the importance of understanding how the culturally different view their own histories and societies and suggests that an infusion of non-Western perspectives into the social sciences and humanities would widen horizons and reveal new options for thought and action.
Muslims As Creators of Worlds, Makers of History
Hodgson and Salvatore have incorporated Muslim vantage points on Islamic civilization, while extending and transforming concepts like civility so that the social sciences and humanities can move beyond lingering Orientalist outlooks. This restores agency to non-Western peoples whose dynamic histories are no longer viewed as stifled by tradition. For example, Hodgson’s history of Islamic civilization during the middle periods reveals impressive cultural splendor as well as political power well into the 17th century. He mentions Persian miniature painting which began in the 14th-century, the architectural tradition which culminated in the building of the Taj Mahal, the rich Persian poetry over many centuries, the solid Persian and Turkish prose works dealing with history, geography, and biography later supplemented by personal autobiographical writing, scientific studies which peaked in the 13th century, and vigorous philosophical inquiry in the 16th and early 17th centuries.
Salvatore demonstrates that even in modern times, despite Islamic civilization’s disruption, Muslims have played an active part in coming to terms with the Western incursion and the modern world. They did not simply import Western ideas and accept political and cultural subordination. The shifting meanings of adab, the courtly tradition which Salvatore sees as one of the two pillars of Islamic civility along with sharia, illustrate how Muslims adapted their own traditions to the radically altered circumstances of colonial and postcolonial times. Let us recall that in precolonial times, adab served as a guide for living a beautiful life, building relationships, and acting with courtesy toward others.
Adab was viewed during the colonial era as a blueprint for being a modern, civilized person. In 19th-century Egypt, it was interpreted in a more individualistic manner as the behavior of the self-directed citizen. Colonial modernity in the Islamic world brought older forms of civility under great pressure within a social order increasingly subject to the disciplinary regime of the nation state. Nevertheless, adab did not lose its currency, even with the introduction of Western legal and political institutions. But it did come to be associated with more politicized notions of justice. In addition, Muslim reformers adapted earlier notions of civility to challenge European conceptions of the modern civilized person. Over time, even though older forms of civility have been increasingly absorbed into modern political ideas, Islamic modernity has retained some distinctive qualities rather than becoming a pale replica of a Western model (12).
Conclusion
Mainstream social science and social theory has often provided ruling administrative, managerial, and governing elites with knowledge while denying the agency of people subjected to their control. Asian societies were treated as static, with only Western influence capable of rousing them from their slumber. Thus, Western concepts for understanding the rest of the world were developed from a position of power and applied to areas of the world whose experience and conditions were quite different.
The accomplishment of Hodgson and Salvatore has been to make use of indigenous Islamic concepts such as Sufism, sharia, and adab as well as Western ones like world history and civility, reinterpreted to fit non-Western contexts. They recognize that the less powerful civilizations have actively created their own impressive and far from unchanging histories, while giving voice to Muslim concerns and outlooks. Hodgson overcomes the dichotomy between Islamic and Western history by demonstrating there is only one history, global history, and that all civilizational histories must be viewed within a world historical context. And both Hodgson and Salvatore believe it is likely that non-Western civilizations would have modernized in their own particular fashion if Western intervention had not foreclosed this possibility.
Hodgson has pictured Islamic civilization in relation to the rest of Afro-Eurasia, highlighting the importance of interactions and connections between Islamic and other civilizations rather than seeing civilizations as separate with their own internal logic and independent development. The unity of world history is restored, and the role of outside influences upon a civilization is recognized. He attempts to build a theory that does justice to both the unique aspects of Islamic civilization and its history of mutual influence with other civilizations and with local regions through cultural and economic exchange.
Instead of imposing a Western theoretical framework upon Islamic civilization, Salvatore provides a sociological theory that is truly global in outlook and reach. His rich descriptions of particular social trends within their historical context give weight to his account of Islamic civilization’s rise within Afro-Eurasia, its centrality for many centuries, and its sharp decline under the pressures of Western imperialism.
Hodgson and Salvatore bring to light the complexities of a civilization whose traditions were creatively adapted to meet changing historical circumstances, a civilization as complex as modern Western civilization. Furthermore, as Salvatore shows, the Islamic version of civility that emerged from the power-knowledge dynamic supported a more balanced and flourishing social order than that of the modern West. It also had the cultural capacity to evolve into a modern form of civility if Western colonialism had not intervened. Unlike Hodgson who wasn’t sure if Islamic could survive the onslaught of modernity, Salvatore believes that the Islamic civilizational heritage can contribute to a more sustainable human future in which modernity is a way station, not triumphant.
Burke points out that Hodgson, as a civilizational thinker, must deal with the extensive criticisms of that approach. In addition, he must make a persuasive case for Islamic civilization by clearly demonstrating its Islamic features. I have already discussed the replies that Hodgson and Salvatore make to the most damaging criticisms of the civilizational approach: it denies agency to non-Western civilizations, it divides civilizations into Western and non-Western ones and studies them from a Eurocentric standpoint, it fails to deal with the relational dimension of civilizations, and it does not account for the effects of Western imperialism and domination on the trajectories of non-Western civilizations. But Hodgson and Salvatore have also tried to demonstrate that it is valid and fruitful to view the region of the world that stretches from Morocco to Indonesia as an Islamic civilization.
For Hodgson, Islam’s ideals give a distinctive character to Islamic civilization, and he explains how these ideals through an intergenerational process of dialogue legitimate Islamic standards of judgment and value. The Quran provides the touchstone to which all interpretations of Islam’s religious and civilizational character must refer. An elite group of the piety-minded or sharia-minded, the people of conscience, have taken it upon themselves to give new life and vigor through their insights to the prevailing traditions, and they are the source of Islamic civilization’s creativity and vitality. For this reason, Hodgson makes their lives and messages a focal point of his history.
One weakness of Hodgson’s approach is that it does not sufficiently deal with social and economic history, a criticism that Hodgson concedes to be valid. He has chosen to place his magnifying lens on what holds Islamic civilization together rather than on its diverse aspects. Another weakness is that Hodgson neglects the historical importance of those groups outside the religious and cultural elite. Salvatore addresses the first criticism by emphasizing the closely intertwined relationship between culture/knowledge and political economy/power. By giving the political and economic dimension its due, he does not exaggerate the significance of the cultural realm.
Salvatore addresses the second criticism by not singling out a particular group, the people of conscience, as the bearers of authentic Islam and its civilizational message. Whereas Hodgson ultimately speaks from a moral standpoint based upon his religious convictions, Salvatore analyzes the moral and spiritual dimensions in purely sociological terms, concerned with Islam’s social impact, not the validity of its ideals and sentiments. At the same time, though, I believe that Hodgson’s focus on the religious dimension does alert us to an important aspect of Islamic civilization’s future relevance and meaning that Salvatore’s sociological approach does not tackle. Since this is a vast subject, I cannot take it up here. It will be the theme of another essay.
What, then, gives Islamic civilization its distinctive characteristics? An emphasis on the interdependence among civilizations and the importance of their long-standing economic and cultural exchanges does not require us to deny or minimize civilizational differences. As Hodgson points out, when the Afro-Eurasian civilizations were all agrarian societies, their economic levels and social power were relatively similar while their cultural characteristics displayed more variation. It was only when the precipitous rise of the West disrupted the balance of social power that civilizational differences at the level of political economy and culture became pronounced. But what are the distinguishing characteristics of Islamic civilization that have persisted over the long-term?
Salvatore finds the difference between Islamic and other civilizations in the specific balance that it maintained over much of the middle periods between knowledge and power. This does not mean that he ignores the impact of changing conditions. After all, he provides a careful historical analysis that does justice to the turbulence caused by catastrophic events such as the Mongol invasion or important historical developments like the formation of three distinct empires within the Islamic world in Turkey, Iran, and India. Yet he does assume that during the middle periods a relative equilibrium was achieved that explains Islamic civilization’s effective functioning over the centuries. It is impressive that he arrives at this position on the basis of concrete analysis of the history of a particular civilization rather than by applying a theoretical account that he assumes to be universally valid for all civilizations.
My final reflections on the value of a civilizational approach are that it does have currency today for many people as a source of identity and allegiance. There has been a tendency to create civilizational fortresses in preparation for a clash of civilizations but this is not the approach to civilizations that I have in mind. Instead, I see civilizational identity as a necessary step beyond national identity that will be balanced by an opposite movement toward the rediscovery of local identities. Ultimately, I see the social dimension of human unity in terms of worldwide communities rooted in a strong sense of place and connected to each other through electronic technologies. Human unity will be experienced inwardly in accordance with the teachings of the esoteric spiritual traditions, and Islam’s challenge will be to bring to the fore the highest Sufi teachings that Hodgson spoke of as the core of Islam. But this is the subject of another essay.
ENDNOTES
- Lipka, Michael, “Muslims and Islam: Key Findings in the U.S. and Around the World, Pew Research Center, August 9, 2017. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/
- Marcus, George, “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scene of Anthropological Field Work.” Ortner, Sherry (ed.), The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond. University of California Press, 1999.
- Geertz response to the postmodern critique of culture is in: Geertz, Clifford. After the Fact. Harvard University Press, 1995.
- Arnason gives the most detailed explanation of his notion of civilization in: Arnason, Johann. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Brill, 2003.
- Geertz, Clifford. “Which Way to Mecca,” New York Review of Books. June 12, 2003.
- Geertz, Clifford. “Mysteries of Islam,” New York Review of Books. Dec. 11, 1975.
- Burke III, Edmund, “Conclusion: Islamic History As World History: Marshall G.S. Hodgson and the Venture of Islam.” In Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Julian Go provides a brilliant critique of mainstream social science from a postcolonial perspective and outlines a non-orientalist approach in Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Salvatore treats Sufism in its meta-institutional aspect and outlines its role in facilitating the spread and consolidation of Islam as a translocal civilization in The Sociology of Islam. For a more detailed discussion of the relation between Sufism and Islamic civility, see Armando Salvatore, “Sufi Articulations of Civility, Globality, and Sovereignty.” Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 4:2, 156–174, 2018.
- Arnason gives an excellent description and interpretation of Hodgson’s civilizational standpoint. See Johann Arnason, “Marshall Hodgson’s Civilizational Analysis of Islam: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives.” Arnason, Salvatore, Stauth (eds.), Islam in Process: Historical and Civilizational Perspectives. Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam, Volume 7.
- Smith, Jeremy. Debating Civilisations: Interrogating Civilisational Analysis in a Global Age. Manchester University Press, 2017.
- For a more in-depth look at the transformations of the concept of adab under the impact of Western colonialism, see Armando Salvatore, “Secularity through a ‘Soft Distinction’ in the Islamic Ecumene? Adab as a Counterpoint to Shari‘a.” Historical Social Research 44: 3, 35–51, 2019.
