Since the 1970s, some Western scholars have been viewing Islamic civilization in its own terms, no longer focusing on how it has failed to meet Western standards of civilization and modernity. This opening in the study of Islamic civilization can help bring about more expansive and balanced perceptions of Islam. The newer images of Islam that emerge from the work of the historian Marshall Hodgson writing in the 1960s and the contemporary sociologist Armando Salvatore are challenging and have wide-ranging implications. This fresh perspective needs to reach non-specialists, opinion leaders, and politicians, and that is why I have written this essay.
Civilizational analysis has enjoyed a revival in recent years. With the end of the Cold War, the cultural dimension and identity issues are now playing a more prominent part within the political landscape. Renewed ethnic pride and cultural self-assertion reflect this trend. 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 members of the same civilization. Historically, many have identified with China as a civilization rather than as an empire or politically defined entity. Russian civilizational thinking centered on historical claims and the Orthodox Church is a further example. And, in the case of Muslim-majority nations, the failure of earlier political movements and ideologies has led to a greater emphasis on Islam as a binding force and guide to social life; the idea of a single political leadership for the Islamic world, a new caliphate, has gained appeal.
Hodgson’s Breakthrough and Beyond
When Hodgson was writing his three-volume The Venture of Islam in the 1960s, Western writers tended to see Muslims as displaying personal qualities opposite those of Western people: passive, feminine, irrational, and obedient to authority. Their picture of Islamic civilization was based on the same underlying assumptions: Islamic societies were stagnant, experiencing a long period of decline, and unable to adapt to the rational and progressive worldview of the modern West. In contrast, Hodgson distinguished Islamic civilization by its ideals. 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. Hodgson does not deal with the great variety of Muslim experience in different settings and epochs. Instead, he examines the culture of literate urban elites in an agrarian age. It is the people of conscience who depart from the prevailing conventions that provide dynamism and creativity. He also writes about Islam's civilizational vision that incorporated a somewhat egalitarian and cosmopolitan outlook, even within the limits of a largely agrarian economy. This fortunate outcome is largely attributed to the relative importance of the merchant class. Rather than picturing Islamic history as a few centuries of creativity and splendor followed by terminal decline, he emphasized the vitality of Islamic civilization during its middle periods. Islamic civility remained vibrant for a thousand years 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.
He emphasizes that Islamic civilization cohered to a considerable degree despite the diversity of its local cultures. Although it was identified with the Arab world for the first few centuries, the expansion of Islam's political control over much of Eurasia in the following centuries made it a truly cosmopolitan civilization. Despite military rule, the social order was somewhat decentralized and quite flexible and open-ended for its time. 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 showing local variation, 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 a technically oriented 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. The nation state became the primary source of power, asserting a dominant role over economic and religious life.
In The Sociology of Islam, which appeared in 2016, Salvatore 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. The brotherhoods often aligned themselves with the religious scholars rather than opposed or struggled with them, even though they could have become an alternative source of power to the administrators of religious law. There were strong motivations for this stance, since the brotherhoods relied on the moral framework over which the ulama had authority, and many ulama were also practicing Sufis.
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 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 for Salvatore 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. This situation largely prevailed throughout the many regions from the Mediterranean to China and from the steppes of Central Asia to the Indian and Pacific Oceans that comprised a single Islamic civilization.
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 open 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 and 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
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. These days, we live in a world that is becoming more fragmented and atomized, and we search for ways to deal with conflicts among nations as well as within nations. The work of Hodgson and Salvatore on Islamic civilization gives us an example of a social order that was relatively successful in establishing bonds of cooperation and trust, while not unduly restricting individual freedom. Rather than viewing civilizations as largely separate universes, it is more helpful to study various civilizations in order to gain insight on our present social and political dilemmas.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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 become truly global. 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.
Conclusion
The newer research and perspectives on Islamic civilization should be made more accessible to the general public so that less balanced views are not uncritically accepted. Likewise, there is a need to leave behind a clash of civilizations standpoint in favor of acknowledging the historical interaction among civilizations, the existence of different developmental paths, and the benefits that accrue from greater knowledge of civilizations outside one's own. Non-Western civilizations can contribute fresh perspectives and insights as we face global crises for which the paradigms of thought largely developed in the West are incomplete and limiting.