Islamic Political Thought: An Introduction

Armando Salvatore

The idea of modernity combines a variety of vectors and paths of transformation: economic factors linked to the rise of capitalism, sociopolitical dynamics related to the formation of increasingly centralized and bureaucratized states, and cultural orientations putting a premium on individual autonomy and collective agency, on self-reflexivity, self-steering, and a capacity for creative innovation, and new, pervasive forms of solidarity. This complex yet well-profiled idea reflects in a first instance the historical experiences and achievements of European societies, or better, of some parts of northwestern Europe. It is also important to consider that the transformations that ushered in the advent of modernity concerned religion, both institutionally and conceptually. It was in modern transformations that religion became a clearly circumscribed—optimally, a privatized—sphere, one increasingly differentiated from the realm of politics.

The social science literature that, from the founders of sociology at large (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) onward, has delineated the key traits of modernity (including its relations to religion) and has postulated that the historical breakthrough to modernity is a Western prerogative, focused on Western Europe and on some of its former settlement colonies overseas (mainly North America and Australia)—primarily because of some allegedly “Occidental” cultural and institutional conditions that did not exist or did not come to maturation in other civilizations. Such civilizations, including Islam, were by contrast considered lacking in one or more crucial features of modernity, in particular the fundamental capacity to spawn creative innovations and to liberate new transformative energies from the “shackles of tradition.” According to this vision, non-Western civilizations could at best achieve limited degrees or dependent forms of modernity through their introduction from outside, via a modernization process induced from the West.

More recent theoretical work has revised both the assumption of the uniqueness of the West and the corresponding conception of modernity as singular. In order to reframe the issue of modernity from the perspective of Islamic political thought, a sound conceptualization of the relation between tradition and modernity cannot approach the former as a mere relic of premodern cultures that is destined to be either neutralized or erased in the course of modernization. Specifically, the relation between modernity and Islam cannot be reduced to an analysis of deficits to be measured by Islam’s alleged insufficient capacity to supersede its rooting in tradition or in a set of combined traditions, by Islam’s dependencies on Western hegemonic patterns of modernity, or by alleged Islamic idiosyncrasies reflected by distorted outcomes of a dependent modernization.

Questions such as “What went wrong?” with Islamic civilization vis-à-vis the modern world hegemonized by the West are the result of static and unilateral views of both tradition and modernity. The famous British Orientalist Bernard Lewis was not the first author to ask this type of question with regard to Islam, nor was 9/11 the first event that prompted such interrogations. The question has been repeatedly formulated from the perspective of a long-term Western hegemony extended over the entire modern world and therefore facing recurrent traumas (from the Indian revolt of 1857 through the oil embargo of 1973, to the terrorist attacks of 2001 and after) resulting in a continual challenge of this same hegemony, often occurring on a symbolical level more than on a material one. The formulation of the question therefore already presupposes that the Western path to modernity is unique, though exposed to challenges.

The heyday of modernization theory, which articulated ideas of modernity as monopolized by the West but exportable, under certain conditions, to the rest of the world, go back to the 1950s and 1960s. The approach suffered a lethal blow in the wake of various events unfolding on the global level during the 1970s and in particular the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, which raised the banner of Islam against the Shah’s authoritarian rule and Westernizing programs. Seeds for an alternative conception, according to which modernity is not a uniquely Western prerogative and cultural and religious traditions are not just detritus left behind by the waves of modernization, were sown in the decolonization struggles, which sparked reinterpretations and critiques of modern ideas and institutions. Their combined result was to challenge the West’s monopoly over the definition of modernity.

With even greater intensity since after the demise of modernization theory, key voices within Western social sciences and in particular within social theory have concurred in observing that modernity was never singular, neither was it homogeneous, not even within Europe. A major contribution to make this simple insight productive in theoretical and comparative terms has been the development of a civilizational approach to modernity itself, according to which the civilizational heritage of a given country or macroregion has an impact on the type and outlook of the modernity to come. Yet even within this revisionist approach it is also admitted that modernity—as a global condition affecting cultural life and institutional forms as much as capitalist cycles and hegemonic contentions—equally impinges on a plurality of civilizational tracks differentiating the hegemonic West from the institutions and cultures developing in other macroregions like China, India, and the Islamic world. In spite of such significant theoretical revisions, the older patterns of Western appraisal of Islam vis-à-vis modernity that were cumulatively built over time have retained a considerable influence on a variety of levels, from scholarship to the media—not least, as mentioned earlier, due to the periodical reiteration of traumatic events.

The branches of scholarship that happened to deal with the issue of Islam’s otherness from a Western viewpoint saw the light during the 19th century in coincidence with the European colonial encroachment upon the Muslim world. They underwent important changes during the 20th century, mainly as a consequence of the two world wars and of the ensuing processes of decolonization. Yet they were also influenced by earlier views of Islam propagated by leading European thinkers who were not academic specialists within Islamic studies but who contributed to shaping the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment self-understanding of the West—thinkers such as Hume, Voltaire, Hegel, and even Nietzsche. Both the discourse on Islam’s insurmountable otherness on issues of modernity and the attempts to critique and revise it are therefore neither a merely scholarly enterprise nor the inexorable reflex of malign media campaigns. The debate has profound philosophical roots and widespread intellectual implications. Any attempt to develop a critical viewpoint should be aware of such deep ramifications in order to avoid falling into a facile counterhegemonic posture.

A host of historians and social theorists—from Ernest Renan through Max Weber to Rémi Brague—have provided the key link between intellectual manifestations of a Western modern self-understanding and scholarly programs for investigating specific cultural factors that were held responsible for the blockage or delay of the political and economic development within Muslim-majority societies. Within such a body of Western scholarship, it was argued that the doctrine of divine command proclaimed by Islam led Muslims and particularly the ‘ulama’ to deny a full legitimacy to government and therefore hindered a full-fledged, modern state formation. In a similar vein, the presuppositions to capitalist growth that enlivened the early modern sociopolitical formations of Western Europe have been considered too frail within Muslim lands. The cause for this deficit was often identified in cultural mechanisms of self-limitation of the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit. This self-limitation was in turn explained with the deeply religious commitments of both cultural elites and popular classes.

Such views have been elaborated upon within the specialized scholarship of Islamic studies. An influential antecedent to the discourse propagated by Bernard Lewis in the academic world of the post–World War II era is the work of another leading Orientalist of the 20th century, Gustave E. von Grunebaum. His approach capitalized on selected Weberian insights revolving around a keen understanding of Western cultural uniqueness and its universal normativity. Even more than Weber himself, von Grunebaum engaged in the study of Islam as a representative of the Western cultural elite deeply imbued with its civilizational values. While he was convinced that the Weberian approach held the key to understanding the West’s rationalist spirit, he considered Islam to be at the mercy of the Western-led process of modernization. Not least, von Grunebaum followed Weber closely in explaining Islam’s purportedly unsuccessful encounter with modernity by seeing in it a dilution of the inner impetus of Christian faith.

This idea aggravated Weber’s derogatory view of the Islamic orientation toward immediate rewards in contrast to Christianity’s focus on the “inner” realm of pure values. According to this interpretation, the inherent deficit of Islamic faith was magnified in the modern era by the fact that Islam did not undergo the process of self-renewal that the West had been going through since after the Protestant Reformation. This stress on reformation often became an obsessive theme in Western approaches to the issue of Islam and modernity. The Protestant Reformation was seen as anchored in a reform of the self that was facilitated by an increasing reflexivity and rationality. Von Grunebaum denied to Muslim cultural elites and political leaders such a capacity for intellectual renewal, which could enable them to successfully cope with the challenges and requirements of modernity.

Modernization theorists introduced some important distinctions into the picture. According to Manfred Halpern, the Muslim as a social actor is not completely paralyzed by the legacy represented by Islamic traditions. It was evident to him that many Muslim actors were not idle but on the move in postcolonial society. While the process and its predictable outcome amounted for him to a gradual collapse of Muslim culture, some key Islamic ideals may not only survive modernization but can even feed into it, if separated from the traditional system to which they originally belonged. Within this more dynamic picture, Islam appears ambivalently positioned toward modernity: while modernization theorists (wrongly) predicted the demise of Islamist forces, they did allow that selected elements of Islamic traditions could enliven the forces of change.

For all these Western scholars the ambivalence toward the West and Western modernity manifested by subsequent generations of Muslim leaders and thinkers, including the so-called modernists or reformists, was deeply problematic. What most Western observers neglected to see was a cumulative trend among Muslim reformers consisting in rejecting the view of either “Islam” or “modernity” conceived as comprehensive entities, as Western scholars were used to seeing them. The idea that Islam is internally plural and that modernity is a process not entrenched in a singular culture seemed alien to most Western observers, while it gradually became a main avenue of reasoning for key Muslim thinkers. A rare and early recognition of this insight came with the observation of Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950), a non-Orientalist, who in spite of being a WASP supremacist wrote in the early 1920s that Muslim thinkers were not simply obsessed with the West but rather intent on developing “a new synthesis.”

A more comprehensive appreciation of original Islamic approaches to modern thought as well as to modernity as a social process could only take form after the slow agony of modernization theory. A major change was prompted by the innovative work of younger Islamologists and historians. They saw that patterns of intellectual modernity, in their multiple ties to specific developments within capitalist production and markets, were seeing the light within the Muslim world prior to any overt confrontation with the encroaching Western modernity. They placed such developments in the context of comprehensive social processes and intellectual trends that linked Western Europe with the Muslim and in particular with the Ottoman world.

The two scholars who most coherently worked on the idea of largely endogenous seeds of an Islamic modernity were Peter Gran and Reinhard Schulze. In order to tackle the weakest point of the Orientalist argument about the decline of the Muslim world in the modern era prior to the advance of the West on Muslim lands, they challenged head-on the “Napoleon’s theorem”—namely, the assertion that the issue of modernity, with its spirit of enterprise and innovation, was first brought to the core of the Muslim world by Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt and other parts of the Near East at the end of the 18th century. The main point of convergence between the work of Gran and Schulze is the intent to show the existence in 18th-century Ottoman society, including Egypt, of thriving bourgeois-like intellectual cultures, many of them significantly connected to some Sufi brotherhoods. According to the two scholars, such cultures reflected commercial and capitalist interests and revealed a new, genuinely modern emphasis on social autonomy and individual responsibility. Accordingly, the Islamic 18th century, far from being the stagnant counterpart to a flourishing European Enlightenment, might have manifested innovative dynamics both at the level of culture and politics.

In the debates that followed their scholarly challenge, Gran and Schulze also stressed that the analysis of texts is meaningful only if situated in the context of wider sociopolitical processes of transformation. Therefore, neglecting the sociopolitical context might lead students of Islamic civilization to lose touch with more general academic debates about the internal reform of tradition and the singularity versus the plurality of modernity. In other words, belittling the diversity of sociopolitical context encourages essentializing both Islamic traditions and Western modernity. The emergence of this new type of scholarship prefigured the possibility of interpreting the relation of Islam and modernity no longer as an oxymoron but as a theme in its own right, opening the way to thinking about the capacity of actors to creatively recombine endogenous resources with exogenous stimuli and challenges.

Secular Subjectivity and Social Solidarity

Against the deeper background of Western theorizing about the allegedly deficient capacity of Islamic civilization to fit into a modern world—not to mention its ability to initiate autonomous modern transformations—the new challenge strengthened the argument, supported by a general reflection on Islamic history (including a new attention to earlier works like The Venture of Islam of Marshall Hodgson), that a differentiation of state power and religious authority was integral to the development of Islamic civilization. Hodgson in particular anticipated interpretations that became familiar to a larger academic public only from the late 1970s onward, ranging from the critique of Orientalist worldviews to a plural and civilizational approach to modernity. Hodgson stated that at the dawn of the modern era, Islamic civilization reached the zenith not only of its political power but also of its cultural creativity. Key Muslim actors and institutions, he argued, worked to selectively blend the resources of power and culture that constitute a civilization within the three different but equally flourishing early modern Muslim empires: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal or Timurid.

In the early 21st century, comparative civilizational analysts are revising the older bias of Western social theorists by valorizing selected Orientalist contributions like the work of Hodgson. As stated by Johann P. Arnason—a social theorist and leading practitioner of comparative civilizational analysis, who has thoroughly studied and commented on the work of Hodgson—the idea that any differentiation of religion and politics was alien to Islamic civilization has given way to the more nuanced view that this civilization displays specific trajectories of differentiation that cannot be measured on a homogeneous scale via a comparison with purported normal standards, usually taken from simplified Western models. Edward Said was right in suspecting that Orientalists were not alone with their essentialist bias concerning Islam. The mother of all essentialisms lies indeed in the way Western social scientists and social theorists have conceptualized religion and its role within modern societies. The work of revision within Western social theory concerning the issue of modernity is therefore no less crucial than the challenge launched by new historians and Islamologists.

In order to throw more light on the vexed question of the differentiation, or lack thereof, of religion and politics within Muslim societies, we need to extend our purview to the wider context that overloaded the study of religion in the West with heavy presuppositions closely tied to the Western self-understanding and its hegemonic discourse. In a variety of academic disciplines that attempted to locate the sources of human sociability, religion was identified as a key sphere of human endeavor, whose emergence basically coincided with the formation of organized community life. From comparative linguistics and comparative mythology through text criticism and history to anthropology and sociology, an army of Western scholars has worked since the 19th century to investigate the role of religion in the constitution of human society and the social bond. The issue of religion figured centrally in the genesis of sociology.

It was Karl Marx who defined religion as a crucial instrument of domination in human history and as a token of human alienation. Émile Durkheim and the school associated with his name reinterpreted religion as the pristine force of social cohesion through which the subject first alienates but then appropriates the power located in the collective world of social relations. According to this school, religion became the overarching category for investigating the nature of the collective forces providing cohesion to society via ever more abstract—and in this sense purportedly rational—models of solidarity. The idea itself of a modern society based on a rational division of labor became with Durkheim the key to postulate an evolutionist trajectory through which the integrative potential of traditional religion is transformed into a civic religion that is strictly functional to the maintenance of the social bond—a trajectory that sees its completion in Western, modern, and complex societies. In this perspective, secularization as a chief characteristic of modernization does not occur by suppressing religion but by transforming its cohesive potential in parallel with the deepening of the social division of labor. In the process, religion takes on increasingly abstract, and nonetheless civil, forms.

The purported role of a “civil religion” within modernity gained further prominence in the latter part of the 20th century, in particular in the United States, where civil religion was interpreted as a cultural capital of society capable of reconciling tradition and modernity. This approach was also represented, though in original ways, in the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, for whom the role of religion as a source of stability is found both in the most modern of Western societies—especially in those with a strong Protestant background, characterized by an increasing individualist ethos—and in the new postcolonial nations, including many Muslim-majority societies, where the cultural function of religion as a provider of collective identity comes to the fore. This interpretation overlapped with the idea, well represented within modernization theory, that elements of Islamic traditions were on their way to being reabsorbed as fragments of a new collective identity, in forms suitable to new development imperatives. Unlike the idea, dominant during the rise of European colonialism, that the Islamic doctrine of divine authority prevented a real legitimization of political power and justified the colonial supremacy of the West over Muslim lands, Geertz argued that in the postindependence polities of the Muslim world, cultural elites and political leaders might be able to culturally construct and politically legitimize new and sophisticated forms of social power and political organization—different from those of the West, but nonetheless modern or at least sufficiently compatible with the modern world.

The chief latent issue underlying the cohesion of modern, Muslim-majority societies, however, does not concern so much the role of “religion,” on which Geertz focused his attention as the configuration of the domain of “politics.” The specter of Western essentialism pushed out by the main door comes back through the window when it is assumed that a secular subjectivity aligned with the model nation-states of the modern West is surrogated within Muslim societies by hybrid formations favoring a basically authoritarian fabrication of a developmental ethos, whereby a conveniently reduced type of Islam remains a key component of collective identity. The relentless critique performed by Talal Asad, targeting a wide arch of Western scholarship stretching from Durkheim to Geertz, puts in evidence the vicious circle between the affirmation of secular subjectivity as the banner of Western culture and values and the reiteration of essentialist knowledge of the West’s other, as incarnate in Islam. Western norms of modern governance remain both in the metropoles and in the former colonies connected to ideas of individual autonomy rooted in a secular subjectivity. Hereby the “secular” should not be equated with a rejection of “religion” but rather presupposes an essentialized, reformed religion as the necessary condition for the formation of self-governing agents.

Asad has stressed that practitioners of Islamic Studies often wrongly assumed that Islamic traditions had no notion of subjective inwardness, in spite of sufficient evidence of the importance of subjective intention and cultivation of the self, both in Islamic worship and in mysticism. Certainly, modern Western subjectivity is different in its emphasis on individual autonomy and dependence on state law, regulation, and administration, as well as on consumer choices mediated by the market. Asad warns, nonetheless, that based on a reiteration of such patterns across various stages of world politics (e.g., from the colonial to the postcolonial age), a full normalization of politics in Muslim-majority societies will always be deferred to some form of direct or indirect, benign or violent intervention by Western powers.

The historical reality is far more complex. Muslim intellectuals from the Maghrib to the Ottoman Empire viewed modern Europe not as culturally unique but as a frontier of new ideas and programs for the rational steering of society. The trauma of colonialism fractured this potentially positive perception of Europe, yet the continuous development of solidarity within modern European societies continued to impress subsequent generations of several Muslim reformers, for whom modern power could be attained within and through a variety of cultural settings. According to these Muslim reformers, there was nothing wrong with Islam per se, provided that its pristine forms of social cohesion and power were restored and reenergized. Yet most reformers remained caught in a polarizing dilemma, also evidenced by Asad’s critique: Is the “organic solidarity” envisioned by Durkheim a legitimate goal for Muslim leaders intent on pushing for the reform of their societies? Does it necessarily require turning religion into mere civic morals? Or can it help instead retrieve the full power of Islamic normativity and even promote a transnational dimension of solidarity extended to the entire Islamic umma (community of believers)? Is the price to be paid the acceptance of the secular subjectivity of the citizen as reflected in the historic trajectory of Western nation-states: a type of subjectivity requiring a privatization of shari‘a? While the latter option seems unattractive to the majority of Muslim intellectuals, all other responses risk becoming trapped in facile formulas of reconciliation of “tradition and modernity” that hide the node represented by the normative requirements of the secular subjectivity rooted in the Western historic models and experiences.

Premodern Forms of Collective Action and the Role of Sufism

Revising the postulates of the Western monopoly of modernity entails a questioning of its universally normative power. Western Europe accomplished a compromise between the state’s control of the religious field and the sovereignty of the soul, between publicness and inwardness. This normative arrangement, however, does not match the historic dynamics through which the Islamic dīn (religion) was incorporated within sociopolitical structures. The dīn and the dawla (state) designated different, though at times overlapping, fields of social activity. Bernard Lewis’s typical assertion that the state and the church are identical in Islam is fundamentally flawed, since neither “church” nor “state” are concepts that can be neatly translated into the institutional grammar of Islamic traditions. The conceptual pair dīn and dawla designates two poles of activity that permanently contribute to each other’s definition while retaining their principled, though conditional, autonomy: they are not absolutely autonomous; rather, they are autonomous within the boundaries defined by Islam. Even at face value, the slogan islām dīn wa-dawla (Islam is religion and state), which became particularly popular as a modern Islamic response to a state whose autonomy was compromised by colonial dependency, does not proclaim the identity of religion and state but the possibility of their concomitant and, optimally, mutual legitimation “in Islam.” The problem in the formula is not an alleged identity of religion and state but rather a strong essentialization of Islam and of its univocal normative force—a presumption that was maintained with particular energy by Western Orientalists in the first place and by some Islamic actors concomitantly or subsequently.

Therefore, one cannot impute a deficit to Islamic civilization for having largely shunned the fully autonomous powers of Western models. Yet in the reiteration of historical processes under Western norms of autonomous agency—inscribed in constitutional formulas, sanctioned by human rights provisions, and prescribed in the form of good governance—this specific type of autonomy becomes an absolute value, in proximity of which any other tradition of self-governance is rarely recognized as fully legitimate from a Western viewpoint (be it “absolutist” or “relativist”). Modern associations invoking a specifically Islamic ethos and adopting organizational forms and funding patterns that refer directly or indirectly to Islamic tenets have had to prove their loyalty to the state in Egypt, while in France they have sometimes claimed a secular identity in order not to incur the suspicion of the authorities and of the public alike.

Invocations of an Islamic legitimacy of forms of organization cannot be reduced to a mere counteressentialist reflex prompted by the need to respond to the affirmation of the universality of Western standards. Once more we need the help of unbiased Orientalist scholarship to understand the relation of tradition and modernity in Islamic history. Hodgson stressed in particular the seminal role of Sufi movements, especially in the later phase of the Middle Periods, during the three centuries that preceded the modern era and the nearly simultaneous rise of what he termed the three dynamic and powerful “gunpowder empires” of the Muslim world: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal or Timurid. According to Hodgson, Islamic civilization gained from the 13th to the 15th century the profile of a transstate ecumene, thanks to a steady expansion across the Afro-Eurasian landmass.

Orientalists before (but also after) Hodgson have mainly characterized this “medieval” period as an epoch of decadence and lack of creativity. It cannot be denied that in this phase, which followed the Mongol invasion of the mid-13th century, political domination was weak and fragmented. Yet at the same time, the cultural elaboration on the relationship between siyāsa (a term of Mongol origin that means sheer government) and shari‘a (designating the comprehensive idea of Islamic normativity more than simply “law”) reached a high point. During this period, Muslim society was a society of networks more than states, so that social governance and its legitimacy were effectively divorced from state power. In the Middle Periods, and especially in its latest phase, Sufi ṭuruq (brotherhoods) played a key role in Islam’s expansion into the Eurasian depths—particularly into the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia—and across sub-Saharan Africa. Their flexible and semiformal model of organization and connectedness, of balancing competition, cooperation, and hierarchy, was well suited to the political characteristics of the epoch. As synthetically put by Hodgson at the end of this period, at the threshold of the modern era, thanks to the expansive capacity of this crystallizing model of soft governance, the dynamics of Islamic civilization exhibited a markedly hegemonic potential.

The most interesting question to ask from a contemporary perspective, which witnesses the erosion of the West-centered state system and the advent, in the wake of globalization, of new forms of governance and solidarity, concerns the aborted yet still latent potential of religious cosmopolitanism that Islamic civilization inherited from the Middle Periods and ambivalently invested into the structures of power of the modern Muslim empires. Viewed from the perspective of the seminal developments of the Middle Periods, these empires, in spite of displaying impressive political power, military organization, and promotion of high culture, and basing their power on specific patterns of differentiation of state and religion, could only partially inherit the creative impetus of the Middle Periods, when a cosmopolitan high culture thrived alongside a dense social autonomy balancing horizontal cooperation and solidarity with hierarchy and command—a pattern that facilitated the penetration of the Islamic message into the lifeworld of lower population strata across new territories.

Western scholars and Muslim reformers alike predicted that the Sufi networks would vanish as several colonial and postcolonial societies of the Muslim world adopted a greater separation between the religious sphere and a civic domain or “civil society.” Yet in the colonial era some Sufi orders expanded their constituencies, and some actually participated in or even led movements of resistance against colonial occupation, most notably in North and West Africa and in Southeast Asia. Several scholars have noticed major shifts in some Sufi orders toward more formal and hierarchical modes of organization since the 18th century—a development that demonstrated their ability to push for social and even political change. While this thesis is well reflected in the previously examined work by Gran and Schulze, earlier scholars like Fazlur Rahman and John O. Voll already spoke of a distinctive “neo-Sufi” associational form characterized by a sociopolitical activism nurtured by a commitment to Islam’s potential for mobilizing various social groups in order to implement Islamic ideals of justice. Some such Sufi groups cultivated the study of hadith in ways that are comparable to some puritan movements—like the Wahhabis—of a decidedly anti-Sufi inclination. The decentralized nature of studies of hadith and the latitude allowed within this branch of study to reinterpret norms of social interaction, including those affecting trade and business, appeared in some cases to further the interests of a rising commercial class. Some urban reformers of the 19th century seemed to be influenced by selective Sufi ideas even in the absence of solid organizational ties to any ṭarīqa or Sufi master. Those reformers who attacked Sufism stigmatized types of practices (like saint worshipping, shrine and grave visits, and above all the “abominable” display of superstition and promiscuity at Sufi saints festivals) that most “neo-Sufi” leaders also shunned.

Sufi orders were overall in good health during the 19th and early 20th century and able to absorb the challenge of colonialism in order to partially renew their social goals and organizational forms; yet by the middle of the 20th century, during the formation of postindependence states, observers registered a state of stagnation if not an outward crisis of Sufism. Nonetheless, this moment of difficulty was overcome in the 1970s via the larger phenomenon commonly dubbed Islamic resurgence, which took a firmer root in a nonovertly political, “civic” field and therefore also favored a revival of Sufi types of affiliation. Nonetheless, especially in late-colonial and postindependence settings, Sufi orders in many countries underwent a process of bureaucratization through their subjection to a more centralized control under ultimate state supervision and patronage. In the new context, however, Sufi leaders often sought connection and influence with various, sometimes high echelons of the state bureaucracy. In this sense, while the formula of incorporation of awqāf (plural of waqf: “pious foundation”) into the state administration was streamlined and could be roughly compared to secularization processes in European settings (whereby the first meaning of secularization was the confiscation of church properties by the state), the way Sufi orders renegotiated their space and autonomy in a postcolonial, nation-state setting was open to arrangements that did not necessarily erase the earlier autonomous dynamism of Sufism and in some cases even reinvigorated it. In republican Turkey, the Naqshbandis (almost reflecting a prototype of neo-Sufi ethos) reenergized themselves in the second half of the 20th century in spite of the thorough secularization measures of earlier republican governments. Most notable in Turkey is the capacity of Sufism to mutate into a new type of movement that is no longer formally a Sufi order but incorporates a rationalization of the Sufi ethos and its flexible organizational and disciplinary forms. This is the case of the Nur movement founded by Sa‘id Nursi and its presently most successful spin-off initiated by Fethullah Gülen: increasingly pervasive in the media world and in the educational sector, aiming at the formation of new elites and audiences alike, imbued of a modern Islamic ethos, and active transnationally, not only in Turkey but also in several other countries of West and East.

Modern Politics and the Reform Program

In contrast to the pursuit of the social idea of human connectedness inspired to the “common good”—an idea that cuts across the divide between tradition and modernity—the prime theme of modernity lies in the issue of differentiation between societal spheres, a process governed by the new forms of power and regulation deployed by modern states. This process affected the original forms of organization and collective action historically promoted by Sufi orders in their pursuit of interconnectedness over distant spaces. The process of differentiation did not destroy or absorb the patterns of connectedness promoted by Sufism—but by affirming the centralization and monopolization of the state’s power on the territory on which it exercised sovereignty, it inculcated in the state subjects the disciplines of the rational agent, increasingly identified with the social agent acting on the basis of narrowly defined personal interests (homo economicus). As an unexpected consequence of the process, these subjects started to reclaim more control of governance and tried to compensate the emerging dominance of economic rationales within social relations by mobilizing the ties of affection and solidarity entailed by ideals of civility—intended as a form of social intercourse, politeness, and interconnectedness that cuts across closed communities and confessional divides. The observation of the unfolding of such highly ambivalent processes in Muslim-majority societies first in the colonial era and then in the postindependence settings also drew the attention of observers to the programs of a host of self-proclaimed Muslim reformers. Many of them still saw in the Sufi ethic a resource, and not a hindrance, for encouraging a new ethos of participation.

Within Muslim societies, the path to modern transformations cannot be therefore reduced to an adaptationist twist of an older model of “Oriental despotism,” which never existed except in the imagination of Western thinkers. Unless we want to identify the access to political modernity of Muslim-majority societies as a process entirely induced by colonial domination or indirect Western pressures (as in the case of the Ottoman Empire, whose kernel regions were never controlled by colonial powers), we should look at the transformations of the cohesive and mobilizing potential of discourses on the “common good” cutting across the conventional divide between traditional and modern social worlds. Islamic notions of the common good (maṣlaḥa) were appropriated by some early reformers in the 18th century (some of them linked to neo-Sufi groups) and were later reinvigorated both intellectually and politically by subsequent generations of thinkers and activists in the context of colonial and postcolonial politics, or, in the Ottoman Empire, in the framework of administrative reforms, known as Tanzimat, and which started in the 1830s.

It is noteworthy that the culture of those reformers who were also members of the high echelons of the state bureaucracy was particularly close to the adab tradition—distinct from the core Islamic traditions based on Qur’an and sunna—inherited from Persianate court culture. Adab denotes the catalogs of the ethical and practical norms of good life that were cultivated by a class of literati in the framework of life at court: a tradition that was central to Islamic civilization, even if detached from the core religious traditions. Far from being abandoned at the passage to the modern era, the cultivation of the adab tradition provided the background culture to the scribal class during the period, from the 18th century onward, when it increasingly acquired the ambitions of a modern bureaucracy. We might conceive of the transformations of adab as the cultural engine of a civilizing process in the sense highlighted by Norbert Elias: initiated in court milieus but with the potential to reach down the social ladder and encompass wider populations, and therefore as a substantial aid to “state-building.” The upgrading of adab into the matrix for a self-sustaining civilizing process starting in the era of the Tanzimat (during which printed administrative bulletins first saw the light) was followed by the rise of a full-fledged public sphere based on a largely free press and the emergence of new genres of public speech. This process suggests that conceptual syntheses of the essence of modernity in terms of either autonomy or self-mastery neglect the more complex social layering effected by a “civilizing process” also via the communicative sophistications allowed within a modern public sphere. Both phenomena are particularly well visible in a sociopolitical world, as in Ottoman and other Muslim, post-Ottoman and postcolonial societies, which are neither the modern incarnation of Oriental despotism nor the exact antithesis of liberal civil society.

By the time, in the late 19th century, when the reform discourse started to be formulated in the context of emerging public spheres by urban personalities who were in most cases both thinkers and activists and sometimes state servants, the Western diagnosis of the inherent deficits of Islamic cultural traditions was already gaining currency. Starting with Afghani (1838–97), reformers were faced with the task both to ground a shared cultural perspective and institute its communicative infrastructure in order to challenge their Western colonialist counterparts on their own terrain while relying on select elements of their own intellectual traditions and institutional legacies. With later reformers such as Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the operational conditions were complicated by the fact that colonial (and later postcolonial) rule at the same time empowered the reform discourse and channeled it into a modern, positive view of the law as a key tool of reform controlled by the state.

The resulting visions could no longer be reconciled with the traditional approach to maṣlaḥa, in spite of the rising popularity of this concept among many Muslim reformers who were interested in its potential to provide the hub for a Muslim theory of social agency and autonomous judgment. The way the Islamic traditions ingrained into the newly emerging sphere that became the battleground of the civilizing process marks an interesting difference with regard to developments in northwestern Europe, where the moral subject was, initially, effectively integrated in the governance machine of the modern state before it claimed autonomy in the public sphere. In the Ottoman Empire and especially in Egypt, the public sphere, though still dependent from conditions dictated by the colonial regimes, developed from the beginning an autonomous potential distinct from the state by virtue of its reposing on a newly recombined discourse of shari‘a and adab—a discourse that, though focused on the building of a new moral subject, was not entirely functional to the sovereign domain of state law and was still to a large extent related to ideals of connectedness and self-governance. This is best illustrated by ‘Abdallah al-Nadim (1845–96), a committed Muslim reformer but also one major disseminator of adab, who defined virtue not just in terms of the canonical injunction al-amr bi-l-ma‘ruf wa-l-nahī ‘an al-munkar (commanding right and forbidding wrong) that is at the heart of the normative system of shari‘a, but as tied to economic development and “industriousness.” Adab thus acquired a meaning close to “civility,” understood as an ensemble of moral dispositions entailing good manners and mastery of the self as well as a sense of social circumstances. While initially reflecting a classic notion envisioning models of cultivation of the self, in the course of the reform process the concept of adab evolved into defining a quite homogeneous field of public morality that the state could not fully control by legislating measures.

Global Civil Society and Transnational Islam

The reform project has left a strong imprint on popular movements inspired by Islamic tenets until our era. Yet the rise of such movements since after the late 1920s can also be considered the symptom of a backlash in the attempt to autonomously articulate an Islamic modernity in the context of an ongoing colonial dependence and postcolonial weakness. Instead of increasing the power of the Islamic sphere through inculcating cultured behavior in the masses, as earlier reformers had tried to do, with the formation of Islamist sociopolitical movements like the Muslim Brothers, the reform program ended up justifying a more one-sided focus on the power of engineering a morality-based public culture. One major test of the development of the branch of Muslim reform that has morphed into modern Islamism has been whether it can renounce a prioritization of power as an instrument to enforce public morals and thus fit into modern visions of “civil society.” Civil society is in the first instance the outcome of specific developments within northwestern Europe. The long erosion of ideological unity since medieval Christianity and the social fragmentation that resulted from the commercial and industrial revolutions led several modern authors, in particular those from the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, to view the social bond as resting on a combination of interest and affection and ultimately on mutual trust among individuals. This formulation replaced a more traditional notion of community as a partnership of faith in God among individuals. The emerging vision stressed new factors of cohesion in society, made “civil” by the simultaneously spontaneous and necessary bond of trust that linked individuals without any divine mediation. The “moral sense” theorized by the Scottish moralists was a form of pristine trust facilitating contractual exchange among private individuals and providing the necessary stability to social relationships spurned by the commercial and industrial revolutions.

Trust among individuals within civil society became the key tool to redefine a social bond increasingly exposed to the impersonality of factory work and of contract-based labor relationships within capitalist economies, as well as to the faceless bureaucracies that were replacing the arbitrary rule of absolutist autocrats. Civil society was considered distinct from the modern state, while it entered a rather symbiotic relationship with it. Optimally, civil society expresses legitimate interests and produces ties of solidarity, while the state guarantees the rules that protect those interests and provides a legal framework for warranting social order. Far from being an antistate, civil society contributes to both solidarity and governance from the bottom up. With the present processes of globalization, however, solidarity at the national level has been eroded, while governance gains ever more transnational contours. In this sense, globalization as a whole denotes the long-term process of adaptation of practices, discourses, and institutions of a given society or civilization to standards dictated by the rationality of world capitalism and of the international political system of nation-states. The latter increasingly includes—especially since the 1990s—narrowly defined liberal norms, aligned with the governance standards of international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. A response to the combined economic and political dynamics of globalization can be found at the level of sociopolitical movements that act on a global scale to challenge the hegemonic paradigms of globalization and propagate alternative global visions, typically subsumed under the slogan “Another world is possible” of the World Social Forum. To describe these developments, the term “global civil society” has been coined—an idea that happens to stress solidarity much more than ties of interest.

As a result, globalization does not weaken either solidarity or governance per se but deterritorializes and redeploys them across conventional borders. Solidarity in particular becomes less tied to locales and potentially more expansive, while governance can be either concentrated in transnational centers or delegated to local power centers less bound by conventional notions of citizenship. The obverse of this process is a looming sense of rootlessness that is caused by the weakening of the incorporation of individuals and groups into nation-state jurisdictions. Sociopolitical integration comes to increasingly depend on market rules and consumption preferences.

The contemporary unfolding of a globally Islamic, post-Westphalian sphere of connectedness, solidarity, and communication builds on the earlier illustrated historical experiences of global interconnectedness within Islamic civilization, while it also responds to Western norms raising the banner of civil society and global governance and to the deep ambivalence of the current processes of globalization, which create new dependences and constraints but also new occasions and spaces for collective action. Although the eyes of Western observers are mainly focused on so-called global jihadism and transnational networks of migration, Islamic globalism includes far more components and facets, which should be carefully taken into consideration. Underlying all forms of Islamic globalism is an abstract notion of a global umma, which superimposes social relations and political contests that are still mainly framed within nation-state frameworks and their narrow patterns of governance and solidarity.

In the extensive literature on Islam in Europe and in the West, several Muslim spokespersons and public intellectuals report a rising feeling of participation in a universal umma—a perception that is sharpened by critical events, from the Rushdie affair of 1989 to 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror,” which have nourished renewed patterns of Muslim global solidarity in the face of a threatening Western posture. This phenomenon is particularly intense in the Muslim diasporas of the West, and an increasing number of Muslim intellectuals who were born or reared in the West have led struggles for Muslim participation within global networks of solidarity. Such battles are often intended to transcend narrowly defined Muslim interests and to join broader efforts for global justice. While increasing attention has been paid to radical groups, particularly remarkable in this context is the flourishing of Sufism. Throughout Islamic history, one strength of Sufi networks was their capacity to support travelers across wide distances. Postcolonial labor migration has been, since the second half of the 20th century, similarly intertwined with the thriving of Sufi ṭuruq in the West. These orders are often linked with the regions of origins of the migrants, such as South Asia and West Africa, but sometimes initiate new networks that cut across traditional regional localizations and attract Western members, including practitioners and sympathizers who are not Muslims in the conventional sense.

To conclude, the significance of Islamic globalism at the present stage of entanglement of multiple modernities might support the decoupling of modernization from Westernization and a reconstruction of modernity along specific civilizational paths conforming to their foundational images, symbols, and discursive patterns. Mass cultural production can further this process but can also increase the chances of building new ties and coalitions across communal or national domains. The growing Islamic focus on transnational interconnectedness transcends a Eurocentric modernist approach to modernity confined within the rationales of nation-states or of new aggregations thereof, like the European Union.