The SAGE Handbook of Islamic Studies

Akbar S Ahmed, Tamara Sonn, Akbar S Ahmed, Tamara Sonn, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780761943259
• eBook ISBN: 9781473971684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

… a welcome addition to the already available introductory works on Islam. The chapters of the book combine depth of analysis and erudition on a wide range of subjects. Thus in a single volume one finds several superbly written papers not only on the foundations of Islam and the manifestations of Islamic culture but also on issues which are at the centre of contemporary debates among Muslims such as multiculturalism, social justice, democracy and diversity. As a sourcebook this work is equally useful for students, academicians and general readers? - Zafar Ishaq Ansari, Director, Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University

Islamic Studies is at a critical moment in its history. It seeks both to maintain its rich history and to engage with other - sometimes dominant - cultural and political studies. This tension is producing complex changes in both the theory and the practice of Islamic Studies.

This timely and stimulating Handbook, edited by world-class experts in the field, provides a comprehensive guide to Islamic Studies today. It examines the main issues in the field and explores the key debates. It provides readers with an indispensable, balanced guide to the roots of Islam and the challenges it faces in the twenty-first century.

The Handbook includes discussions of:

- Islam as a community of discourse and a global system

- Islam, diaspora and multiculturalism

- The Qu?ran today

- Islam as a moral and judicial system

- Islam and politics

- Islam and culture

- Diversities and Islam

Concise, level-headed and penetrating, this collection will be of interest to anyone who studies contemporary Islam. It brings together an unparalleled collection of international scholars who illuminate some of the most urgent and complex issues in the world today.

PART 1

Islam and Multiculturalism

1

Islam as a Community of Discourse and a World-System¹

John Obert Voll

Islam is a major monotheistic faith, but ‘Islam’ also is used as a term identifying a way of life, a civilization, a culture and a historic community. This variety of definitions creates confusions when people discuss Islamic history and current events. Some of this confusion is simply the result of using the same term for different phenomena. The confusion may also reflect the need for a redefinition of the basic conceptualizations involved in the study of the historic community of Muslims and their faith. Analysis of the historical experience of the believers requires different methods from those used to debate the truth of revealed religions. However, even in the discussion of historical Muslim experience, the terminology needs to be examined. In many discussions of Islamic history, ‘Islam’ is conceived of as an historic ‘civilization’, but this framework for analysis may be misleading and historically inaccurate.

The terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamic’ are used, as Marshall Hodgson noted more than 30 years ago, ‘casually both for what we may call religion and for the overall society and culture associated historically with the religion’.² Confusion is created by describing Islam using general terms that are thought to be universal but may, in historical reality, be the label for a particular type of human organization. Islam is often called a ‘civilization’, as is the case in the famous analysis of Samuel Huntington.³ However, that type of analysis tends to use the term ‘civilization’ as a generic category for any large-scale human sociocultural unit rather than recognizing that, in world historical analysis, there are many different types of large human groupings, and that ‘civilization’ is simply one type of grouping with a relatively specific and clear definition, at least in scholarly analysis.⁴ It is useful to ask whether the complex of social relations that is often called ‘Islamic civilization’ is really a ‘civilization’ or if there are alternative conceptualizations that can provide a more effective basis for analysis of Islamic history.

The current transformation of major social formations on a global scale provides the opportunity to re-examine our understanding of the nature of some of the basic units. In particular, it opens the way for examining the large-scale networks of relations that are the major units of contemporary global interactions. I propose to start with a well-known reconceptualization of global interactions, the world-system concepts that have been articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein, and to see if this framework can help define the global Islamic entity more usefully and clearly. This analysis utilizes Wallerstein’s conceptualizations as a foundation for developing a concept of the global Muslim community as a multicivilizational and cosmopolitan community of discourse.

World-system theory is not a simple, monolithic explanation of global human history and society. Even as initially defined by Wallerstein, it was a complex cluster of approaches to understanding a wide variety of experiences. The world-system conceptualization has now become the basis for many different perspectives and interpretations, as the articles in issue after issue of the Review of the Fernand Braudel Center illustrate. Early articles in that journal by Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank and a thought-provoking retrospective by Wallerstein – all suggest the luxuriant productivity of this perspective, while the continuing debates into the twenty-first century between Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank reflect the longstanding importance of this conceptualization.⁵

Within this very broad field of concepts, it is difficult in a short discussion to do justice to the full relevance of world-system theory to an understanding of the Islamic historical experience. Therefore, I take one aspect of the early formulations of Wallerstein and explore its implications for the study of Islamic history. At the same time, I consider the implications of Islamic history for world-system theory, because I think that the Islamic experience represents a special case that suggests a different conceptualization of global networks of human relations based more on discourse and exchange of ideas than on the economic relations central to Wallerstein’s approach.

In his early presentation of the world-system approach, Wallerstein argued that:

… thus far there have only existed two varieties of such world-systems: world-empires, in which there is a single political system over most of the area … and those systems in which such a single system does not exist over all, or virtually all, of the space. For convenience and for want of a better term, we are using the term ‘world-economy’ to describe the latter. … Prior to the modern era, world-economies were highly unstable structures which tended either to be converted into empires or to disintegrate. It is the peculiarity of the modern world-system that a world-economy has survived for 500 years and yet has not come to be transformed into a world-empire. … This peculiarity is the political side of the form of economic organization called capitalism.⁶

This broad picture of the dynamics of the evolution of the great regional civilizations fits well within the generally accepted grand narrative of premodern world history. The rise and fall of empires and of civilizations is a central theme in the visions of many world historians from Edward Gibbon to Arnold Toynbee and more recent global historians. World-systems scholars deal specifically with this issue,⁷ and the popularity of the best-selling books by Jared Diamond on ‘the fates of human societies’ and ‘how societies choose to fail or succeed’ reflects the continuing interest in these subjects.⁸ This general presentation of the differences between modern and premodern world-systems is appealing both for its clarity and for what we know about the history of the major world civilizations. The alternations between grand imperial unifications and political–economic disintegration in China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe are important parts of the world historical narrative.

The pattern described by Wallerstein of incipient world-economies that result either in imperial unifications or disintegrations seems to fit the history of the Middle East in the Islamic era. There is the period of the great imperial unification begun by the Arab–Muslim conquests in the seventh century and continued by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. This imperial unification is part of the long line of great world-empires that brought the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world-economy (or world-economies) under the control of one or two major imperial systems. This series began as early as the Phoenician–Greek–Persian network of the seventh century BCE, and stretched through the Hellenistic state system created by the conquests of Alexander the Great to the later Parthian–Sasanid and Roman–Byzantine empires.⁹

The standard historical narrative notes the disintegration of the Islamic imperial system under the Abbasid rulers of the tenth and eleventh centuries CE and its replacement by a decentralized network of smaller states ruled by military commanders, or sultans, who replaced the imperial caliphs as the effective rulers of Muslim areas by the twelfth century. The final act in this process of disintegration was the destruction of Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, by Mongol forces in 1258. Journalistic accounts speak of the era of ‘backwardness and stagnation that afflicted the Moslem world between the fall of Baghdad … and the renaissance of the twentieth century’.¹⁰ In the scholarly terms of his influential book The Arabs in History, Bernard Lewis notes that at this time took place the ‘transformation of the Islamic Near East from a commercial, monetary economy to one which, despite an extensive and important foreign and transit trade, was internally a quasi-feudal economy, based on subsistence agriculture’.¹¹

This gloomy picture is correct in some very specific and limited ways. The imperial political unity of the Islamic world was irretrievably destroyed by the middle of the thirteenth century, and in many areas, the effectiveness of the urban-based commercial monetary economy was significantly reduced. In the terms of Wallerstein, in the absence of an effective world-empire, the old world-economy of the Middle East seems to have disintegrated. At this point, one might simply state that the history of the premodern Islamic world-system appears to bear out Wallerstein’s formulation.

However, the standard gloomy picture of the Islamic world following the Mongol conquest of Baghdad is not the only possible picture, as the works of scholars like William H. McNeill, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Ira Lapidus and others show. The gloomy picture does not prepare the observer for the actual world situation at the beginning of the sixteenth century. As McNeill has noted:

We are so accustomed to regard history from a European vantage point that the extraordinary scope and force of this Islamic expansion [in the period 1000–1500 CE], which prefigured and overlapped the later expansion of Western Europe, often escapes attention. Yet an intelligent and informed observer of the fifteenth century could hardly have avoided the conclusion that Islam, rather than the remote and still comparatively crude society of the European Far West, was destined to dominate the world in the following centuries.¹²

In this so-called era of stagnation, the size of the Islamic world virtually doubled from what it had been in the days of the glories of the Abbasid caliphs. By the middle of the sixteenth century, major Muslim imperial states had been established in the Mediterranean world, Iran, South Asia, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The power and glory of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Uzbek and Songhai empires more than matched the emerging Iberian empires of the day and outshone the smaller dynastic states of Western Europe. In addition, Islam was actively winning converts beyond the boundaries of these empires in Southeast Asia, Southeast Europe and elsewhere.

The world of Islam was, in fact, dynamic and expanding, not static and stagnating, or disintegrating. As a global unit, however, it is difficult to define in the standard terms of world-systems theory. It stretched from the inner Asian territories of the Manchu (Qing) empire in China and the small sultanate of Manila in the Philippines to the Muslim communities growing in Bosnia and sub-Saharan Africa. Whatever the unit was, it was not a world-empire and had no prospect of becoming one. At the same time, it was not disintegrating and collapsing. Neither of the alternatives posed by Wallerstein for premodern world-systems seems to be applicable to the Islamic entity in world history in the period just before modern times.

Part of the problem may lie in the way we look at this Islamic entity as it emerged in the centuries following the collapse of effective Abbasid imperial power in the tenth century. The term most frequently used is ‘civilization’, as in ‘classical (or medieval) Islamic civilization’. This is an awkward term, because it implies a civilizational coherence similar to other historic regional civilizations. As long as the Muslim community was primarily or exclusively Middle Eastern, it could be thought of as the most recent phase of the long-standing tradition of civilization in the Middle East. In the half-millennium after the Abbasid collapse, however, Islam became an important component in many societies outside the Middle East. Some, like India, themselves represented significant traditions of civilization, and this civilizational identity was not eliminated by the introduction of Islam. As a result, by the sixteenth century, the Islamic entity was a multi-civilizational entity, not an autonomous ‘civilization’. Further, this expanding Islamic entity now included areas where the complex urban structures characteristic of traditions of civilization were not the dominant modes of social organization. The Islamic entity included both urban-based and pastoral nomadic communities, that is, it included both civilized-citied societies and non-citied/non-civilizational societies.

This Islamic entity was a vast network of interacting peoples and groups, with considerable diversity and yet some sufficiently common elements so that it is possible to speak of these diverse communities as being part of ‘the Islamic world’. I hasten to add that the problem of understanding the ‘unity and diversity’ found within the Islamic world is a major and continuing one for scholars of Islam.¹³ It is tempting to think of this Islamic world as a premodern network or system of peoples. In terms of Wallerstein’s early definition, it is possible to see this vast network of interacting peoples and groups as ‘a social system … that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence’.¹⁴

The real foundation of this world-system, however, does not appear to be a world-economy in the precise sense of the term as used in the analyses of Wallerstein and others. The primary sense of a self-contained identity and the meaning of the boundaries and legitimations do not lie predominantly in the world of trade, production and exchange. In the current debates over the nature of world-systems and such issues as whether or not there is one world-system extending over 5,000 years, as Frank argues, most people engaging in the discourse of world-systems theory are speaking about the material world and economic forces.

Perhaps a foundation of economic ties does bind the Muslim communities of West Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, there has been little examination of the trade patterns within the Muslim world in the centuries following the Abbasid collapse. Research by Janet L. Abu-Lughod shows how important such studies can be. She presents a picture of ‘a longstanding, globally-integrated “world-system”, to which Europe had finally attached itself’. She notes that this world-system of the thirteenth century had three or four core areas and states that ‘no single cultural, economic or imperial system was hegemonic. Indeed, a wide variety of cultural systems coexisted and cooperated, most of them organized very differently from the West’.¹⁵ It is noteworthy that the trade of each of the three major ‘core’ zones in Abu-Lughod’s analysis (the Middle East, Central Asia and China, and the Indian Ocean basin) tended to be dominated by Muslim-controlled groups or Muslim communities. However, it was not trade or economic exchange that gave this Islamic entity its identity or basic cohesion.

Wallerstein noted that scholars dealing with world-systems analysis face the challenge of ‘elaboration of world-systems other than that of the capitalist world-economy’.¹⁶ I suggest that to understand the premodern entity of the Islamic world as a world-system, it is necessary to define world-systems in ways that are not as closely confined to the economic and material dimensions of history as in the conceptualizations of almost all world-systems scholars. (For example, Wallerstein insists that the networks and boundaries that define a world-system must be related to material exchanges and the economic dimensions of social systems.¹⁷)

The Islamic world had ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: CURRENT ISSUES IN ISLAMIC STUDIES
• PART 1 ISLAM AND MULTICULTURALISM
• PART 2 FOUNDATIONS OF ISLAM
• PART 3 CULTURE OF ISLAM
• PART 4 CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ISLAM
• PART 5 DIVERSITY WITHIN ISLAM
• Index