Abstract
Salvatore’s book represents the first systematic attempt to define the sociology of Islam as a strategic field of enquiry that embraces different disciplines (e.g., history, sociology, Islamic studies). The volume is the first book of a trilogy related to the sociology of Islam; the second and the third volumes will be The Law, the State, and the Public Sphere and Transnationalism, Transculturalism, and Globalization, respectively.
The main goal of this introductory volume is ‘to explore the extent to which the history and the present of an internally, civilizational constellation . . . justifies and legitimates a more comprehensive and less Western-centered view of civility’ (p. 278). For Salvatore, the sociology of Islam, which can trace its origins back to the 1970s, when Turner’s book Weber and Islam was published, relies on the contacts between Europe and the Islamic ecumene, as he defines the Islamic world, and the concept of modernity. In order to pursue this goal, it is essential to emancipate sociology from its ‘original sin’, namely its ‘reluctance to recognize the social and civil dynamism of non-Western articulations of religion’ (p. 6). The sociology of Islam aims at bringing together the discourse on religion and modernity, which was one of the issues discussed by the founding fathers of sociology. Hence, the need to debate the concept of ‘Islamic modernity’ that, for Salvatore, represents a field of research and contestation but can no longer be viewed as an oxymoron. In order to set the groundwork of the discipline, Salvatore, following Hodgson, acknowledges in waqf, tasawwuf and hadith, the three meta-institutions that can empower social actors and through which he provides a civilizational analysis of the origin of the sociology of Islam.
For Salvatore, the sociology of Islam can play a crucial role in developing an analysis of many traditions and intertwined modernities to emphasize the existence ‘of non-Western genealogies and articulations of [the] knowledge–power equation’ (p. 14). To pursue his goal, the author adopts a historical and comparative approach.
He provides a theoretical overview in Chapters 1 and 7. Chapter 1 is mostly focused on the origin of civil society and how the concept of civility should replace it because the latter is able to bind together knowledge and power. However, Salvatore warns us against the risk of ‘applying’ civility, which has its origin partially in hegemonic Western countries, to the Islamic ecumene as it is. He suggests that in order to grasp its transversal nature, the concept of civility should be freed from its Western heritage in such a way ‘to take into account non-Western experiences and trajectories’ (p. 43). The concept of civility is more broadly analysed in Chapter 7 where he provides a deep insight of Elias’s approach of the civilizing process. In detail, Salvatore tends to underline the multidimensional nature of the concept of civility by affirming that the civilizing process relies on a ‘wide variety of localized patterns of civility . . . the civilizing process and the consequent emergence of patterns of civility, if applied to a variety of civilizational environments, no longer appears as a one-way, cumulative, and teleological process of singularization of power’ (p. 255). In other words, Salvatore recognizes the prominent role of Elias’s work in explaining the civilizing process in such a way to emphasize the dynamic, intersubjective and impersonal nature of civility that is able to join knowledge and power.
The historical exploration is more deeply discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, where the author analyses the evolution of Islam civilization in the Middle Periods that Hodgson identified as occurring between the 10th and 15th centuries. After the collapse of the High Caliphate (at the end of the 9th century), the Islamic ecumene appeared to be governed by anarchism and instability and this phase has been depicted by orientalists and many historians as a phase of decadence. For Hodgson, the Middle Periods represent the phase in which the Islamic ecumene flourished; this was mainly due to the prominent role of Sufi movements because as an expression of brotherhood (in Weberian understanding) they represented an institution in which social actors were organized in horizontal modes of governance and network. Thus, Sufi orders ‘played a particularly crucial role in articulating Islam’s capacity to weave long-distance ties and turn them into a versatile source of civility’ (p. 75). The long-distance trade and the expansion of cities fostered the diffusion of Islam (Chapter 3) especially in the sense of ‘the absorption of patterns of civility from other Afro-Eurasian civilizational realms’ (p. 106). This expansion and malleability of the Islamic ecumene to absorb the patterns of civility from other civilizational areas has led Salvatore to argue that the Muslim, during the Middle Periods, appeared as a global ‘citizen’, ‘in the sense of enjoying full recognition as a partner in the hemisphere-wide circulation of goods, peoples, ideas’ (p. 107) and absorbing practices coming from Africa, and Inner and East Asia. Although during its expansion, Muslims had to wrestle with other religious groups in Central and Inner Asian courts in order to ‘earn’ the favour of the rulers, in the 14th and 15th centuries, under Timur and his successors, ‘Islam achieved an enduring breakthrough’ (p. 108). For Salvatore, it is therefore reductive to consider the expansion and absorption of Islam in African and Eurasian realms as a consequence of military activities. Instead, Islam was accepted in the new territories and internalized by social actors because of its communicative nature that was ‘a mixture of appeal, convenience, and patronage, which often combined smoothly through the effectiveness of embracing Islam as a spectacularly transregional (and largely transcivilizational) social and moral idiom’ (p. 108).
The comparative approach is more deeply discussed in Chapter 4, where the author compares the Islamic ecumene with the Middle Ages in Europe, which is considered the darkest period of European history. The ‘apparent similarities between Islamic and European developments . . . concerned in particular the emerging patterns of distinction and reconciliation between “spiritual” drives and the construction of civic ties’ (p. 132). The comparison between the Latin Christendom and Islamdom was mainly based on the presence of monastic movements and mendicant orders that in the former represented a rapture and pressure on the ecclesiastical institutions because they were able to meet ‘the practical necessities and desires of renewal that spread among popular classes and the rising urban middle classes’ (p. 132). In the Islamic ecumene, the counterpart of the monastic and mendicant European orders was represented by Sufi orders. However, as Salvatore underscores in Chapters 5 and 6, around the 18th century, the Sufi orders underwent profound changes during the colonial phase. The main argument advanced by the author in both chapters relies on the idea, following Hodgson, that ‘Islamic civilization at the inception of the modern era did not suddenly evaporate at the moment that newly emerging colonial powers affirmed their lead in long-distance maritime trade and discoveries’ (pp. 167–168). For Salvatore, the contact between the Western powers and the Islamic ecumene did not necessarily entail an implosion of Islam. The lack of implosion of Islamic civilization is evident in the Sufi networks that did not exhaust their impetus but diversified their ‘modes of ingraining into the process of building civic spaces’ (p. 189). This process, which has been introduced by other scholars and then proposed by Salvatore, is defined as Neo-Sufism, meaning that ‘the Islamic ecumene was able to show, exactly in the interstices and intervals between the modernity of the Muslim empires and the modernity of the European colonial powers, a singular capacity of articulation of activist forms of sociability, civility, and mobilization’ (p. 191). This new process of articulation between knowledge, power and civility was clearly evident in the resistance brought against the Western powers by some Sufi orders and leaders, such as al-Sanusi in Cyrenaica or al-Qadir in Algeria.
To conclude, by adopting a historical and comparative perspective that recognizes the existence of different patterns of life conduct, sociability and modes of governance, Salvatore suggests that this approach can inform the sociology of Islam and allow for grasping the interaction between knowledge and power in histories of civilizations. Lastly, this approach tends to emphasize the sui generis nature of Islamic civilization, therefore acknowledging that the theoretical boundaries of the concept of civility rely on the ‘transborder connections and cross civilizational dynamics’ (p. 274).