The Sociology of Islam

Armando Salvatore is Professor of Global Religious Studies at McGill University, Montreal, and Professor at the Centre for Arab & Islamic Studies of the Australian National University, Canberra. His work as a social scientist emphasizes transregional comparison and explores the Islamic ecumene’s socio-political trajectories as well as transcultural interconnections. As a complement to The Sociology of Islam he is editing The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam. Among his previous works are Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (1997), Public Islam and the Common Good (edited with Dale F. Eickelman, 2004), The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism and Islam (2007), and Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates (edited with Muhammad Khalid Masud and Martin van Bruinessen, 2009).

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Knowledge and Power in the Sociology of Islam 1

Knowledge/Charisma vs. Power/Wealth: The Challenge of Religious Movements 18

Civility as the Engine of the Knowledge–Power Equation: Islam and ‘Islamdom’ 23

Part I Patterns of Civility

1 The Limits of Civil Society and the Path to Civility 43

The Origins of Modern Civil Society 43

Civil Society as a Site of Production of Modern Power 50

Folding Civil Society into a Transversal Notion of Civility 57

2 Brotherhood as a Matrix of Civility: The Islamic Ecumene and Beyond 73

Between Networking, ‘Charisma,’ and Social Autonomy: The Contours of ‘Spiritual’ Brotherhoods 73

Beyond Sufism: The Unfolding of the Brotherhood 85

Rewriting Charisma into Brotherhood 92

Part II Islamic Civility in Historical and Comparative Perspective

3 Flexible Institutionalization and the Expansive Civility of the Islamic Ecumene 105

The Steady Expansion of Islamic Patterns of Translocal Civility 105

Authority, Autonomy, and Power Networks: A Grid of Flexible Institutions 114

The Permutable Combinations of Normativity and Civility 118

4 Social Autonomy and Civic Connectedness: The Islamic Ecumene in Comparative Perspective 131

New Patterns of Civic Connectedness Centered on the ‘Commoners’ 131

Liminality, Charisma, and Social Organization 140

Municipal Autonomy vs. Translocal Connectedness 147

Part III Modern Islamic Articulations of Civility

5 Knowledge and Power: The Civilizing Process before Colonialism 165

From the Mongol Impact to the Early Modern Knowledge–Power Configurations 165

Taming the Warriors into Games of Civility? Violence, Warfare, and Peace 176

The Long Wave of Power Decentralization 189

6 Colonial Blueprints of Order and Civility 201

The Metamorphosis of Civility under Colonialism 201

Court Dynamics and Emerging Elites: The Complexification of the Civilizing Process 218

Class, Gender, and Generation: The Ultimate Testing Grounds of the Educational-Civilizing Project 226

7 Global Civility and Its Islamic Articulations 239

The Dystopian Globalization of Civility 239

Diversifying Civility as the Outcome of Civilizing Processes 251

From Islamic Exceptionalism to a Plural Islamic Perspective 260

Conclusion 271

Overcoming Eurocentric Views: Religion and Civility within Islam/Islamdom 271

The Institutional Mold of Islamic Civility: Contractualism vs. Corporatism? 278

From the Postcolonial Condition toward New Fragile Patterns of Translocal Civility 287

Index 295