In turning now to another major Abrahamic religion, I will try to show how the situation of Islam is both similar and different to that of Christianity. What follows will therefore have some of the same emphases as the previous section. In many respects, however, the approach is of necessity rather different because of the different details of Islam, certainly, but almost more critically because of the different position it has acquired in the modern globalizing context. Above all, Islam has not been the reli- gion of hitherto dominant centres of the global system; more consistently the contrary.
As with Christianity, the historical process that is of interest in the present context is not a matter of the invention of a religion called Islam nor of its original construction out of disparate but already existing social structures and cultural traditions. Just as the idea and an institutional reality for the Christian religion predated the modern era by many centuries, so was a self-identified, institutionalized and recursively struc- tured system of communications called Islam an important and in many regions highly determinative social reality from about the ninth century CE.
As with Christianity, therefore, the issue at hand is not the invention of Islam but rather its re-construction, re-imagination and thereby (renewed) differentiation. The key question is what forms Islam takes in a socio- historical context in which differentiated and globalized function systems, including for religion, dominate.
The key to understanding the sorts of transformation and reconstruction that are at issue here is again the notion of differentiation, that is the differ- entiation of Islam as a religion beside the others and as a subsystem of the religious system beside other, non-religious systems. As an illustrative symptom of this double differentiation, one can refer to the frequently heard insistence on the part of devout Muslims today that Islam is indeed a religion, but it is at the same time more than that: it is a complete ‘way of life’.7 The recognition of its status as a religion implies comparison with
other religions: Islam is a religion and thereby a different religion. Not surprisingly, Muslims sharing this recognition differ greatly on the issue of exactly how this religion relates to the others. Opinions range on a continuum between those who assert that Islam is the only true or universal religion, and those for whom it is a religion on a par with other religions, but happens to be ‘my’ or ‘our’ religion. The insistence that it is also a way
of life makes the additional claim that this religion is not limited in its rele- vance to only one domain of life. It is a way of living all aspects of one’s life, whether religious, familial, cultural, political, legal, economic, physical, emotional or intellectual. Although from one perspective such a statement may seem redundant – after all, is that not what the devout adherents of any religion might claim – in the contemporary societal context it points directly to the issue of the secular character of other, ‘non-religious’ systems. Claiming that Islam is also a way of life amounts to a problemati- zation of the institutional differentiation of other functional spheres. Implied is that the latter should be grounded in and structured in conso- nance with the values and priorities of the religious system of Islam, that the system of Islam is expressly not a system like the others but rather the system that should have operational primacy over any others. Even though this is a question for every one of the other religions and for the religious system as a whole, in contemporary Islam, it has moved much more into the foreground as a way of declaring and structuring the specificity of Islam as a religion. This is not to say that Islam in the modern world is simply defined by this problem of delimitation vis-à-vis other, putatively ‘secular’, systems. For the most part, as with all the other religions, the everyday practice of Islam proceeds without much attention to this issue, which is to say that the communicative practices that recursively constitute Islam do not constantly thematize it. Just as Christians today do not constantly talk about, let alone pray about, questions like Christian unity, and Hindus are not in their religious practice endlessly obsessed with how Hindus are not Christians or Muslims; so Muslims generally just go about their religious business of praying, fasting, reciting or preaching without worrying exces- sively about whether capitalist, state, educational or sport structures in their region or in the world are sufficiently ‘Islamic’. Nonetheless, in terms of the social forms (especially social movements) and theological emphases that have restructured and re-imagined Islam for the contemporary modern and globalized context, the question of Islam’s boundaries of social influ- ence appears to have been among the most important.
Islam, Islamic civilization, Islamic religion
The main question is thus one of the restructuring and re-imagination of Islam for a different, namely globalized, context. As in the Christian case, therefore, it is well to begin the further discussion of these developments with a look at aspects of the institutional and conceptual realities of Islam before the modern and global era. The key points concern the nature and degree of institutional differentiation, both with respect to ‘other religions’ and to ‘non-religion’.
Its core mythic narratives in both Qur’an and Sunna, as well as the practice of historical Muslim societies, seem to indicate that religious
plurality is rather more foundational to Islam than it is problematic. Other religious revelations to other peoples are discussed and accepted as authentic in the Qur’an; to these corresponds a concept, din, which, although not used in the Qur’an, does have a plural form, adyan. The systematic way of living in the world that the Qur’an calls Islam is an example of a generic category din, albeit the best example (Wilfred Cantwell Smith 1991: 81). Moreover, historically Islamic societies are well known for tolerating other religious groups, especially the so-called ‘people of the book’, Jews, Christians and others such as Zoroastrians. That phrase, ‘people of the book’, however, indicates that this tolerance is not the same as the clear recognition of differentiated religions in the modern globalized sense discussed here. The Qur’an, in fact, presents itself as the single and only revelation of the one God, as ‘the’ book revealed as such to different groups of people through different prophets, albeit in their own languages. The difference of the Qur’an is not so much that it reveals a different religion to Muhammad and the Arabs, but that it is the Arabic and undistorted rendition of the single revelation revealed to the final prophet, the seal of the prophets, Muhammad. Religion, on this view, is singular, and contained in its pure form only in the Arabic Qur’an. The tolerance is therefore not of other religions, but of other peoples, in the plural, who have a different but distorted version of that one religion. It is a way of underscoring the uniqueness of the religion of Islam, not a decla- ration of the plurality of formally equal and alternative religions. Indicatively, those people not deemed to be in possession of a version of this single revelation are, in Qur’anic terms, people without religion, not people practising a different religion. This understanding in most ways resembles that prevailing among contemporaneous Christians: Christian religion is the name for the authentic religious path in comparison with which ‘other religions’ are imperfect approximations or not religion at all, even anti-religion.
Although the Islamic understanding of din has historically been singular in this sense, the differences in comparison to the roughly contemporary European meaning of religio are just as instructive. Perhaps most critical among these is that the Islamic din contains the meaning of an encompassing system of life-conduct ‘in this world’ (Gardet 1960 [1980]). Unlike the founding narratives and early history of the Christian movement with their eschatological emphases on a ‘kingdom that is not of this world’, on ‘rendering unto Caesar’, on ‘two natures’, on what we today would call sectarian organization, the Islamic movement, likewise in its founding narratives and early history, featured a union of eschatological and this-worldly political orientations, such that it was from early on a religio-political movement in the largest sense of that term. It informed empire more fundamentally, much earlier in its development, and above all more seamlessly than the Christian movement
did even in the centuries after the Constantinian turn. Just as suspicious of mystical trends and renewed propheticism as its Christian neighbour, Islam also stressed a rejection of renunciatory asceticism and monastic flight from the world. Hence the pre-modern European meaning of religio as referring to the monastic ‘way of life’ contrasts with this Islamic sense of din as referring to the ‘way of life’ of all Muslims.8This
early established pattern received institutional expression not only in the form that Islamic empires or states typically took, for instance in the Sunni idea that the caliph was ideally both the religious and political head of the community and not just legitimated on religious grounds. It further manifested itself in the refusal to allow the development of corpo- rate institutional entities that were not also an expression of this seamlessness, in modern Islamic parlance, this tawhid.9Correspondingly,
for example, the Christian collective term, ‘church’, from early on carried an organizational, communal and even somewhat sectarian meaning, whereas the parallel term in Islam, ummah, denoted only the communal self-descriptive dimension. All this is definitely not to say that the Islamic conceptual ideal actually manifested itself straightforwardly and consis- tently in concrete Islamic social reality, that institutions operated quite so seamlessly. It is, however, to say that this conceptual ideal had a powerful and persistent presence in Islamic societies, making its use for restructuring Islam in the context of the developing global religious system of recent times as likely as that Christians would resort to an organizationally inspired strategy in that context. At issue are the ideational resources that Muslims have had at their disposal for engaging in the re-imagination of Islam, not some putative ‘essence’, let alone ‘fundamentals’ of Islam.
Nonetheless, the tawhid conceptual emphasis present in Islam should not lead one to think that Islamic societies did not exhibit important struc- tural differentiation. There was always such institutional differentiation. The seamlessness of Islam as a system (nizam), however, points to the fact that this will not have been primarily functional differentiation. Indeed, the notion of din as encompassing life system contains the express nega- tion of the conditions for a primacy of functional differentiation. Instead, the form of differentiation implied in the recognition and toleration of other religions or other religious communities is rather hierarchical or stratified, and therefore dhimmi, or ‘protected people’, status in Muslim societies has historically been ‘second-class’ status. A good example of the institutional expression of this understanding can be found in the Ottoman millet10 system, by which Jewish and different Christian groups were
accorded their own legal and educational, as well as religious, institutions, but were barred from full participation in the power structures of the empire, notably high state office and the military. Although the millets were distinguished as religious communities, they were not just religious
divisions, but rather something much closer to class or strata divisions defined in religious terms. Analogously, the society as a whole was consid- ered Muslim, as the House of Islam in which the prevailing ideology dictated that powerful functional institutions were to be Islamic, some- thing that did not prevent the sort of practical differentiation between especially religious and political/state structures that also prevailed in pre- modern Christian society. Correspondingly, the other side of the functionally defined House of Islam (dar al-Islam), namely the House of the Infidel (dar al-kufr or dar al-harb), had no positive place in this under- standing: to recognize the other side would have been to lend functional distinction primacy, as of course is the case in the contemporary global religious system.
The issue of Islam’s relation to ‘non-religion’ before the modern and contemporary eras must be seen in a similar way. It is not that there was no institutional differentiation according to function. Political, economic and religious leaders were most often not the same people; there were ‘specialists’ in each domain. State and imperial structures were not also those of the religious scholars and Sufi adepts. The distinct development of especially these two streams is standard stuff of the history of Islamic societies (Esposito 1999; Lapidus 1988: Part I). Yet this was not the primary form of institutional differentiation, core/periphery, stratified and segmentary forms being rather more critical depending on the time and place which one is considering. Thus, political leaders relied on explicitly Islamic legitimation to justify their rule, incorporated Islamic scholars into their law and administration as a matter of course, and the scholars usually saw themselves as the natural occupants of these positions. At least as critically, these societies did not exhibit the clear institutional differentiation of various other functional domains, for instance the scien- tific, the educational, the legal, the economic, the health or the media. Practically, the failure of these domains to develop is attributable to the fact that the religious experts and institutions saw to those functions, especially the first three. But part of this practical reality was the concep- tual and semantic dimension: they were understood functionally as aspects of the system of Islam. Thus, although the relation of Islam to the world was definitely also an issue (din vs dunya), it did not and could not present itself as one of the relation of functionally defined institutional spheres, one of which was religion. In practical terms, the traditional Islamic societal situation is quite similar to others such as the South Asian and European: religious leaders were the knowledge providers, the educa- tors, the judges and arbitrators. Yet in Christian Europe the notion and concrete institutional reality of functionally differentiated institutions had much more solid precedent, as we have seen. In developed form, it is a peculiarity of the modern and now global situation in which function systems dominate.
Islamic reform and the challenge of Western power
As in the case of Christianity, the starting date for a narrative of modern Islamic reconstruction must of necessity be a bit arbitrary. Following John O. Voll’s oft-cited treatment (Voll 1982, 1999), I begin with developments in the eighteenth century not because little of importance transpired before then, but rather because the more significant reform impulses that character- ized this century provided key thematic resources and emphases for the numerous reformers and intellectuals that followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The eighteenth century was not a time during which Western presence was all that overwhelming in most Muslim dominated regions. British, Dutch and French forces especially were definitely present in most areas, such as South and Southeast Asia, but their ultimate hegemony was far from evident at the time. Islamic reform movements of the time were responses to more regional and local developments, such as the gradual and roughly simultaneous decline in the efficacy of the three dominant Muslim empires of the time, the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal.
A more nuanced understanding of the different Islamic reform impulses of that time would have to examine different regions, different movements and the orientations of the various leaders that spearheaded them. For the present purposes, however, one can limit the discussion to three dominant themes typical of many of them, namely a distrust of conservative imita- tion of received tradition in favour of re-appropriation of core religious sources, an emphasis on what Voll calls ‘socio-moral reconstruction’, and a particular understanding of the unity of Islam. The three themes mutu- ally inform one another. The first, expressed for instance in a rejection of imitation or taqlid, stressed the degree to which then prevailing forms of doing Islam had become corrupted, were unreliable or at least had to be re-examined rather than just imitated. Thus was the door opened for a reformulation of the programmatic core of Islam on the basis of the selec- tivity of the reformers, namely their ability to engage in independent interpretation, or ijtihad. This breaking free from received tradition, however, meant anything but openness for eclectic borrowing from a wide variety of sources or radical invention of new traditions. The dominant eighteenth-century trend circumscribed the possibilities quite sharply. Neo- Sufi impulses such as that of the Naqshbandiyyah order or more austere directions like the Wahhabis agreed that reform had to consist in a recovery of the Qur’an and the traditions of the prophet, the Sunna, as the obligatory and only reliable sources. As so often in religious reform move- ments, reinterpretation of the core religious programme proceeded by way of a putative recovery of the mythic origins. It was structured recursively, presenting itself as a winnowing or purification rather than an adaptation or augmentation. Thus, corresponding to this positive ‘return to the origins’ was the rejection of those aspects now deemed to be illegitimate
accretions, or of the obligatory nature of anything not traceable to the origins as the reformers understood them. In the Islamic reform impulses of the eighteenth century, that meant practically the rejection of a large portion of accumulated Sufi belief and practice, especially that related to the veneration of Sufi saints and direct personal religious experiences as a reliable source for doing Islam (cf. Gellner 1969). The Wahhabis represent the most extreme form of this direction. In general, the reformers were inclined to reject notable historical Islamic figures that represented these tendencies, especially Ibn al-Arabi, in favour of the more ‘scriptural’ and rule-oriented Islam of figures like al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah. The prevailing tendency was in favour of obeying God’s commands and away from a stress on a devotional and quasi-pantheistic search for closeness to God. Yet this submission (Islam) as obedience to God was not to be done on the basis of imitating a human authority, thereby creating another intermediary between God and the human being. It was rather the respon- sibility of the individual Muslim using only the reliable sources of Qur’an and Sunna.11 To this ‘socio-moral’ emphasis corresponded a notion of
Islamic unity that eschewed a more pantheistic understanding of tawhid as the unity of everything in God in favour of one that stressed God’s tran- scendence and therefore unity of the world under God. Hence the critical