Christianate. Historians of books, of science and of empire must therefore finally overcome the eurocentrism and occultophobia still endemic in these fields, and cease judging Islamicate imperial occultism by Christianate standards, or simply writing it out of history altogether.” M. Melvin-Koushki, “How to Rule the World: Occult-Scientific Manuals of the Early Modern Persian Cosmopolis,” Journal of Persianate Studies 11(2) (2018), 140–154; summary.16 16 Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review (October, 1994) spurred others to applaud and emulate, but also to decry and attack her. She herself changed positions over time, as evidenced by her recent, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 2019). For the cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences, see Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research,” British Journal of Sociology 61(3) (2010), 409–443.
17 17 Armando Salvatore, The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016): 29. Later, Salvatore reiterates and endorses the cosmopolitan nature of Islamicate civilization: “Hodgson thought that Islam brought to a new and particularly powerful synthesis the cosmopolitan and largely egalitarian orientation of the Irano-Semitic traditions” (p. 31). In what follows I demur only in suggesting that the egalitarian orientation was masked, or rather sublated, by hierarchical structures of reciprocity in court culture and beyond. See especially discussion throughout the book on taskhir and adab.
18 18 Ross Douthat, “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism,” The New York Times, Sunday Review (July 2, 2016).
19 19 Lotfi Zadeh, “The Concept of a Linguistic Variable and Its Application to Approximate Reasoning,” Information Sciences 8(3) (1975), 199–249.
20 20 Lotfi Zadeh, “Fuzzy Sets,” Information and Control 8/3 (1965), 338–353. One of Zadeh’s many admirers has described the implications of his thesis as follows: “the central thesis is that everything is a matter of degree. The world is grey, not black-and-white. But Western scientists and philosophers have refused to face up to this fact; they persist in describing the grey world in black-and-white language.” Their doing so is what the author calls the “mismatch problem,” a problem rooted in the uncritical acceptance of two-valued logic—“binary faith.” Binary logic sacrifices accuracy for simplicity. Bivalence is a rounding off that works fine at extremes but fails everywhere else. Indeed, the core principles of bivalent logic—the Law of Excluded Middle and the Principle of Non-Contradiction—are merely limiting cases of a more proper multi-valued logic (B. Kosko and M. Toms, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (London: Harper Collins, 1993)). It is the same opposition to binary logic that characterizes barzakh logic, a parallel but variant form of nonbinary reasoning and argumentation.
21 21 I am thinking here of the Haitian anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his several works underscoring how “others” are created, then deployed for specific purposes. In depicting the Modern as heterology he observes: “As part of the geography of imagination that constantly recreates the West, modernity always required an Other and an Elsewhere. It was always plural, just like the West was always plural. This plurality is inherent in modernity itself, both structurally and historically.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002): 224. I am also indebted to Walter Mignolo for conversations and communications, as well as his several published reflections, on this same subject. My sense of heterology is here inverted: the other, once acknowledged and recovered, becomes an extended, and productive, way of rethinking the self.
22 22 The pivotal importance of Ethiopia, despite its omission from most literature on Islamicate cosmopolitan (re)thinking, merits closer consideration. A collective initiative to correct this oversight can be found in Dereje Feyissa and Bruce B. Lawrence, “Muslims Renegotiating Marginality in Contemporary Ethiopia,” The Muslim World 105 (July, 2014), 281–305.
23 23 This is the judgment of Hodgson in The Venture of Islam, vol. 3, reviewed but also qualified by Faisal Devji in chapter 9 “The Problem of Muslim Modernity”, Edmund Burke and Robert J Mankin, eds., Islam and World History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), especially pp. 147–162.
24 24 William Gallois, “Al-Andalusi Cosmopolitanism in World History,” but also the radiant book, Allen F. Roberts and Mary N. Roberts, A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003), heralding the labor and the legacy of Ahmadu Bamba in modern-day Senegal. I am indebted to Gallois both for this link and also his generosity of spirit in engaging the notion of Islamicate cosmopolitan as a living, undying spirit animating both Muslims and non-Muslims in the 21st century.
25 25 A brief genealogy to barzakh logic would begin less than two decades ago. Its pioneer was Taieb Belghazi, “The Mediterranean(s), Barzakh, Event” in T. Belghazi and L.Haddad, eds., Global/Local Cultures and Sustainable Development (Rabat: Publications of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, 2001): 217–236. More recently, it has been applied to the Arab/Persian Gulf in miriam cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), where one reviewer noted that “cooke exquisitely captures the civilizational barzakh of the Arab Gulf states—the generative space connecting/disconnecting, mixing/separating ‘the tribal’ and ‘the modern.’” For my own development of barzakh logic, with reference to the Andalusian philosopher-mystic, Muhyiddin ibn ‘Arabi, see Bruce B. Lawrence, Who is Allah? (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015): 40–45.
1 Tracing Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit Across Time and Space
To look at Islamicate civilization is to face the choice of where and when to look but it also requires one to invoke fuzzy or barzakh logic at the outset. There is no great divide between East and West or between Islam and its political–religious rivals, whether in the premodern or the modern world. Many are the historians who have labored to point out that civilizational study is predicated on “gray” not black and white visions of the past, and multiple, local understandings of civilizational actors, events, institutions, and legacies.
In short, cosmopolitan studies, like civilizational studies with which it is allied and on which it must be modeled, requires decentering the West and reappropriating the “rest” for a deeper, truer sense of what is genuinely world history.
In that quest for a revisionist world history—or what one scholar has framed “a world history worthy of the name”1—Marshall Hodgson occupies a special place. His legacy has to be reviewed to understand how one builds on the edifice he proposed in order to trace the enduring influence of Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit (ICS).
Hodgson begins not with the premodern but with the modern world. He asks of himself the tough question all of us must ask: not what is Western but what is the force of “Western” as a descriptor in the numerous theoretical studies on modernity? At the same time, he launches a thorough, all-out attack on Weberian notions of calculative rationalism. He challenges Weberian assumptions in offering a prognosis for transformation on a different calculus than
