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Acknowledgments
The roll call of colleagues who helped shape this manifesto extends back several decades and crosses generations as well as continents. I would be remiss not to begin with the 1980 conference on Islamic studies organized by my late friend, Richard C. Martin of Arizona State University. Rich brought together older colleagues, such as James Kritzeck (my first teacher on Islam), Jacques Waardenburg, and Muhammad Abd ar-Rauf, along with younger scholars like William Graham, Marilyn Waldman, and Fred Denny, to rethink the field of Islamic studies beyond Orientalism. Said’s book had just been published 2 years earlier (1978) and one of the several scholars invoked to chart a way beyond Orientalism was Marshall Hodgson. Fast forward 25 years and Rich Martin, along with Carl W. Ernst, organized a conference on Islam in Theory and Practice that centered on my work, and it highlighted Hodgson as the harbinger of a Muslim/Islamic/Islamicate cosmopolitan alternative to Orientalism. All the participants of that 2006 conference, later contributors to a book titled Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), deserve recognition and thanks: Ernst and Martin at the head of the list, followed by Vincent J. Cornell, Katherine P. Ewing, A. Kevin Reinhart, Omid Safi, Jamillah Karim, Charles Kurzman, Ijlal Naqvi, David Gilmartin, Abbas Barzegar, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Tony K. Stewart, Scott Kugle, and Ebrahim Moosa. In 2008 I was awarded a Carnegie Scholars of Islam grant, allowing me to travel not just to Egypt and Ethiopia but also to Indonesia and the Philippines. My experience of minority Muslim communities expanded owing to the vision and support of Patricia L. Rosenfield and Hillary S. Wiesner from Carnegie Corporation. Among the scholars I met from Southeast Asia, two—the late Alber Husin (to whom the manifesto is dedicated) and Jowel Canuday—came to a conference on Muslim cosmopolitanism I was able to convene in Doha in December 2010, thanks to the generosity of Sheikha Al Mayassa Al Thani, then head of the Qatar Museum Authority, who had invited miriam cooke (my spouse) and me to be scholars in residence at the Museum of Islamic Art. My thanks are due not just to Sheikha Al Mayassa Al Thani but also to others who attended and contributed to that conference: Walter Mignolo, Kevin W. Fogg, Sita Hidayah, Dereje Feyissa, Jonathan Cross, Afyare Abdi Elmi, Anthony Shenoda, Andrew Simon, Amira Sonbol, Sulayman Khalaf, Mohammed Ali Abdalla, and, of course, miriam cooke. miriam has also provided me with countless hours of proofreading and correcting the manuscript, just as she joined me in the lunch conversation of 2019 at the University of Exeter, recounted in the Preamble. Other colleagues at Exeter enhanced the horizons of my work: Robert Gleave, Sajjad Rizvi, Ian Netton, William Gallois, Istvan Kristo-Nagy, Mustafa Baig, Emily Selove, and Rasheed El-Anany, while back in North Carolina, other scholars added to the chorus of support: Anne Allison and Charles Piot, with spirited commentary, Michelle Lamprakos and Steven Kramer, by close reading, and Leela and Baba Prasad as audacious critics. I am also indebted to the Abdullah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School for hosting a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Hodgson’s demise. Titled “Marshall Hodgson and the Contested Idea of a Discernible Islamic Civilization” it convened on November 9, 2018 and included along with myself these participants: Richard Bulliet, Richard M. Eaton, Wael Hallaq, Hedayat Haikal, David Nirenberg, Ahmed El-Shamsy, Nile Green, Carol Hillenbrand, Kevin van Bladel, and Frank Griffel. Anthony T. Kronman, Owen Fiss, and Bradley Hayes made the event sizzle, and I begin the Preamble with reflections that they inspired, though neither they nor any of the above-mentioned supporters are responsible for the case I make, and the arguments I advance, for an Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. I am finally indebted to the three outside reviewers for Wiley-Blackwell, all of whom sharpened the tone and expanded the scope of my manifesto, while miriam cooke added her voice to theirs in foregrounding my own voice throughout what follows.
Preamble
Why Islamicate, why now, why me? These three questions will occur to anyone who picks up this manifesto. They deserve a prompt answer, a brief self-disclosure.
Islamicate is a neologism for what pertains to Islam and Muslims. It was coined by the American historian Marshall Hodgson. Islamicate defines the arc of Islam beyond religious boundaries. It is at once a cultural and an ethical term. Though not devoid of religious tones, it registers them as subtle undertones rather than explicit dicta. Hodgson introduced this term in the 1960s but he died suddenly in 1968, his work unpublished. It was only 6 years later in 1974, thanks to the tireless labor of his colleague, Reuben Smith, that there appeared a posthumous publication titled The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. It consists of three volumes, published by the University of Chicago Press.
I never met Hodgson nor did I ever study at the University of Chicago. I had been in India when the book appeared, and I first read it in the summer of 1976 after my return to the United States. Enthralled, I began to teach all three volumes in a year-long Duke University undergraduate course titled “Islamic Civilization.” I taught the course for more than three decades, till my retirement from Duke in 2011. Though many students were engaged by Hodgson, others found his mode of reasoning, as also his labored writing style, difficult to fathom. Yet even some of these dissidents later shared with me his profound
