decade ago, I proposed to write a manifesto for Wiley-Blackwell on Muslim cosmopolitanism, but 4 years later in 2014 I was invited to contribute a reflection on The Venture of Islam and its author for the LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), and began to explore not Muslim but rather Islamicate cosmopolitanism. I noted: “it involves not just Muslims but all those who are engaged by Muslim others. Islamicate pluralism has emerged, and deserves analysis, as the unexpected yet evident consequence of Hodgson’s moral, cosmopolitan vision.”1 I discovered that more and more scholars were starting to engage with Hodgson, his methodology (hemispheric history), and his vocabulary (neologisms, including Islamicate, but also Islamdom, Nile-to-Oxus, Persianate, and Afro-Eurasian ecumene). The notion of Islamicate cosmopolitan became inescapable and compelling. In spring 2015, I gave a lecture at Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute titled: “Islamicate Cosmopolitan: A Past without a Future, or a Future still Unfolding?” In that lecture, I further explored the legacy of Hodgson’s approach and his challenge to binary notions of Muslim identity and hackneyed surveys of Islamic history.2
At that time, I noted in many quarters a reluctance about the man, his mercurial career, and now his longer impact on world history. That reluctance was in full display when Yale Law School announced a further tribute to Hodgson, a 50-year retrospect in November 2018. I had been invited, along with eight other senior scholars, to present working papers on aspects of Hodgson. (Two commentators summarized four papers each in morning, then afternoon sessions, with a keynote address at noon.)3 Some presenters were highly critical, especially of the neologism Islamicate and the key term civilization. But Hodgson also has his proponents, many of them outside the Euro-American academy, notably younger scholars. Since 2012 I have been teaching in Istanbul. Several of my students there, and also some colleagues, notably Ercüment Asil and Huricihan Islamoğlu, convinced me that more could and should be said in defense of Hodgson. Someone needed to explain the continuing value of his insights, not least his neologisms, for a new generation of scholars attuned to his civilizational vision, especially its ethical as well as analytic import. Why not me, and why not now?
And so, this book evolved as a different manifesto, with an accent on Islamicate/Persianate trajectories shaped by a common cosmopolitan spirit. Because the topic is deeply lettered, there are references that must be traced, acknowledged, lauded, or critiqued, but above all, framed in a manifesto on Islamicate, which is also cosmopolitan and which resonates as spirit. I will say more about Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit in the pages that follow, but this book would have been completed much earlier had the number of publications relating to the Persianate world, and Persianate elements in Islamicate history, not exploded during recent years. I deal with the major edited volumes in Chapter 5, but the one caveat I offer to the inquiring reader is: be alert to Persianate themes and evidence of a Persianate stratum of Islamicate influence, far beyond what I examine in the pages that follow. The answer to my 2015 question is now clear to me: Islamicate cosmopolitan persists, its future still unfolding.
Notes
1 1 See http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/larb-channels/genius-denied-reclaimed-40-year-retrospect-marshall-g-s-hodgsons-venture-islam.
2 2 Available online at: https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/islamicate-cosmopolitan-past-without-future-future-still-unfolding.
3 3 The full program with paper titles and presenters is provided at: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/yale-law-school-events/marshall-hodgson-and-contested-idea-discernible-islamic-civilization.
Overview: A Manifesto in Three Words and Six Chapters
In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the blogger Riverbend observed: “What is civilization? It’s not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers, and McDonalds. It’s having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs …”1
How do we define civilization as the deepest recognition of mutual and interactive sanctities? Riverbend’s shibboleth is mine: finding the connection and fostering the opportunity to recognize, then engage seeming opposite, even hostile others who are no less human for being unlike us.
No global civilization can exclude Islam, but how to include it? The search for an inclusive civilizational ethos worthy of the name reached a tipping point for me in the United Kingdom last year. It was mid-February 2019. I was at the University of Exeter as a visiting scholar in residence. We had just completed a 2-hr lunchtime workshop. I got to pick the topic and the title for the talk. My title: “Islamicate Cosmopolitan?”
The title, posed as a question, was intended to be provocative. What is Islamicate? And who qualifies as an Islamicate cosmopolitan?
After an intense exchange that went beyond the usual lunch hour, we were about to disperse when a senior colleague asked: “So what?”
“So what?!” I rejoined, in surprise.
“You have made our lunch hour into two hours,” he joked, adding “You have reflected on all the options and argued for a new tongue twister—Islamicate cosmopolitan. But do you really feel that this phrase is an epistemic turn worth pursuing? Where can one find a guide for the perplexed, some text illumining our understanding of both Islamicate and its coordinate term, cosmopolitan?”
This manifesto is my answer to my colleague’s challenge. My motive is also my hope: to enliven each term with the other, Islamicate as cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan as Islamicate. But each needs a further referent, and so I am introducing a still broader trope: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, itself the entry way to civilizational options at once inclusive and enduring.
Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit
Since a manifesto is an extended general essay rather than a specialized monograph, I want to stress each word in my chosen topic: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. At the most basic level each connotes a surplus: Islamicate is more than Islamic or Muslim, Cosmopolitan is more than congenial or civil, and Spirit is more than subject or agent. Together Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit projects the presence of a tidal wave in world history that remains hidden for most, opaque for many, and misunderstood even by experts.
Each of these three key terms requires a brief history. But they also elicit a prior question about history itself: is historical revision desirable, even necessary? If so, is it possible without revising the categories or key terms in which history is framed?
For Islam, there is a need for revisionist terminology. I would argue that the need is even more urgent because “Islam” has become encumbered with misinterpretation in public discourse since 1979 and the Iranian revolution but even more since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and two wars in largely Muslim countries: first Afghanistan, then Iraq. What must be foregrounded at the outset is stubborn resistance, from many quarters, to moving beyond “Islam” or “Muslim” in order to describe the 1,400-year experience that marked the birth, growth, and expansion of a 7th-century Arabian political-religious movement into a transregional presence. Islam did originate from Arabia but it quickly extended westward
