Muslims and there is no “incorrect” Islam. That reductionism needs to be avoided but it can only be avoided if we use “religious labels” with attention to their historical context. To be Islamic in the 21st century, as in the 11th century, means more than being a believer in Allah, and a follower of Muhammad. But what is the extra element beyond the religious label, however refined and redefined? One has to look at other avenues of meaning, other vistas of hope in the long history of what I prefer to call Islamicate civilization. I argue in this manifesto that one needs to suspend the religious labeling of everyone Muslim, or mislabeling of Muslim as Islamist, in order to find that other sphere of origin and influence. Like Hodgson, I call that larger element “Islamicate” because it draws on Muslim/Islamic antecedents but out of an expansive reservoir of human experience and expression that exceeds religion. It is not secular but centripetal, always attracting a mixture of elements that are both religious and cultural.
Islamicate is at once social and political, aesthetic and literary yet always in flux. According to one of its recent, eloquent definitions, “Islamicate = the hybrid trace rather than pure presence or absence of Islam.”4 Islamicate traces can be antecedent or subsequent,5 before or after “Islam,” but in every instance they exceed objective analysis since they are in-between markers, reflecting gray rather than black and white, ambiguity and flexibility rather than fixity, rigidity, or “objectivity.” As one frequent traveller to many Muslim domains, Asian and African, has noted: “Islamicate = Islam filtered in diverse contexts, reflecting synergy between Muslims and non-Muslims apart from creedal or ritual allegiances.”6 Whether Islam filtered or Islam as hybrid trace, “Islamicate” exceeds binary categories or narrow norms of identity. It inflects fuzzy or barzakh logic, as I will explain below.
Why Cosmopolitan? Because it Values Bi-location in Two Worlds
Islamicate both complements and qualifies cosmopolitan because “cosmopolitan,” like Islamicate, is a category in flux. It has often been linked to Europe or the European enlightenment as an encompassing expression of mobility, generosity, and tolerance, yet cosmopolitan is broader than Europe, having an ecumenical reach that literally encompasses the Afro-Eurasian ecumene; that is, the inhabited world as it was known for more than two millennia.7 There are so many competing definitions of cosmopolitanism that it seems preferable to list some of these scholars before declaring which I choose to present and defend in this manifesto. All are acknowledged leaders in social scientific engagement with cosmopolitanism, and since one collected volume has included their analyses, I list six options from Vertovec and Cohen in order to highlight the enigma they collectively pose:
Cosmopolitanism may be a cultural, and cognitive, orientation, specifically, “the ability to stand outside a singular location (the location of one’s birth, land, upbringing, conversion) and to mediate traditions.”8
But cosmopolitanism may also be the social experience of difference without threat, above all, in urban locations, where one moves through offices or zones of the city “reconciling alterity and rigidity, or alterity and rationality, with a notion of temporary identification.”9
Cosmopolitanism may also not be individual but collective, an awareness oriented toward an agonistic democratic process, one that involves communities who find themselves “in that open space that requires a kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism is then not about an individual life style nor a universalist morality nor global political institutions, but rather it is about the “vision of a cosmo-polis, a global community of citizens.”10
More specifically, cosmopolitanism might project an inclusive democratic strategy. While cosmopolitanism is presumed to be inherently urban, elitist, and consumerist, might it not also involve redefining social solidarities to engender mutual commitment and responsibility from the greatest number of citizens? In this case, “cosmopolitan democracy depends on finding ways to relate diverse solidarities to each other rather than trying to overcome them.”11 Implicit in all the above is what has been openly stated by other social scientists: the cosmopolitan has to engage nationalism, and so for two other theorists, it is not just citizenship but nationalism, as also redefining national identity as a modern reflex of global capitalism, that must be at the core of any cosmopolitan project. Yet nationalism itself is not a consistent or constant analytical referent; it reflects at least two tangents of cosmopolitan sensibility.
Cosmopolitanism must be “modern” and national and that means: Option One. “There is no opposition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. They emerged together, and they belong together in the context of an emerging capitalist world-system.”12 Or else:Cosmopolitanism must be modern and “global” and that means: Option Two. Cosmopolitanism is simply globalism writ large, that is to say, “the self-definition and public reflexivity of transnational ways of life and situations, not only at the top but also at the bottom and in the middle of an emerging society of world citizens.”13 Despite their seeming disagreement, Options One and Two converge in their focus on the necessity of national markers: every cosmopolitan must have a national identity, but at same time s/he needs to be committed to working against exclusive forms of national, ethnic, or local identity. What is presupposed and promoted is the vision of a cosmopolis, a global community of like-minded citizens, and that runs the risk of alienating or subjugating minorities, as Hannah Arendt has argued. It is precisely a resolute, if often unacknowledged, nationalist spirit that made cosmopolitanism impossible because it created the nation in terms of what it is not, that is, newly minted minorities without the rights of the majority. Cosmopolitanism becomes a form of neo-tribalism for elites only, caught between an imperial past and a totalitarian headwind.14 Suffusing all these definitional efforts is the thrust of a cosmopolitan ethos, and because it is an aspiration, like every ethical norm, it is more readily sensed in its adjectival than in its nominal form; the -ism suggests an ideological closure that the adjective resists. In the interest of openness, I speak of Islamicate cosmopolitan, not Islamicate cosmopolitanism. The frame in which I locate each Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit is the historical trajectory and capacious context of Islamicate civilization.
Why Civilization? Because Every Cosmopolitan Has Civilizational Roots
While there are many elements to Islamicate cosmopolitan, its central inescapable core is an interactive, civilizational framework. “Civilization” as a category has been, and will continue to be, disputed, but what is beyond dispute is the linking of civilization with civility and so with polis or city. Without civilization, civility, and cities there would be no cosmopolitan ethos, whether Islamicate, Persianate, Italianate, or Christianate.15 Herein lies a tension, between the verticality of “the cosmos,” and the horizontal rootedness of “the polis.” It is a tension to be explored below, but one should underscore that civility requires belonging to some polis or city place, and without that belonging there could not be the longing to make the world the larger—indeed, the largest—place of belonging.
The implications of the cosmopolitan turn augur a new paradigm dating back a mere 30 years.16 The paradigm meanders within and across the Afro-Asian ecumene, with huge implications for understanding Islamicate cosmopolitan. The first, critical link is historical. Islamicate did not originate with the coming of Islam; it had deep roots in Irano-Semitic social and institutional patterns. In other words, the traces of Islamicate cosmopolitan preceded the historical advent of Islam. A prominent sociologist, Armando Salvatore, explains the historical trajectory as follows:
On the one hand, Islamicate civilization revealed a strong rooting within the Irano-Semitic cultural world. On the other, by virtue of the articulation of Islam itself as a religious tradition that sealed the chain of Semitic prophecy while also integrating the rich and complex heritage of Persianate culture, it was particularly porous to inter-civilizational exchange. This is why Islam quickly acquired a uniquely expansive potential in cultural, as well as political, terms.17
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