cultural legacy of Iran, the Persianate strand that pervades, and also redefines, Islamicate civilization, above all in the magisterial guise of spirit. There is a constant tension as well as interactive creativity between the Irano-Semitic, and also the Perso-Arabic, and then the Persianate-Islamicate folds of world history. Persianate is a direct consequence of Islamicate developments, even as it becomes the embodiment of Islamicate taste and influence through much of Central, South, and South-east Asia, including the Indian Ocean. It is not the dominance of one over the other but the continuous interaction of Persianate with Islamicate that expands the role of moral imagination and cultural productivity in Muslim-dominant regions of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene.
Why Spirit? Because Islamicate Cosmopolitan is Fluid and Restless
The rapid spread of Islam in the 7th century compelled its conquering forces to adapt to multiple civilizations as far west as Spain and as far east as China. Islamicate civilization from the outset evinces a cosmopolitan ethos marked by the two key traits of longing and belonging. The belonging is always a reflex of power, the privilege of literacy and mobility but also the benefits of imperial patronage. All premodern Islamicate cosmopolitans benefited from hierarchical social-political structures. Yet that benefit did not limit their horizons, for allied with belonging was longing, the longing for something more, a surplus of benefit to humankind beyond their immediate time/space frame.
It is that surplus of benefit, which is also a higher level of meaning, that requires a further adjective as qualifier. To explore and try to explain Islamicate cosmopolitan one must recognize not just its origins but also its aspiration. There was never a fixed horizon. It was always an elan, a spirit, and cosmopolitans themselves, whatever their time/space belonging, remain spirited agents of change, delineated by their period and place in the canvas of human history but not delimited in their imagination or aspiration for a humane world order feels too generalized. To corral them as parochial, territorial, or ideological is to deny them their own deepest longing: to project beyond the limits of their loyalties to affirm others whatever their loyalties. They are less Islamicate cosmopolitan “national” subjects than aspiring agents of a multilingual, transnational Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, both Persian and Arab, both Iranian and Semitic, heirs to others, harbingers of many others.
There are many who qualify as Islamicate cosmopolitan spirits through affirming this aspiration. One notable modern exemplar appears in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Quoted above was the blogger Riverbend: “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 …” One can trace a direct line from Diogenes, the Greek orator, who proclaimed: “I am a citizen of the world,” and his neighbour—not in time but in outlook—Riverbend. Crucially, it is important to note where in the world one claims to be a citizen. For Riverbend, unlike Diogenes, it was in the midst of a warzone, with material, social, and cultural destruction at a level that made the plea for cosmopolitan thinking a rescue shibboleth rather than a boutique advertisement. The distance from Martha Nussbaum’s notion of world citizenry is evident, and of course there are multiple detractors from any cosmopolitan identity. One need look no further than the opinion page of The New York Times, where Ross Douthat depicted what he called “the myth of cosmopolitanism” as subsuming others into “a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call ‘global citizens.’”18 This is, of course, a caricature of cosmopolitan longing and belonging, depicted above, and while there are “Muslims” in this club, they do not reflect the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit.
Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit as Fuzzy or Barzakh Logic
And that aspiration brings to the fore the second major impetus for this manifesto: what makes an Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit (rather than visible form or invisible substance) is fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic as a category is itself recent. Devised little more than half a century ago by an Azeri scientist who had migrated to the United States, it has now branched into a broader linguistic strategy that helps to define cosmopolitan tensions generally and Islamicate cosmopolitan in particular. Fuzzy logic is often heralded as self-critical, even ironic, so it is a further, fitting irony that fuzzy logic becomes the pillar of Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit since the founder of fuzzy logic, Lotfi Zadeh, is himself an Islamicate cosmopolitan, even though he himself has yet to emerge in the larger universe of constructive rethinking of the key terms he helped to formulate. As early as a 1965 article he had introduced fuzzy sets but it was the subsequent 1975 article that makes the case for their implementation in cosmopolitan reflection. His language is dense but its appeal evocative. “The concept of a linguistic variable,” argues Lotfi Zadeh, “provides a means of approximate characterization of phenomena which are too complex or too ill-defined to be amenable to description in conventional quantitative terms. In particular, treating ZFuth as a linguistic variable with values such as true, very true, completely true, not very true, untrue, etc., leads to what is called fuzzy logic. By providing a basis for approximate reasoning, that is, a mode of reasoning which is not exact nor very inexact, such logic may offer a more realistic framework for human reasoning than the traditional two-valued logic.”19
Of course, ZFuth is itself a nonsensical term introduced to make the point that conventional language, like conventional numbers (“conventional quantitative terms”), has to be approached with a new kind of reasoning beyond Aristotelian bivalent logic (“traditional two-valued logic”).
If fuzzy sets are the exemplars of fuzzy logic, that is “collections of information whose boundaries were vague or imprecise,”20 then all cosmopolitan theories are sets of information at once discrete in their common subject yet unbounded in their actual formation and historical emergence. They are always marked by their “spirit,” that is, by a commitment to explore the limits of what is possible, so that “spirit” does not merely connote the life force, but also the essential human trait manifest as consciousness, discernment, and, above all, moral motivation—to do not just what is right but what is best, not just for oneself but for all others, a combination of agonism and altruism.
The benefit of the fuzzy logic approach to Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit is what some theorists have labeled heterology: the other as a foundational principle of the self.21 In expanding Islamic to Islamicate, one must consider not just the Other, but multiple others, those others that preceded and informed Islam. One must revisit and revalue all the resources on which Muslim actors—from artists to traders to rulers to philosophers—drew in rethinking the nature of Islamic pursuits through the lens of those others. The very boundaries of Islamicate civilization, as also Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, become fungible, extending back to 500 ce, in considering Byzantine and Sasanian but also Ethiopian antecedents.22 And the further teleological reach of Islamicate civilization, and so its cosmopolitan ethos, is not just the 18th century. Instead of ending with the advent of the Great Western Transmutation,23 it lingers, projecting a flash point, or set of points across Africa and Asia, spaces that can still summon what one scholar calls islands of life/light in the midst of what seems to be a binary world of North/South replacing East/West.24
And so, to answer my colleague from the University of Exeter, whose query spurred me to clarify my intent, let me close with a brief two-part summary of why I have pursued the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit challenge and am now writing this manifesto.
First are the new forays and the several arguments for rethinking world history outside the West while also not ignoring the West. Let us label that tangent: the demands of world history.
Coupled with the demands of world history is the need for revisionist vocabulary and also attention to the rules of fuzzy logic. My central premise: not to accept binary divisions but to look for in-between spaces, alternative players, and dimly lit options that herald a new methodology. Let us call that methodology:
