me pause and make a detour at the outset. For those to whom “fuzzy logic” is itself too fuzzy, there is an alternative: barzakh logic. Neither dualistic nor binary but triadic, barzakh logic both affirms and denies, while neither affirming nor denying. I call it barzakh logic because, like fuzzy logic, it requires its practitioners to be grounded in science, like Wittgenstein, a mathematician–engineer turned linguistic philosopher. To see the limits of science one must first know its protocols. A theorist does not eliminate science but rather tries to recover the ground preceding and undergirding all true science, as did Bacon but also Pascal and later Polanyi and Peirce. Barzakh logic, like fuzzy logic, does not destroy or deny reason, but instead probes its frontiers, which are internal and sentient as much as external and cognitive.
Barzakh itself is a Persian word found in the Qur’an (Q 23:99–100, Q 25:53, and Q 55:19–20). At its simplest, the barzakh evokes the division between this life and the next, between our present life in this world and a future life beyond knowing, but barzakh also refers to the divide between salt and fresh water, found in some oceans and rivers. And so barzakh is at once barrier and bridge. Like fuzzy logic, it moves beyond the binary dualism, either/or, but unlike fuzzy logic, it confirms a dyad, both/and as well as neither/nor. Barzakh might be defined as interactive, uninterrupted connection, linking two things—whether two cosmic realms or two bodies of water or two key terms—without reducing or diluting either. Nor can the barzakh itself be reduced: it cannot be triangulated to produce yet another form of abstractionism. If barzakh logic or its companion, fuzzy logic, is to apply, it requires constant vigilance against the reflex to rely on binary categories and the ontology they both presume and promote.25
And so, we begin with these twin exigencies, at once declarations and guideposts, mandates and shibboleths, for all that follows: (a) world history must be revised, and (b) the rules of fuzzy or barzakh logic must apply. Together, a world history revised in tandem with fuzzy or barzakh logic forms the basis for an enduring Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit.
Notes
1 1 From a blog titled “Civilization,” posted on Tuesday, October 21, 2003. http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003/10 (accessed May 22, 2020).
2 2 For the Saudi critique of both women, see the scorching essay by Hamid Dabashi, “Why Saudi Arabia hates Muslim women in the US Congress,” January 2019 published online at https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/saudi-arabia-hates-muslim-women-congress-190126055438087.html. I have also written extensively on the misuse of violence as a category besmirching all Muslims across time and place, especially in Bruce B. Lawrence, “Muslim Engagement with Injustice and Violence” in Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013): 126–152.
3 3 Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016): 452.
4 4 Srinivas Aravamudan, “East–West Fiction as World Literature: the Hayy Problem Reconfigured,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47(2) (2014), 198. I am indebted to Aravamudan for many stimulating discussions on Islamicate as a cosmopolitan qualifier across time and space, in Europe and Asia, in the 11th, 18th, and now 21st centuries. For a fuller reference to Aravamudan, as also to the complicated genealogy of (non)use of Islamicate cosmopolitan, see my 2014 intervention at https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/islamicate-cosmopolitan-past-without-future-future-still-unfolding (accessed February 15, 2021).
5 5 Let me be clear: what comes “before” Islam is also deemed Islamicate, only in retrospect. Aristotelian philosophy, like Byzantine architecture, had elements of reciprocity with Islamic norms and values, and so became Islamicate continuously, often seamlessly, after the 7th–8th and successive centuries.
6 6 Pru Lambert during a conversation in London, fall 2014.
7 7 For the term Afro-Eurasian ecumene, see Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974): 173–174, where Hodgson states his preference for “oikoumene” over “ecumene,” since the latter for him retains the adjectival shadow of “ecumenical.” On this point, I disagree with Hodgson since ecumene retains a rigorously historical rather than purely theological nuance. Even in disagreeing with him, however, I, along with other revisionist historians, remain indebted to his bold forays into the global as well as moral trajectories of civilizational analysis.
8 8 David Held in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002): 58.
9 9 Richard Sennett in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002): 44–45.
10 10 Roger Baubock in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002): 111.
11 11 Craig Calhoun in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002): 108.
12 12 Peter van der Veer in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002): 178.
13 13 Ulrich Beck in in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002): 81, citing Robertson (1992), Albrow (1996), and Nassehi (1998).
14 14 The debate augured by Arendt is intense and also complex. For an engaged view of its historical trajectory, with special emphasis on the relation of imperial to totalitarian currents of change, see the insightful 2012 essay of a Turkish academic, Dr. M. Cagri Inceoglu, “Arendt’s Critique of the Nation-State in The Origins of Totalitarianism,” available online at https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/179189 (accessed February 15, 2021).
15 15 Both Italianate and Christianate have their own genealogy. Matthew Melvin-Koushki has contrasted Persian Islamicate with Latin Christianate. “Imperial grimoires—that is, manuals on various forms of magic and divination written for or commissioned by royal readers—also record the religiocultural
