Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. Bruce B. Lawrence

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 Hodgson introduced this term in the 1960s but he died suddenly in 1968, his work unpublished.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 influence on their world view and career choices.

A 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