Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. Bruce B. Lawrence

Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit - Bruce B. Lawrence


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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?”

      “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?

      What is Islamicate? Islamicate is neither a first nor a second but a third order of identity beyond “Muslim” and “Islamic,” its two precursors, both crowded with religious valence. Despite its prevalence, religion itself can become a veil rather than a catalyst for understanding broad historical movements. Neither “Muslim” nor “Islamic” because of their close association with “religion” can reveal the tapestry of culture and cultural networks, and without being revealed that tapestry remains occluded, undervalued, too often minimalized, or ignored.

      While I oppose the contemporary or presentist bias, I also cannot ignore its pervasive influence. It produces a stigma, the stigma attached to Islam and, by extension, Muslims—too often riffed as Islamists—in 21st-century Euro-America. Unavoidable is the gaze of global media that defines events and actors through soundbites and images, usually negative. With the ubiquitous instant info world that we now take for granted, where tweets often count more than books, newspapers, or even television, one must ask: can Islam ever be free of the weaponizing proclivity of terror images? There are more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide, and few have anything to do with terror, yet if every Muslim is deemed a potential Islamist, can Islam itself be retained as a category of analysis without further exceptionalizing, minoritizing, and negativizing Muslims? For “Muslim” cosmopolitanism to work, it must extract the category “Islam” from the baggage it has acquired through daily, media saturation with negative images of Arab/Muslim/Islamic. If bad or violent, “Muslims” will appear in headlines, TV news, and tweets, but if good or cosmopolitan, they are relegated to the bylines or omitted, not just from essays and articles but also by visual media.


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