Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. Bruce B. Lawrence

Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit - Bruce B. Lawrence


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for their paucity, underscore how “negative” Islamic/Muslim have become as labels in 21st-century America. Beyond Muhammad Ali, a sports hero to all, and Kareem Abd al-Jabbar, a basketball superstar, there are two Muslima Americans who were recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives: Rashida Tlaib from Michigan and Ilhan Omar from neighboring Minnesota. I applaud these women, as do many other Americans who are alert to a pluralist, progressive public square of debate and compromise but above all representation and advocacy. Yet these two Midwestern Muslima pioneers have been critiqued as well as lauded, by Muslims as by non-Muslims. More than mere politicians, they, unlike their non-Muslim counterparts, are seen to carry the weight of co-religionists with whom they share little other than the label “Muslim.”2

      Why Islamicate? Because a New Vocabulary Is Needed

      The very act of defending Islam detracts from the deeper layers of cultural complexity that affect the domain where Islam has been introduced and Muslims are prevalent, either as majority or minority citizens. I move beyond the impasse it creates. I attempt to retrieve the larger contour of global history marked by Islam and Muslims. Throughout this manifesto I recuperate “Islam” and “Muslim” by locating both in a third referent, Islamicate. I argue that one cannot simply refute the notion that Islam is violent, or that Muslims are all Islamists; one must have a counternarrative that infuses the longer trajectory of Islam with elements that do not erase violence but instead reduce its dominance as the sole or main activity of Muslim subjects.

      Let me give an instance of how difficult it is when even scholars ignore the role that “violence” plays in shaping every effort to address “Islam” or evaluate “Muslims.” The late Shahab Ahmed, a skilled interpreter of Muslim intellectual history, tried to recuperate Islam from violence by generalizing the scope of Islam and minimizing its violent subset. Ahmed argued that in all instances, no matter the activity or its register, only “Islamic” satisfies the requirements of being Muslim or being linked to Islam. He wrote his own manifesto, in the form of an extended dialogue with prior scholars on Islam and Islamic history. He justifies his preference for Islam over Islamicate as follows:

      But what is the substantive basis of Islam apart from individual agency? Once we posit that there is no Islam beyond what individual Muslims say it is, then all who claim to speak on behalf of Islam as genuine, observant Muslims are correct, even when they differ. There are no “bad” 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.

      Why Cosmopolitan? Because it Values Bi-location in Two Worlds

       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


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