Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. Bruce B. Lawrence
to working against exclusive forms of national, ethnic, or local identity. What is presupposed and promoted is the vision of a cosmopolis, a global community of like-minded citizens, and that runs the risk of alienating or subjugating minorities, as Hannah Arendt has argued. It is precisely a resolute, if often unacknowledged, nationalist spirit that made cosmopolitanism impossible because it created the nation in terms of what it is not, that is, newly minted minorities without the rights of the majority. Cosmopolitanism becomes a form of neo-tribalism for elites only, caught between an imperial past and a totalitarian headwind.14 Suffusing all these definitional efforts is the thrust of a cosmopolitan ethos, and because it is an aspiration, like every ethical norm, it is more readily sensed in its adjectival than in its nominal form; the -ism suggests an ideological closure that the adjective resists. In the interest of openness, I speak of Islamicate cosmopolitan, not Islamicate cosmopolitanism. The frame in which I locate each Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit is the historical trajectory and capacious context of Islamicate civilization.
Why Civilization? Because Every Cosmopolitan Has Civilizational Roots
While there are many elements to Islamicate cosmopolitan, its central inescapable core is an interactive, civilizational framework. “Civilization” as a category has been, and will continue to be, disputed, but what is beyond dispute is the linking of civilization with civility and so with polis or city. Without civilization, civility, and cities there would be no cosmopolitan ethos, whether Islamicate, Persianate, Italianate, or Christianate.15 Herein lies a tension, between the verticality of “the cosmos,” and the horizontal rootedness of “the polis.” It is a tension to be explored below, but one should underscore that civility requires belonging to some polis or city place, and without that belonging there could not be the longing to make the world the larger—indeed, the largest—place of belonging.
The implications of the cosmopolitan turn augur a new paradigm dating back a mere 30 years.16 The paradigm meanders within and across the Afro-Asian ecumene, with huge implications for understanding Islamicate cosmopolitan. The first, critical link is historical. Islamicate did not originate with the coming of Islam; it had deep roots in Irano-Semitic social and institutional patterns. In other words, the traces of Islamicate cosmopolitan preceded the historical advent of Islam. A prominent sociologist, Armando Salvatore, explains the historical trajectory as follows:
On the one hand, Islamicate civilization revealed a strong rooting within the Irano-Semitic cultural world. On the other, by virtue of the articulation of Islam itself as a religious tradition that sealed the chain of Semitic prophecy while also integrating the rich and complex heritage of Persianate culture, it was particularly porous to inter-civilizational exchange. This is why Islam quickly acquired a uniquely expansive potential in cultural, as well as political, terms.17
By itself Islam does not account for the 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