Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. Bruce B. Lawrence

Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit - Bruce B. Lawrence


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course, ZFuth is itself a nonsensical term introduced to make the point that conventional language, like conventional numbers (“conventional quantitative terms”), has to be approached with a new kind of reasoning beyond Aristotelian bivalent logic (“traditional two-valued logic”).

      And so, to answer my colleague from the University of Exeter, whose query spurred me to clarify my intent, let me close with a brief two-part summary of why I have pursued the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit challenge and am now writing this manifesto.

      First are the new forays and the several arguments for rethinking world history outside the West while also not ignoring the West. Let us label that tangent: the demands of world history.

      Coupled with the demands of world history is the need for revisionist vocabulary and also attention to the rules of fuzzy logic. My central premise: not to accept binary divisions but to look for in-between spaces, alternative players, and dimly lit options that herald a new methodology. Let us call that methodology: the rules of fuzzy logic.

      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.

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