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FOREWORD: THE RELIGIOUS PUBLIC SPHERE IN EARLY MUSLIM SOCIETIES
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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FOREWORD: THE RELIGIOUS PUBLIC SPHERE IN EARLY MUSLIM SOCIETIES DALE F. EICKELMAN The search for distinctive public spheres in premodern Muslim majority societies is a relatively recent undertaking. Until recently, historians and social theorists alike were deflected from considering such a possibility by conventional assumptions concerning the characteristics of “traditional” societies in general, and Muslim societies in particular. The contributors to this volume argue that “traditional” Muslim society had diverse and changing varieties of public spheres, the manifestations of which have been as far-ranging as the ideas and expression of Islamic civilization itself. So pervasive was the impact of the early or “classical” formulations of modernization theory from the 1950s until the 1970s that they blocked more nuanced social and historical thought about the nature of the religious, educational , social, and economic structures in “premodern” societies. Thus, one leading modernization theorist in the 1960s saw the Muslim world as facing an unpalatable choice between a “neo-Islamic totalitarianism” intent on “resurrecting the past” or a “reformist Islam” that would open “the sluice gates and [be] swamped by the deluge.”1 In the late 1970s, assumptions about Islam’s role in the development process remained similarly unnuanced: “In an industrializing nation, the gap between political and religious authority . . . becomes progressively greater,” whereas “Islamic influence and control are strongest when maintaining the status quo in a backward community.”2 Such ideas have retained their vigor in some circles. In Ernest Gellner’s Conditions of Liberty, the last book published during his lifetime, he reiterated his long-standing convictions about “Muslim society.” He preferred the single, society, to the plural, societies, in writing about Islam because he regarded Islam as imposing “essential” constraints on the conduct and thought of those committed to it.3 Modernization theory framed not only the work of social theorists but also blocked historians from imagining the possibility that “traditional” empires, societies, and religious formations could be as dynamic as their presumed 1 “modern” counterparts. Thus, in both popular thought and in many historical analyses, a prevalent negative view of the possibilities of evolution of the Ottoman Empire discouraged consideration of possible continuities between the religious empire and the ensuing secular republic. Few considered the possibility that the former, even though demonized by early modernizers, may have contained many of the seeds for the development of the latter. Recent studies of the dynamics and demographics of Ottoman households, for example , show significant and gradually evolving continuities in the transition from empire to nation. There was no sharp break as asserted by reformers such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) and those influenced by the implicit and explicit assumptions of modernization theory.4 The notion of the public sphere, much like the narrower but more pervasive concept of civil society, reemerged as a key concept only in the past decade.5 Some social theorists trace its origins to the eighteenth century. In Immanuel Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, for example, the notion of “public” is represented by the words of a writer appearing before readers independent of authoritative intermediaries such as preachers, judges, and rulers. “Public” thoughts and ideas presented in this manner are thus judged on their own merits. Implicit in this notion is the idea of a public space separate from both the formal structures of religious and political authority and the space of households and kin.6 The notion is closely associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, although his development of the idea is largely based on European societies and in the eyes of many is linked to the emergence of a certain form of bourgeois society and the “rational-critical” discourse possible within it.7 Habermas’s approach to understanding the idea of the public sphere is closely tied to developments in Europe since the early sixteenth century. More directly useful for understanding the public sphere in other regions of the world—including premodern Muslim societies—is the approach of Eisenstadt and Schluchter.8 In developing the notion of early modernities—note Eisenstadt and Schluchter’s use of the plural—they stress that culture is created , contested, and in flux for both “traditional” and modern societies. Societies and civilizations develop not autonomously, but through a “continuous interaction between the cultural codes of these societies and their exposure to new internal and external challenges.” Such an idea is not entirely novel. Eisenstadt and Schluchter note that Max Weber’s discussion of the role of sects in generating heterodoxies and movements of protest...