Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft

12. Cosmopolitanism Past and Present, Muslim and Western

297 12 Cosmopolitanism Past and Present, Muslim and Western R o x a n n e L . E u b e n It has become almost common scholarly wisdom that the progressively dizzying flows of people, knowledge, and information characteristic of the contemporary world have inaugurated an unprecedented deterritorialization of politics. We are now said to live in a world in which “borders have stopped marking the limits where politics ends because the community ends,” our identities not only shaped by particular places and spaces such as nation and domicile, but also subjected to the multiple crosscurrents and exposures created by rapid economic globalization and cultural hybridization (Balibar 1998, 220). As is often noted, such developments have not only rendered national borders increasingly permeable but have also called into question the preeminence of the modern nation-state as the dominant frame and unit of political analysis. In turn, such changes have precipitated a reevaluation of the spatial and conceptual parameters that have governed most scholarly inquiries into statecraft, sovereignty, citizenship, identity, and rights since the seventeenth century. Such a reassessment is particularly evident in the wide array of political and social theorists who have engaged in debates about the “new cosmopolitanism ,” a protean category that signals an attempt to rethink the An earlier version of part of this chapter appeared previously in my book Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, published in 2006 by Princeton Univ. Press and reprinted here with permission. 298 • Roxanne L. Euben scope and scale of moral, legal, and political obligations among human beings whose identities and loyalties are no longer—if they ever were— coextensive with the modern nation-state. This scholarship may register as just one among many by-products of the rapid transfigurations in culture and knowledge brought about by globalization. Yet arguments about the new cosmopolitanism are establishing many of the scholarly terms in which the deterritorialization of politics is defined, and delineating the range of moral, political, and economic practices that do or should flow from it. Consequently, such debates are significant not only because of the way they reflect this historical moment but also because they are helping to determine how and in what terms we come to understand it. This chapter is an analysis of how this otherwise promising scholarship often enacts a cultural and historical parochialism that inadvertently conceals cosmopolitan genealogies located beyond a series of “Western” figures and philosophical touchstones.1 As a partial antidote to this provincialism , I sketch the outlines of an Islamic ethos of travel in search of knowledge. The contours of this ethos, I argue, illuminate a genealogy of Muslim cosmopolitanism, one woven from a variety of doctrinal sources as well as from disparate practices, moments, and ideas that punctuate the history of Muslim societies. This countergenealogy, as it were, brings into focus the historical and normative resources that inform and transform the ways in which the umma (Muslim community) is continually reimag1 . Oppositions such as West/non-West and West/Islam carve up the world in ways that obscure the fissures within each category, erase their mutual historical indebtedness , and deny the cross-pollination of the present. Given the frequency with which these terms are invoked by people all over the world and the very real allegiances and enmities they evoke, however, scholars engaged directly or indirectly with the dilemmas of contemporary politics cannot simply dispense with such categories by reference to all that they miss, distort, or exclude. As the current political climate attests, there is much more at stake here than whether or not categories such as Islam and the West are accurate, in the sense of corresponding, more or less precisely, to actual geographic, political, historical , and/or normative borders in the world. I will thus retain references to these terms without quotation marks, but they should be understood as political constructions rather than historical, cultural, or territorial descriptions. Cosmopolitanism Past and Present, Muslim and Western • 299 ined as a moral, political, and now even virtual oikoumene (Greek for the word ecumene, meaning “entire world”).2 In a geopolitical landscape that has been reshaped by a War on Terror , such a genealogy has a particular political import. It not only underscores the unnecessarily narrow parameters of the current debate about the new cosmopolitanism, but it also brings into sharp relief the range of cultural, historical, and political forces that collude...