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INTRODUCTION
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INTRODUCTION MIRIAM HOEXTER AND NEHEMIA LEVTZION The essays included in this volume were presented and discussed at an international workshop on the Public Sphere in Muslim Societies, held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in October 1997. The workshop concluded two years of deliberations on the public sphere in general and its application to Muslim societies in particular, by a study group whose participants then presented their papers. They were joined by international scholars represented in this volume by Dale F. Eickelman. Their comments added substance to the project ’s aim to develop the concept of the public sphere in Muslim societies. For the purposes of this volume we have adopted the definition of the public sphere put forward by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter. They define the public sphere as a sphere located between the official and private spheres. While both the official and the public spheres work for the common good, the public sphere recruits its personnel from the private sphere, not from the ruler’s domain. The public sphere is thus autonomous from the political order, and “its influence rests on interpretations of the common good vis-à-vis the ruler, on the one hand, and the private sphere, on the other.”1 The concept of the public sphere adds a new dimension to the discourse on civil society. It shifts the emphasis from the political authorities to society and stresses the close connection between the autonomy of this sphere and the idea of the social order as promulgated in a specific society or culture without necessarily developing in the direction of Western political institutions. The foreword and concluding chapter expand on the theoretical and comparative perspectives. The other chapters are case studies stretching from the ninth century to the twentieth. They certainly do not cover all periods or all regions of the Islamic cultural area; but they all refer to institutions that were central to Muslim societies during most periods and in most parts of the Muslim world. Each chapter deals with a specific period and region and treats specific aspects of the public sphere. Much of the discussion centers around issues, events or institutions connected with Islam. However, rather than a system of worship, confined to the private sphere,2 the emphasis in all chapters 9 is on Islam as a regulator of the social order. We thus focused on the role of the shari`a as an autonomous civic force; the ensuing autonomy of institutions and social groupings based on the shari`a and their dynamics; the role of the community in the public sphere; and the nature of the interaction between the society and the ruling authorities. We have been inspired by the approach of Marshall Hodgson, who identified three religiously sanctioned institutions that held together all groupings of the umma (the community of believers) in the town: the shari`a laws, the waqf foundations, and the Sufi brotherhoods (tariqa, pl. turuq).3 All three institutions figure prominently in the essays. Umma and shari`a are central conceptions running through the discussion in virtually all the chapters included in the present volume. The umma—the community of believers—was accorded central importance in Islamic political thought. Not only were the protection and furthering of its interests the central concern of the ruler, the individual Muslim, and the `ulama'; the umma’s consensus (ijmà) on the legitimacy of the ruler as well as on details concerning the development of social and cultural norms was considered infallible. The community of believers was thus placed as the most significant group in the public sphere, and above the ruler (see Miriam Hoexter). The shari`a—the sacred law, or the rules and regulations governing the lives of Muslims, derived in principal from the Qur’an and hadith4—was developed by fuqaha' (jurists) and was basically an autonomous legal system, independent of the ruler’s influence. Above and beyond being a legal system, the shari`a embodied the values and norms of the social order proper to the community of believers and became its principal cultural symbol. The sacred nature of the shari`a is deeply entrenched in the public sentiment of Muslim societies. The sanction of the sacred law has contributed to the formation of a Muslim public opinion and endowed institutions and social groupings based on the shari`a—such as the qadi, the mufti, the schools of law (madhahib)— with a high degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the ruler. It has also accorded moral authority...