Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. Bruce B. Lawrence
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Название: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit

Автор: Bruce B. Lawrence

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Религия: прочее

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isbn: 9781118780008

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СКАЧАТЬ he makes for transformation apply to a broad spectrum of humankind. Religion looms as the catalyst for hopeful change, and for genuine transformation, in the future, but does religion assist or impede the modernization process?

      I contest the assumption that only modernization finally works, and that religions must be judged good or bad by how congruent or dissonant they are with forces, structures, and goals of modernization. I prefer to stand this question on its head, suggesting that modernization is neither monolithic nor inevitable. It is not monolithic because it did not impact on all parts of Euro-America with equal success. Nor is it inevitable since it was a concatenation of circumstances rather than any single cluster of ideal traits or the convergence of such traits with technical discoveries, all of which produced what Hodgson termed the Great Western Transmutation.

      The Intervention of Huricihan Islamoğlu

      A Turkish socio-economic historian, who herself studied with Hodgson, Huricihan Islamoğlu has offered a brief recapitulation of his legacy that underscores yet again why and how Islamicate civilization matters. In a 2012 essay titled “Islamicate World Histories?” Islamoğlu rehearses then reassesses several approaches to Ottoman historiography before closing with this query: can we write world histories that are genuinely “world histories”?

      Our present history at least suggests that it is time to look beyond Western domination. A genuine rethinking of world history implies transcending the binaries of West and non-West, European center and non-European periphery, premodern and modern. It implies questioning the identification of modernity with the West, whereby institutions emerging from Western history represented universal attributes of modernity, merely imported or adopted or resisted by non-Westerners […]

      And the problem that this acceleration and dominance pose for global comity is the same for her as for Hodgson. What was lost was a differential view of human progress.

      Subsequently Islamoğlu elaborated on her expansive view of global change by adding an accent on the metaphysical underpinning, the core moral imperative, that suffuses The Venture of Islam. At WOCMES 2014 in Ankara, she observed that:

      There are three crucial elements from Hodgson and Islamoğlu that need to be stressed: elites, empires, and modernity. Each has its own valence; none can be ignored in tracing ICS over time and space.

      First, lives of elites matter. The Sisyphus-like struggle of Muslim elites—bureaucrats, warriors, merchants, industrialists, and scholars—was to seek solutions to multiple historical challenges. Nonelites also matter but elites dominate the civilizational kaleidoscope etched over time and space, and they are the primary class to consider as exemplars of ICS, Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit.

      Third, modernity matters—everywhere. The Great Western Transmutation shadowed the open-ended vision of history, with an accent on justice, that Hodgson evoked vividly and repeatedly. In volume three of The Venture of Islam, he seems to argue that Islamicate societies persist even if Islamicate civilization vanishes. One must review that judgment on the peripheries, especially the West African and Southeast Asian peripheries, of the extant Afro-Eurasian ecumene, but it is first necessary to estimate the emergence of Islam, and so an Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, on the two wings of empire: India and Andalusia.

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