Islamdom’s dynamic of challenge and reabsorption occurred within an ever

as incompatible by the cultural elites. In contrast to such dynamics, the paradox

of the process within Latin Christendom consisted of the fact that the most

radical challenges drained the discursive resources of the traditions of Latin

Christendom without suppressing their symbolic substrata. The remobilization

of such immaterial resources fed into emerging power formations directly or indirectly tied to the modern state. In particular, the radicalization of the social and

political transformations initiated during the ecumenic renaissance led the religious

reformers of the early modern era to stress the autonomy of the innerwordly

components of traditions. As a result, these movements were empowered

to challenge institutional authorities on the basis of pure reasons of the ‘spirit’,

something that not even the most heterodox movements within Islamdom (like

e.g. the movement that brought about the formation of the Safavid dynasty in

Iran in the early sixteenth century, at the dawn of the modern era) were ready to

do. The most striking example of a radical challenge was the Puritan revolution

in England. Not by chance this is the first revolution to be considered as fully

modern: not in spite of, but because of its calling for a Kingdom of God on

earth. Only in this way could the axially balanced tension between immanence

and transcendence be definitively broken. The way was open for their ultimate

fusion via programmes making immanent and in this sense secular the ultimate

horizons of salvation (Voegelin, 1998: 217–68).

The Puritan revolution first instituted a potentially unlimited sovereignty of the

commoners via the state. Yet the paradoxical outcome of the process was a growing

pressure to redefine the proper realm of religion, which was achieved through

of 1648. This principle drastically reduced the instability generated by religiously

motivated conflict by sanctioning the religion of the ruler in each and every state

as the only legitimate one. The now compressed religious realm also needed

governance from within, and this goal was largely achieved by rendering religion

a matter of personal belief and sovereignty of the self within the ‘inner forum’.

The process of modern state-formation within the Islamic civilizational framework

is in the case of both the Ottoman and Safavid empires positively related

to the crystallization of autonomous though articulate networks such as those

linking Sufi brotherhoods to warriors’ coalitions: both dynasties emerged at the

head of two such flexible bodies (Rahimi, 2004). The outcome of the basically

anarchical developments of the Islamic middle periods, whose earlier half coincided

with the transcivilizational breakthroughs of the ecumenical renaissance,

allowed for a considerable state-building potential. As synthetically put by

Hodgson, at the threshold of the modern era, ‘Islam promised itself, not without

reason, that it would soon be absorbing the whole world’ (Hodgson, 1993: 24).