beginnings) is not completely illegitimate, but suffers from being formulated in

bluntly essentialist and quite unsociological terms. Hodgson, who was only six

years younger than Lewis but passed away prematurely in 1968, also famously

wrote: ‘In the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars might well have

supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim’ (1993:

97). Following Hodgson, one should rather and more concretely ask whether the

(at the time hegemonic) Islamic proto-modernity enshrined in the power and

culture of the three modern ‘gunpowder empires’ (the Ottoman, the Safavid

and the Mughal) was inadequate response to the ideal of societal autonomy,

communitarian connectedness and civilizational interconnectedness that had been

deployed within the Islamic ecumene during the middle periods, and why it could

not match the development of a Westphalian type of modern sovereignty in

Western Europe.

Looking to the early modern configuration of Muslim power, it seems pointless

to reiterate the motive of a blockage that prevented Islamic civilization from

developing modern forms of statehood, on the basis of the state’s prerogative to

set the rules governing, at least externally and publicly, a specifically religious field.

The question that is most interesting to ask from a contemporary perspective

concerns the aborted yet latent potential of a modern type of religious cosmopolitanism that inspired the civilizational dynamic of the middle periods and that might find a more congenial social basis and communicative environment in a

post-Westphalian world. The three modern Muslim empires achieved considerable

results in terms of the accumulation of fairly centralized political power, and

also based their power on specific patterns of differentiation between the state and

religion. Yet such crystallizations could only partially realize the creative impetus

of the middle periods, when a cosmopolitan high culture thrived alongside a

dense social autonomy balancing horizontal cooperation and solidarity with hierarchy

and command: a pattern that facilitated Islam’s absorption into the practices

and cultures of lower strata and the absorption of new communities and

territories into Islamdom.

For sure, in spite of the accumulation of new studies proving the dynamism

of the Ottoman empire in the modern era, this mighty rival of the European

states of the Westphalian era lacks, in comparison with them, a fully autonomous

legitimization and a radical centralization of power. We miss in particular the

institution of a strongly ideological nexus between corporate centralization and

a determination of individual rights framed in the context of that form of power,

i.e. first of all, via the state’s guarantee of contractual autonomy and a corresponding

mechanism to protect and promote individual property. While the most

modern among the Muslim states of the early modern era relentlessly pursued a

centralization of power and was even able to increase its power through an astute

management of centrifugal processes (Barkey, 2008), it did not acquire the kind

of ideologically pinpointed, self-legitimizing political sovereignty that the European

states attained by appropriating, metamorphosing and inverting some of

the sacral features of the church as a corporate body.