the sultan (or sultan-caliph) a pale shadow of charisma. Accordingly, the monarch

was viewed as occupying the pinnacle more than incarnating the ‘circle of justice’

that was consecrated by Persianate ruling culture and supported by Ottoman

Such an instance of a simultaneous differentiation and relinking of religion and

the state within a modern setting shows the extent to which the Ottoman Empire

was the outcome of a specific culture–power syndrome that makes perfect sense

(and appears quite ‘normal’) in the context of hemisphere-wide dynamics. One

could even compare the Turco-Persian bureaucratic culture based on the idea of

a ‘circle of justice’ with the Chinese one oriented to a ‘mandate of heaven’, in

spite of clear differences in the recruitment system of administrative personnel.

Against such a background of Eurasian comparability, if not similarity, the Western

path stands out due to its capacity to activate a pre-axial symbolism of social

cohesion under radically mutated conditions for pursuing and legitimizing power.

This is evident in the long-term process of turning sacred kingship into a conception

of modern absolute power supported by a separate, abstract body: a quasiheterodox,

polity-centred reconfiguration of the body of Christ, and therefore the

continuation of the church with other means (see Arnason, 2003: 253).

Compared with the eccentric exceptionalism of Europe, the Ottoman Empire

and the post-Ottoman states represent not so much defective imitations but

rather an unfulfilled dream of competitive continuity. In this sense, the counterpart

to the radically imploded tradition of the West that matches an aggressive

reconstruction of modern power machineries with a reconstructed symbolic

apparatus is a moderately imploded tradition of Islam that can still elaborate on

motives of continuity and find a comforting penumbra in them. A frequently

invoked counterexample is the project of Mustafa Kemal and other Turkish

reformers which consisted in building a national ‘community of virtue’ with no

direct links with the core institutions consecrated by Muslim traditions. It should

not be forgotten, however, that the National Assembly of the Turkish Republic

tried to keep alive a shadow of caliphal authority by proclaiming in the law that

suppressed it in 1924 that the idea of the caliphate had to be considered as

substantially incorporated in the concept of republican government. The grandchildren

of the late-Ottoman strand of Islamic revivalism survived the trauma

and provided within the republic an alternative ‘re-intellectualization’ of Islam

in vernacular forms that fed into the process of reform of Muslim politics and

led to the successful grounding of the presently ruling AK party (Mardin, 2006).

We can now better appreciate Rémi Brague’s key argument depicting the

Western European singularity as the outcome of an eccentric elaboration on axial

sources more than as a self-perpetuation of a combined legacy of Hebrew symbols

and Hellenic values. The phantom of ‘Western exceptionalism’ cannot be

completely absorbed by the comparative perspective of civilizational analysis. At

the same time, it would be difficult to deny that the attempts to reconcile civilization

in the singular with the anti-colonial impetus of non-Western traditions

have exhausted their momentum. This momentum relied on a reappropriation

of Westphalian formulas for regulating the nexus between state power and the