Repositioning ‘Islamdom’

religious field and for supporting the secular authority of the developmental

state. The exhaustion of this momentum retrieves the potential of transcivilizational

processes to erode the hegemony of civilization in the singular. This potential

is often latent but sometimes manifest in several contemporary expressions

of an Islamic political idiom from the Maghreb to South-East Asia. It is also

apparent through an expanding geography of actually or potentially ‘failed states’:

from Palestine and perhaps Lebanon, through Somalia and perhaps Sudan, to

Afghanistan and perhaps Pakistan. This phenomenon might fit into a trajectory

of exit from Westphalian straitjackets, though, at the moment, entropy prevails

over order. It remains that, more than reflecting a singularization of the civilizing

process, the long-term formation of Islamdom is tied to ongoing transcivilizational

dynamics that might as much polarize as they can connect socio-political

forces across the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Deepening the implications of an

‘Islamic perspective’ can contribute not only to a better understanding of the

continual repositioning of Islamdom, but also throw more light on the ambivalent

nexus between the singularizing impetus of the civilizing process and an increasingly

global (and therefore transcivilizationally open) deployment of modernity.

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