The Culture–Power Syndrome within a
Transcivilizational Ecumene
Armando Salvatore
ORIENTAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY, NAPLES/HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY, BERLIN
social theory might appear in a new light: no longer to be subjected to the sole scrutiny of a critique of modernity immanent to the dynamics of Western civilization, but problematized, complexified and potentially enriched via the study of an Islamic perspective on the interrelation of culture and power, which constitutes the main analytical formula of civilizational analysis. Islam’s purported ‘difference’ might then appear rooted in the ‘normality’ of its ecumenic dynamism, investing culture into expansive, mildly legitimized forms of power.
In this article, I will particularly focus on two key variables of the culture– power syndrome: religion and the state. The notion of civilization itself will become the object of collateral observations, since Islam as the civilization of the middle of the Afro-Eurasian civilizational complex provides a key case for the idea of a
transcivilizational ecumene. Marshall Hodgson called this ecumene ‘Islamdom’ and depicted it as a civilization sui generis, that inherited and creatively recombined the cultural characters and the political specificities of a vast and more ancient geo-cultural unit: the ‘post-cuneiform’ Irano-Semitic civilizational realm with its mostly town-based and mercantile-biased prophetic traditions (Hodgson, 1974, 1993). Arising from and keeping its main centre of gravitation within this area, Islam reassembled and gave an unprecedented impetus to the heritage of a number of civilizational components and in particular to the cosmopolitan and largely egalitarian orientation of the Irano-Semitic traditions. It gave them a new transcivilizational potential by investing this expansive orientation in the depths of the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere or ‘the Old World’. Translocal solidarities were shaped alongside a pattern of denial of strong legitimacy to any parochial type of corporate identity (Hodgson, 1993: 97–125).If seen from the viewpoint of civilization in the singular, converging with the identity of the modern West, the Muslim world – whose main political formation, viewed from modern Western Europe, was the Ottoman Empire – has for a long time been taken to suffer from the absence of a self-limiting religion and of a viable, centralized and strongly legitimized state, supported by a clear-cut corporate identity. The transcivilizational impetus of Islam evaporates if measured in terms of the parameters set by Western-centred political modernity. A more sophisticated version of this diagnosis sees a common cause of the purported double deficiency in the weakness of the will to power of the carriers of Islamic civilization, which became manifest in a limited capacity of self-critique and self-reform: a prelude to its succumbing to European hegemony since the late eighteenth century. Nonetheless, what some key authors within European social thought have unilaterally diagnosed as factors of blockage attributable to Islamic civilization, should rather be reevaluated in the context of a trajectory based on a civilizationally specific cultural construction of power. According to Hodgson, this trajectory is more ‘ecumenic’ (and therefore ‘transcivilizationally’ constructive) than the Western building of a singular and hegemonic civilization, the civilization of Western modernity. Following Hodgson’s approach, we need an analysis of types of worldliness, subjectivity and their supporting cultural forms more than a rigid comparison between civilizational blocks. The concept of ‘civilization’ does not photograph a geo-cultural unit but denotes a process characterized by
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European Journal of Social Theory 13(1)