Repositioning ‘Islamdom’

original conceptions of the world, modalities of living in the world and approaches to constructing a common world (Arnason, 2001, 2003). Accordingly, the recurrent reluctance within Islamic civilization to sacralize corporate identities and so to strongly legitimize state formations should be assessed as a reflex of a specific civilizational orientation rather than as a cultural deficit exposing a lukewarm will to power.

Whose Divergence?

The formation of the toolkit of categories we use for making sense of the relationship between Islam and the West is incorporated in the historical narrative through which ‘Western civilization’ gained the upper hand against ‘Islamic civilization’. The reasons why Islam has often represented a civilizational model neatly contrasting with the European historical trajectory of transformation of religion and its relation to the state cannot be reduced to an alleged inability of Muslim traditions to turn the tension inherent in the God–man relation into a socially productive and politically progressive differentiation of societal spheres.

Yet the ‘essentialism’ of Western characterizations of Islamic civilization deserves attentive scrutiny. It is not necessarily a malign bias facilitating the instrumentalization of the knowledge of the Other and bolstering the hegemony of the Self, as critics of Orientalism often argue. Not by chance, the relation of religion to the state is often at the centre of a subtle game of comparing and differentiating, of lamenting blockages and demonstrating divergences: an intellectual exercise that does not seem to be governed by a power quest or power imbalance per se (reflecting the allegedly self-serving Orientalist domestication of the Other) but rather responds to the much less controllable dynamics through which the cultural definition of power within the hegemonic West has facilitated drawing civilizational borders. In this framework, essentialism helps determine a hierarchy of intensity between different manifestations of the civilizing process, particularly at the level of constructions of worldliness and subjectivity supported by a will to power. In the process, essentialism often betrays an excess of comparativism and a tendency to measure the degree of conformity with – and divergence from

– a norm, which is essentially dictated by the activity itself of distinguishing the

hegemonic civilization from the ‘rest’ of the world (Salvatore, 1997).

This is scarcely surprising. The politically overloaded character of the study

of civilization with regard to religion is shown by the fact that it was part and

parcel of the genesis of Western social sciences in the longer nineteenth century.

Within a field characterized by a fierce competition among the various disciplines that attempted to situate the cultural sources of human sociability, religion often happened to be seen as a key sphere, whose formation was identified with the emergence itself of organized community life. In Durkheim’s footsteps, the sociology of religion has too often assumed the identity of a scarcely defined ‘tradition’ with an overloaded notion of ‘religion’. Religion as the archaic key to social integration remains ‘traditional’ and so confined to marginality in the modern

Salvatore Repositioning ‘Islamdom’ 101

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