capacity to condense the social bond into its unmediated, proto-secular kernel

and so to de-sacralize every form of power (Bellah, 1970: 146–70). Islam effected

a synthetic re-pristination of those features of axial sources that promoted a human

orientation to the ‘common good’ and diffused them across a broad ecumene

cutting through Europe, North Africa, the Near and Middle East and other

regions situated further East and South-East, through the depths of the Eurasian

landmass. The Word as manifested in the Qur’an becomes a moment of liberation

by virtue of its clarifying capacity and normative power, more than by setting

in motion an eschatological dynamic. In the new faith, the path to internalizing

facilitated by an orientation to the life of the Prophet Muhammad, whose exemplary

conduct combined a wide range of signs of excellence within various spheres

of human action. The bulk of the new regulations was carried by the ‘traditions’

The Arabic word hadith . . . captures nicely the double sense of temporality usually

separated in English: on the one hand it denotes anything that is new or modern, and

on the other hand a tradition that makes the past – and future – reencountered in the

present. For hadith means discourse in the general, secular sense as well as the remembered

discourse of the Prophet and his Companions that is actualized in the disciplined

(Asad, 2003: 224)

Such key traits are not constructed by Brague as an essential cultural divergence,

but are explained in terms of different styles of cultural production and human

communication (Brague, [1992] 2000). Within the axial dynamics magnified by

Islam, sheer power is a mediator of cultural meaning, while the ‘Roman road’

constructs a power–meaning–power matrix, whereby meaning is produced for the

sake of maximizing but also sublimating power (Salvatore, 1997). Yet we should

rebalance Brague’s over-streamlined argument by looking at how a divergence

in the patterns of relating culture to power became irreversible precisely in the

period when the chances of a post-axial convergence between Islamdom and

Latin Christendom based on their common legacies seemed to be enhanced by

an hemisphere-wide civilizational movement. Björn Wittrock has called the

period of spiritual ferment and new institutional crystallizations across the Euro-

Afro-Eurasian civilizational area that occurred at a moment of maturity of Islamdom,

around the turn of the first millennium CE, and reached its climax in the

middle of the thirteenth century, ‘ecumenical renaissance’ (Wittrock, 2001). Some

scholars have attributed an increasing significance to the upheavals of this age

within Western Christendom, in some cases considering them no less important

than the sixteenth-century Renaissance and Reformation, conventionally identified

with the beginnings of European modernity (Arnason, 2003).

During the era of the ecumenical renaissance Islamdom incorporated key

civilizational components of Persian and Turkic origin. The strong impulse to