colonize culturally, rather than politically, the Afro-Eurasian macro-civilizational

realm reached its peak during this epoch, which Hodgson characterized as the

early Islamic ‘middle period’, but which Orientalists before (but also after) him

have mainly depicted as a phase of political decadence and lack of cultural

creativity. The period also witnessed the unfolding of the heterodox challenges

of Shi‘i groups and potentates vis-à-vis the Sunni orthodoxy. This dynamic will

be carried over into the modern era with the rivalry between the Sunni Ottoman

empire and Safavid Iran, that became the new stronghold of Shi‘a power. Yet even

if less markedly than in the Safavid case, the Ottoman state was itself the product

of the orthodox incorporation of a combined military and mystical movement that

came to maturation during the last phase of the era of the ecumenic renaissance

and expanded during the late Islamic middle period (Rahimi, 2004). In spite of

its geo-political expansion across Eurasia, both Islam’s Abrahamic root and its

selective and largely creative appropriation of the Greek philosophical heritage

contributed to keep one major centre of Islamic cultural gravitation, throughout

the era of the ecumenical renaissance and after, on the Mediterranean side. As a

result, a heightened competition with the rising Latin Christendom was ignited

at multiple political and cultural levels, which cannot be reduced to the military

confrontation associated with the so-called crusades. Most notably, the Western

part of the Muslim world happened to be almost fully controlled by the Ottomans

in the sixteenth century and the rising Ottoman empire became both the main

political challenger and the principal source of representations of Islam’s cultural

traits and political ambitions in the West.

The Islamic trajectory during the ecumenical renaissance displayed some factors

of change that initially also affected the transformations in Western Europe, in

particular with regard to the paradigm of distinction and reconciliation between

the religious and political spheres. Yet the seeming commonalities concealed an

accentuation of divergent paces in the cultural reproduction of social power. The

main convergence was represented by the rise of mystically oriented movements

drawing on the imagination and needs of the commoners, including city dwellers.

These movements, though potentially heterodox, were for the most part integrated

into the orthodox mainstream and influenced its institutional configuration both

within Latin Christianity and Sunni Islam, with enduring consequences lasting

till our days. They were equally significant, in both civilizational realms, in their

work directed to enhancing the importance of the commoners and promoting

their desire for a renewal of norms of life conduct within wider socio-economic

transformations spurned by thriving urban economies and cross-regional trade

(cf. Arjomand, 2004; Rahimi, 2006).

Within Latin Christendom, the new monastic movements and a resurgence

of urban life occupied the central stage from the eleventh century onwards and

reached a climax in the thirteenth century. The problem of strengthening moral

authority required the capacity to construct and communicate the common good

within increasingly complex social worlds. Models of ascetic life conduct based on

discipline and piety were transposed and adapted to the world of an expanding

laity (Brown, 1984: 33–4). A comparable role was played within Islam by Sufism.

Through subsequent waves not only of military conquest but also of religious