Its been a long while since I read an excellent Book Review essay. Prof. Bruce B. Lawrence celebrates the seminal 3-Volumes of Hodgson’s moral vision. Below are some glimpses: Marshall Hodgson was both a genius and a visionary. While he may have seemed to be just another university professor, at once restless, innovative, and genial, he was also an academic Übermensch with a global agenda. He wanted to change the world by changing the way we saw, understood, and engaged Islam within world history. Hodgson was informed, above all, by a moral vision of world history. He thought that Islam mattered because it righted the intellectually wrong yet emotively triumphalist notions of Eurocentric domination in world history. Hodgson advanced a moral vision that accommodates civilizational continuity and change. A history was about social organization and civilizational patterns, and that religion mattered less for its heroes than for the patterns of social exchange they promoted. The so-called clash of civilizations debate, linked to both Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, as well as one of Huntington’s former students, Frances Fukuyama, only highlights Euro-centrism and Western hegemony by other means, with old arguments recycled under new rubrics. I consider Hodgson’s contribution of pivotal importance to the ambiguous yet productive category “Islamicate cosmopolitanism.” This category involves citizenship, cultural identity, class/ gender perspectives, and, of course, network theory, across time and space but always relating to cities. It involves not just Muslims but all those who are engaged by Muslim others, whether in a majority or minority Muslim polity. Despite the screeds of terrorism and Islamophobia, Islamicate pluralism has emerged, and deserves analysis, as the unexpected yet evident consequence of Hodgson’s moral, cosmopolitan vision. Hodgson has been crticised for using his Islam-specific arguments, in order to buttress his counter-capitalist, quasi-socialist appeal as a world historian. > HODGSON IS BOTH SO NECESSARY AND SO PERILOUS AS A CATALYST FOR OUR 21ST CENTURY ENGAGEMENT WITH ISLAM > WITHOUT DEVELOPMENTS IN ISLAMDOM (THE COUNTERPART TO CHRISTENDOM IN HISTORICAL RECKONING), THE SO-CALLED RISE OF THE WEST WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED. THE VENTURE OF ISLAM CORRECTS THE FALLACY THAT THE DEFINING ARC OF GLOBAL CIVILIZATION IS CENTERED IN THE WEST.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 07:37:24 +0000
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