Bruce B. Lawrence - Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit (Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos)

Bruce B. Lawrence

Duke University
Durham, USA

This edition first published 2021

2021 Bruce B. Lawrence

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lawrence, Bruce B., author.Title: Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit / Bruce B. Lawrence. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2021. | Series: Wiley-Blackwell manifestos | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: Overview : a manifesto in 3 words and 6 chapters -- Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit across time and space -- Eastward into India -- Westward into Spain -- Premodern Afro-Eurasia -- Persianate culture across the Indian ocean -- Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit beyond 2020 -- Conclusion. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058488 (print) | LCCN 2020058489 (ebook) | ISBN 9781405155144 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118779996 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118780008 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Islamic civilization. | Cosmopolitanism. Classification: LCC DS36.88 .L395 2021 (print) | LCC DS36.88 (ebook) | DDC 909/.09767--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058488LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058489

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Set in 11.5/14 Bembo Std by Integra Software Services, Pondicherry, India

To Alber Husin
Gun-less Warrior for Peace
Exemplar Cosmopolitan for the Ages

1. Chapter 2
2. Chapter 4
3. Chapter 5

The roll call of colleagues who helped shape this manifesto extends back several decades and crosses generations as well as continents. I would be remiss not to begin with the 1980 conference on Islamic studies organized by my late friend, Richard C. Martin of Arizona State University. Rich brought together older colleagues, such as James Kritzeck (my first teacher on Islam), Jacques Waardenburg, and Muhammad Abd ar-Rauf, along with younger scholars like William Graham, Marilyn Waldman, and Fred Denny, to rethink the field of Islamic studies beyond Orientalism. Saids book had just been published 2 years earlier (1978) and one of the several scholars invoked to chart a way beyond Orientalism was Marshall Hodgson. Fast forward 25 years and Rich Martin, along with Carl W. Ernst, organized a conference on Islam in Theory and Practice that centered on my work, and it highlighted Hodgson as the harbinger of a Muslim/Islamic/Islamicate cosmopolitan alternative to Orientalism. All the participants of that 2006 conference, later contributors to a book titled Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism toCosmopolitanism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), deserve recognition and thanks: Ernst and Martin at the head of the list, followed by Vincent J. Cornell, Katherine P. Ewing, A. Kevin Reinhart, Omid Safi, Jamillah Karim, Charles Kurzman, Ijlal Naqvi, David Gilmartin, Abbas Barzegar, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Tony K. Stewart, Scott Kugle, and Ebrahim Moosa. In 2008 I was awarded a Carnegie Scholars of Islam grant, allowing me to travel not just to Egypt and Ethiopia but also to Indonesia and the Philippines. My experience of minority Muslim communities expanded owing to the vision and support of Patricia L. Rosenfield and Hillary S. Wiesner from Carnegie Corporation. Among the scholars I met from Southeast Asia, twothe late Alber Husin (to whom the manifesto is dedicated) and Jowel Canudaycame to a conference on Muslim cosmopolitanism I was able to convene in Doha in December 2010, thanks to the generosity of Sheikha Al Mayassa Al Thani, then head of the Qatar Museum Authority, who had invited miriam cooke (my spouse) and me to be scholars in residence at the Museum of Islamic Art. My thanks are due not just to Sheikha Al Mayassa Al Thani but also to others who attended and contributed to that conference: Walter Mignolo, Kevin W. Fogg, Sita Hidayah, Dereje Feyissa, Jonathan Cross, Afyare Abdi Elmi, Anthony Shenoda, Andrew Simon, Amira Sonbol, Sulayman Khalaf, Mohammed Ali Abdalla, and, of course, miriam cooke. miriam has also provided me with countless hours of proofreading and correcting the manuscript, just as she joined me in the lunch conversation of 2019 at the University of Exeter, recounted in the Preamble. Other colleagues at Exeter enhanced the horizons of my work: Robert Gleave, Sajjad Rizvi, Ian Netton, William Gallois, Istvan Kristo-Nagy, Mustafa Baig, Emily Selove, and Rasheed El-Anany, while back in North Carolina, other scholars added to the chorus of support: Anne Allison and Charles Piot, with spirited commentary, Michelle Lamprakos and Steven Kramer, by close reading, and Leela and Baba Prasad as audacious critics. I am also indebted to the Abdullah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School for hosting a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Hodgsons demise. Titled Marshall Hodgson and the Contested Idea of a Discernible Islamic Civilization it convened on November 9, 2018 and included along with myself these participants: Richard Bulliet, Richard M. Eaton, Wael Hallaq, Hedayat Haikal, David Nirenberg, Ahmed El-Shamsy, Nile Green, Carol Hillenbrand, Kevin van Bladel, and Frank Griffel. Anthony T. Kronman, Owen Fiss, and Bradley Hayes made the event sizzle, and I begin the Preamble with reflections that they inspired, though neither they nor any of the above-mentioned supporters are responsible for the case I make, and the arguments I advance, for an Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. I am finally indebted to the three outside reviewers for Wiley-Blackwell, all of whom sharpened the tone and expanded the scope of my manifesto, while miriam cooke added her voice to theirs in foregrounding my own voice throughout what follows.