Armando Salvatore - The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility

A brilliant, pioneering effort to explain the cosmopolitan ethos within Islamicate civilization, The Sociology of Islam encompasses all the terminological boldness of Marshall Hodgson, making the Persianate and Islamicate elements of civic cosmopolitanism, across the vast Afro-Eurasian ecumene, accessible to the widest possible readership in both the humanities and the social sciences.

Bruce B. Lawrence,author of Who is Allah? (2015)

Sociologists of religion have long been awaiting a successor volume to Brian Turner's pathbreaking but now dated Weber and Islam (1974). Armando Salvatore's new book provides just this update and much more. Ranging across a host of critical case studies and theoretical issues, Salvatore provides a masterful account of religious ethics, rationalization, and civility across the breadth of the Muslim world, from early times to today. The result is a book of deep intellectual insight, important, not just for the sociology of Islam, but for scholars and students interested in religion, ethics, and modernity in all civilizational traditions.

Robert Hefner,Boston University

The sociology of Islam has been a late and controversial addition to the sociology of religion. This field of research has been the principal target of the critique of Orientalism and after 9/11 the study of Islam became heavily politicized. Terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut have only compounded the long-standing difficulties of objective interpretation and understanding. In the first volume of what promises to be a major three-volume masterpiece, Armando Salvatore steers a careful and judicious course through the various pitfalls that attend the field. The result is an academic triumph combining a sweeping historical vision of Islam with an analytical framework that is structured by the theme of knowledgepower. One waits with huge excitement for the delivery of the remaining volumes.

Bryan Turner,City University of New York

ARMANDO SALVATORE

This edition first published 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Salvatore, Armando, author.
Title: The sociology of Islam : knowledge, power and civility / Armando Salvatore.
Description: 1 | Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005808 (print) | LCCN 2016006680 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118662649
(hardback) | ISBN 9781119109976 (paper) | ISBN 9781118662625 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781118662632 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Islamic sociology. | Civil society Islamic countries. | BISAC: RELIGION / Islam / General.
Classification: LCC BP173.25 .S34 2016 (print) | LCC BP173.25 (ebook) | DDC 306.6/97--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005808

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Khaju bridge, Esfahan, Iran. Aurora Photos / Alamy

The sociology of Islam is an emerging, strategic field of inquiry, teaching, and debate located at the delicate intersection of a variety of disciplines, including sociology, history, Islamic Studies, anthropology, comparative religion, and comparative civilizational analysis. It deals both with conceptual questions and historical interpretations as they originated back in the 1970s, particularly in the pioneering work of Bryan S. Turner and his commentary on Marshall Hodgson's monumental trilogy The Venture of Islam. Covering this field of study is a longer-term undertaking that cannot be completed in one volume. This is why this book was born with an introductory intent and use value.

While the beginnings of the sociology of Islam should be traced back to Bryan S. Turner's Weber and Islam (Turner 1974), my own entry into the field as a scholar goes back to the early 1990s and coincides with the beginning of my PhD dissertation, which I completed at the European University Institute, Florence in 1994 and published in 1997 (Salvatore 1997). Yet my baptism of fire into the sociology of Islam occurred when I taught my first graduate seminar, in the winter of 1995, at Humboldt University, Berlin. The seminar was titled, in a kind of self-indulgent provocation, Is a Sociology of Islam Possible?

Clearly, whatever the sociology of Islam was by the mid-1990s, it still appeared fragile, dependent on scattered contributions and intermittent collaborations among individual scholars. Still absent, or at best latent, was the sense of a nexus between historical and empirical work, on the one hand, and whatever we happen to call theory, on the other. In the summer prior to that graduate seminar, right after my arrival in Berlin, I convened a small panel on the sociology of Islam at an international conference sponsored by the leading social science journal Theory, Culture and Society. The event took place, by sheer coincidence, in Berlin. The journal editor, Mike Featherstone, had months earlier suggested to me that I invite Bryan Turner and Georg Stauth as speakers to the panel. I had never met them before, though I had read a lot of what they had published, including their co-authored works. These included