Abstract

This lecture sketches a historicized paradigm for analyzing the relation between Islam as a world religion and the Islamicate civilization that grew around it from the Nile to the Oxus. Moving away from the monistic and ahistorical, one ideal-type one-religion approach followed by many Weberians, and applying instead Max Weber’s own notion of developmental patterns to axial civilizations in their formative period(s) and beyond, it offers a pluralistic conception of axial—in this case, Islamicate—civilizations as consisting of normatively autonomous domains, each with its own developmental pattern that can interact or conflict with those in other domains. Each domains, is furthermore, capable of engaging in encounters with other civilizations largely in its own terms. I will illustrate my analytical framework with examples from the interlinked religious and political domains concerning the legitimacy of monarchy and the normative regulation of the political order. My aim will be to demonstrate how these two domains are brought into a measure of meaningful consistency in the context of the historical contingent developments in the Islamicate civilization.

Bio

Saïd Amir Arjomand (Ph.D, University of Chicago, 1980) is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies. He is the founder and president of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, and Editor of its interdisciplinary organ, Journal of Persianate Studies. He has published extensively in the humanities and social science journals, and the author of several books including The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Organization and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to l890 (l984; new ed., 2010), and The Turban for the Crown. The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1988), and most recently, Worlds of Difference (with Elisa Reis, 2013), and Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age (2014).