Armando Salvatore's ambitious text, The Sociology of Islam, investigates the “nexus of religion and civility” (xi) in order to explain how Islam shapes social, cultural, and political dynamics. Updating and building on Bryan S. Turner's influential Weber and Islam, Salvatore draws on the analytical tools of sociology in order to explore the way that knowledge and power shape Islamic traditions. By attempting to transcend post-orientalist and post-colonial critiques of sociology's parochialism, Salvatore seeks to use the sociology of Islam as a lens with which to critique Western notions of modernity. As he says, “The critical angle opened up by the sociology of Islam within the body of sociological enquiry and theory allows us to not only look at Western modernity as if from its margins but also to critique the idea itself of a fixed core of modernity within a rapidly evolving global order” (12). In other words, as an internally diverse civilizational idea and a blueprint of life, Islam provides Salvatore with a means of pushing the discipline of sociology away from teleological, evolutionary arguments about society evolving from traditional, religious societies toward modern, secular ones modeled on a Western-European prototype.

The other lodestone for Salvatore's analysis is Marshall Hodgson's three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilizatio n. In that work, Hodgson pioneered the world history approach to Islam and positioned his subject on par with global Christendom. “Global Islamdom” included a strong moral vision for society and a powerful set of organizing institutions. Published in 1974, Hodgson's magnum opus was a critique and rebuttal of Orientalist approaches to Islam that depicted it as backward, hostile to modernity, and subject to change only as a result of Western influence. Salvatore's charge is similar. He seeks to rebut Orientalist approaches to Islam, including those by Max Weber, and takes as his scope a world historical approach to Islam, comparing select concepts like waqf (pious endowment) in Islamdom to the commons in Christendom.

This book is the first in a planned three-volume set. This first text focuses on the ideas of knowledge, power, and civility as analytical frameworks to understand Islamic institutions and traditions. The second volume will focus on the issues of law, the state, and the public sphere, which are more immediately germane to political science. The third volume will explore issues of nationalism and transnationalism using the concept of the umma (community) as the locus of inquiry.

Salvatore's goals are at cross-purposes to the bulk of contemporary comparative politics and international relations scholarship on Islam. The experimental turn in political science is only the latest of a long drive toward causal explanation with a high degree of measurement validity. Salvatore's book is instead oriented around broad conceptual comparisons across centuries of civilizations. His arguments are unapologetically non-falsifiable. The dominant (if flailing) approach to religion in political science is modernization theory. Salvatore takes the failure of modernization theory for granted. Comparative political scientists frequently take advantage of variation in states or societies to use structured comparative analysis and explain religion's power. Salvatore, meanwhile, takes the constitutive power of Islamic civilization for granted. Given the common ties of both sociology and political science to Max Weber's political sociology, it is stunning how far our disciplinary norms have diverged. In contrast, John R. Bowen's The New Anthropology of Islam focuses on education, ritual, ethics, agency, and local comparison, and is far more intelligible to our discipline than The Sociology of Islam.

Nonetheless, Salvatore's volume is immediately useful to political scientists in at least two respects. First, Salvatore develops the concept of civility, which he rightly describes as the “quintessentially modern form of religion” (5) and which provides a source for social cohesion and mobilization. Salvatore deploys the concept of civility in empirical chapters on Sufi Brotherhoods and Egyptian and Ottoman Court relations, among others. Political science struggles to understand varieties of religious agency that seek ends other than freedom and power maximization, despite the fact that religious organizations often do not seek power. Rather, many religious organizations seek to build social welfare, charismatic authority, or brotherhood. Salvatore provides a nice example of a pathway beyond the hegemony of liberal conceptions of agency.

A second immediate value of the text for political scientists is in updating Turner's critiques and adaptations of the Weberian approaches to Islam. Weber is best known for his study of Protestantism and its work ethic, which drove large numbers of people to engage in trade, enterprise, and other entrepreneurial activity that led to the accumulation of wealth for investment. Weber's writings on Islam were sparse and often factually incorrect. He argued, for example, that the uniquely patrimonial nature of Muslim political institutions prevented the emergence of a money economy and rational law. This line of analysis has unfortunately been parroted by contemporary pundits despite the fact that patrimonial institutions are common across the world and not a function of Islam. Salvatore suggests, instead, that Islam provides a common idiom of civility that enables trade and cooperation across groups that differ by status, wealth, or geographic distance. As a result, rather than being inflexible and incompatible with bureaucratic rationality or modern capitalism, civility provides the group cohesion necessary to support modern political institutions and trade.

A short review cannot do justice to this book's sweeping historical vision of Islam nor the intricate analytical framework. Scholars interested in civilizational analysis, ethical comparisons across centuries, and the ongoing debates about how to approach Islam as an object of study will find much to appreciate and digest in Salvatore's bold first volume on The Sociology of Islam.