This anthology of writings by Bryan S. Turner on the sociology of Islam has the merit of providing conceptual and historical depth to how the field of study and theoretical reflections which delimits the sociology of Islam can enliven both sociological theory (and, with it, that thriving subfield called civilizational analysis) and the interdisciplinary study of Islam (especially through interfacing with the history and anthropology of Islam).
Historical depth is provided less by the fact that Turner refers to Islam's unfolding from its origins to the contemporary global scene, than because the anthology is itself a mirror of the history of the field, whereby the author frequently reviews and revises his own positions over four decades. Alongside such depth there is a plasticity of argument determined by how the field's own trajectory has intersected the critique of Orientalism as a problematique of power-knowledge.
It becomes evident through the various stages of the author's production that several key arguments and benchmarks were set by Turner in a critical dialogue with the theoretically gifted historian of Islam Marshall Hodgson, whom Turner now credits with crucial merits in freeing the study of Islam from the hegemony of text-trapped and conceptually prejudiced Orientalism.
One can enumerate various arrows in a rich analytic arsenal that Turner has updated through fresh introductory essays to the three parts in which the chapters are thematically grouped (I. Classical Approaches – Understanding Islam; II. Orientalist Debate – Positioning Islam; III. Islam Today – Sociological Perspectives). My choice of the following discussion points is not random, yet it relates to what I, as a practitioner of the sociology of Islam since the 1990s, consider the most salient dimensions in Turner's analysis in view of the future structuring of the field.
Turner supports the idea, for which Hodgson is mostly remembered, that the sociological characteristics of Islam cannot be derived from its Arabian origin: think of Weber's reduction of Islam to a “national Arabic warrior religion” (p. 28) which largely derived from the nineteenth-century European characterization of Islam as a particularistic Semitic religion, in the framework of both Oriental Studies and the emerging field of world religions. This emancipation from European philologists' obsessions with authentic origins is nurtured by the attention paid to the cumulative trajectory of Islam's venture into world history and global society, and most notably to the expansion and entropy of what Hodgson called the “Middle Periods”, eleventh–fifteenth century ce.
While acknowledging since the 1970s, with Hodgson, that the socio-cultural “carriers” (a Weberian notion) of Islam were not warriors but urban strata of scholars and traders, Turner exposed the US historian's stated intention, in spite of the latter's criticism of Western Islamic studies, of exploring Islam through a prism opposing inner factors to outer components: namely private piety and consciousness vs. public cult or norm. This binary straitjacket is usually considered Western-biased and influenced by a Reformation-oriented view (or reduction) of religion (Hodgson never concealed his faith commitment as a Quaker). My impression, however, is that Turner's critique insisted too much on Hodgson's introductory positioning of his work (mostly located at the beginning of volume I of The Venture of Islam) while neglecting that, in the deployment of his rich historical narration, the US historian relativized the normative ubiquity of the controversial prism (unlike the insistence on it by leading orientalist Gustave von Grunebaum) and rather evidenced nuances and intersections among several levels of Islamic life-orientational and social forces.
Turner also intimates, as evidenced by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt in the 1960s, rightly in my view, that we should not dichotomize pure and routinized charisma. Islam provides an excellent example of seeing the two dimensions of charisma as two sides of the same (sociological) coin, since they are produced simultaneously. By stressing the social and rather diffuse dimension of charisma with regard to the role of socio-cultural carriers of a religious tradition, one should acknowledge that charisma is born routinized, so to speak, while Weber too directly referred a “world religion” to its origination through extraordinary charismatic characters who were able to unsettle inherited traditions and authority (thus reproducing the Orientalist emphasis on the authenticity of beginnings). Through this critique of Weber, charisma and tradition are no longer separate matrices of social power and religious authority, and the sociology of Islam plays a crucial role in helping redressing Weber's lopsided typology.
As a consequence of both of these struggles against Western-biased dichotomizations pioneered by Turner, sociologists of Islam face the crucial tasks not only of recovering the complex multiplicity of Islam's several layers of social meanings (as also famously advocated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, from whom Hodgson drew inspiration), but also to use them to make social theory “multiversal”, especially since, prior to the rise of Western hegemony, Islam was the hub of a diversifying civilized world. Nowadays, when non-Western modernities valorize endogenous traditions without belittling the weight of Western colonial inheritances, concepts and institutions, paying attention to the way in which Islam worked as a civilizational benchmark before the onset of Western colonialism has the potential to pluralize and enliven social theory globally.
In the 1970s and 1980s Turner maintained that the long-term failure of patrimonialism in Muslim societies caused the breakdown of the virtuous circle of justice first theorized by Ibn Khaldun and then adopted by the Ottoman Empire. As Turner evidenced, Weber's idea that patrimonialism was the political structure determining Muslim societies was decisively influenced by his perception of the late Ottoman Empire that was contemporary to the late Weber (p. 161). However, Hodgson had shown that with the partial exceptions of the early “High Caliphate” and the modern “gunpowder empires” there was never anything as structured as a patrimonial regime in the Islamic ecumene, and that the Islamic expansion/entropy during the Middle Periods occurred thanks to the absence of effective patrimonial rule. In other words, while Turner previously criticized Western notions of oriental despotism and of an Asian mode of production, his espousal of Weberian patrimonialism with regard to Islam could only be facilitated by an ambivalent appreciation of The Venture of Islam, which he has more recently (and rightly) praised as “magisterial, and so far unmatched” (p. 152).
Hodgson and other authors showed quite early on that there was no reason to reproduce Weber's contingent (and anachronistic) angle and that one key task of the sociology of Islam should be to produce a truly sociological explanation of the fact that Ottoman society outlasted centuries of pressure from world capitalist reorganizations and colonial conquest from the West. The Ottoman case then appears as a larger foil for the sociology of Islam's capacity to take society (its inner balances, its large autonomy, to some extent its malleability and receptivity to an ethically informed, yet also internally and externally diversified civilizing process) seriously in a Muslim context. Another seminal yet controversial work in the sociology of Islam, Ernest Gellner's Muslim Society (1981), though referenced by Turner, could have helped him to focus more sharply on the refined sociological engineering entailed in the Ottoman process of turning the unstable khaldunian cycle of sheer power into a more stable Ottoman circle of justice and governance presiding over an intersecting network of groups, communities and institutions (whose virtuous rather than vicious dimension Turner has been slightly more inclined to recognize in his more recent essays).
Earlier critical contributions by Turner (not included in this collection) highlighting how “civil society” as a sociological construct cannot be extricated from the Orientalist construction of purported Islamic despotism as the antithesis of civil society, have been dropped in favour of a fuller endorsement of the universal rationality of the Westphalian model of citizenship, within which Muslims (individually or through their associations) nowadays can or cannot (depending on specific circumstances) be successfully integrated and so live a “life of faith” (p. 292, the final words of the book). This conclusion appears to be a quite paradoxical inversion of the young Turner's scathing criticism of Hodgson's singling out of private faith from the multi-levelled sociological nexus of Islam (which Hodgson in fact courageously theorized as “Islamdom”, a matrix of social connectedness other than private piety).
