Marshall Hodgson. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History
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8 Cultural patterning in Islamdom and the Occident 137
It is impossible to compare directly what profundity of human aware-
ness may be encouraged by giving primacy to one or the other of such
interpretations of life. Each has encouraged its distinctive areas of inten-
sive probing. Christian writers, facing the stark reality of
evil,
have found
layer beneath layer of meaning in suffering and death. It is notorious that
Christians have not solved the logical problem of suffering - not on the
level of evident formula, that is; surely this is precisely because they have
probed it too deeply to be content with a pat answer. Yet the mark of the
matured Christian has undeniably been his vital joy. Muslim writers,
accepting the consequences of purposefulness in the creation, have
spoken on many levels to the person who finds himself facing solemn
responsibilities - as father in a family or judge in a city or seer for a great
community. It is likewise notorious that Muslims have not solved the
logical problem of free will on the level of past formula, for all the disputes
about it. Yet the mark of the matured Muslim has ever again been seen to
be his human dignity.
As compared to the Christian tradition, the Islamic seems to have held
closer to the central lines of the old Irano-Semitic prophetic tradition,
especially as represented in the Hebrew prophets with their emphasis
on direct human moral responsibility. To persons for whom the tragic
sense of the classical Greek drama, focusing on irreducible evil, raises
the most telling ultimate questions about human life, the Islamic tradi-
tion, where such problems have been kept to one side, may seem to lack
a crucial profundity which may be found in the Christian tradition.
Others distrust too encompassing a preoccupation with what is sombre
or poignant or obscure as tending to tempt people to neglect what lies
before them direct and clear. Such may feel the Islamic tradition to be
more manly and more balanced, and even a sounder point of departure
for any profundities that may be ventured on. They may agree with the
Quranic description of Muslims as forming a middle community, avoid-
ing extremes.
Enduring
religious
commitments in the two cultural
patterns
The prime norms of a society must not be confused with the multiple
actuality of the various standards and expectations actually effective in
its cultural life. Peoples do not differ nearly so much in practice as may
seem if one judges either by the obvious difference of symbolic detail
whereby they fill the demands of daily behavior, or by the standards
given primacy in their high culture, and so embodied in their literature
138 II Islam in a global context
and in the more formal events of law and social intercourse among
especially the privileged classes. Any persistent cultural pattern is likely
to be making sense in terms of the calculable interests of those who
practice it. Hence it is doubtful if one should say of any given major
society (though it is often said) that such and such practical alternatives
were closed to it because of such and such unalterable culture traits. If,
in the long run, a given society failed to develop along a line which
might seem to us advantageous, this is generally to be explained in
terms of the practical options open to members of the society at the time:
one can expect to find that, in fact, given the total situation, the neces-
sary steps were not sufficiently advantageous to sufficient numbers in
any given generation to make them worthwhile. One need not invoke
the dead hand of the past, supposedly exercised through traditionally
imposed attitudes, religious or not. In a history such as this, therefore,
the interests of particular groups and the problems of particular periods
are put in
relief.
Nevertheless, those norms that are given primacy in prestige, on the
level of high culture among the privileged classes, have a pervasive and
enduring efficacy. In a crisis, they underlie the ideals that imaginative
individuals will bring to bear in working out new ways of action; they
offer a guide that aspiring groups in the society can make use of as they
try to approximate to the privileged classes' ways; above all, it is these
norms that confer legitimacy. Other things being equal, those ideas,
practices, and positions of power or authority that are recognized gener-
ally as legitimate can survive times when their current expression or
implementation is temporarily weakened; for each person expects that
the others will support them, and so he will be guided more by the
positions' long-term prospects of strength than by a short-term weak-
ness.
A dog is obeyed in office: even a fool will be obeyed for a time if he
is recognized as legitimate ruler. Hence norms given cultural primacy
and legitimizing some cultural forms at the expense of others have a
pervasive influence so long as the traditions that support them retain
their long-term relevance. A global comparison between two cultures, as
in this chapter, will necessarily bring out any more persistent constants
of this sort that can be perceived.
It is not only norms in the sphere of ultimate commitment, but also in
other spheres, artistic, intellectual, and socio-legal, that mold the climate
of a society. The straightforward moral appeal of the Islamic religious
tradition was complemented on the social level, in Islamdom in the
Middle Periods, by what may be called a "contractualistic" pattern of
8 Cultural patterning
in
Islamdom
and the
Occident
139
determining legitimacy
in
social organization.
We may
subsume
the
whole ayan-amir system
of
social power under this more abstract princi-
ple.
This pattern contrasted
as
sharply
to
what
may be
called Occidental
"corporativism"
as did
Islam itself
to
Christianity.
The
norms
of
social
organization cannot
be
derived directly
in
either case from
the
religious
orientation
as
such,
not the
reverse.
Yet
they were
not
unrelated.
The
manner
of
their relationship
is
itself
a
point
of
contrast between
the two
societies.
In
the
case
of
Islam, life-orientational
and
societal norms were
di-
rectly coordinate
in our
period. Both
the
social norms
and the
religious
seem
to
have resulted from
the
same long-term circumstances
in the
Irano-Semitic core area,
and the
line
of
development taken
by
Islam
then reinforced
the
corresponding social expectations.
In any
case,
the
monotheistic communal tendency
in
Irano-Semitic culture necessarily
made
for
casting society into forms conceived
as
religious, unless reli-
gion were
to be
isolated
and
neutralized entirely.
Yet
Islam
has
proved
consistent with quite different social forms
and
standards from those
of
the Irano-Semitic core area
in the
Middle Periods. Accordingly,
we
must
see
Islamicate contractualism
not as the
result
of
Islam
but as
largely
a
tendency parallel
to
that
of
Islamic moralism
itself,
though
perhaps unrealizable without
the
support
of
Islam.
As
to
Christianity,
the
social pattern
and the
basic thrust
of
religious
ideals were less closely interdependent.
The
Occident
was
obviously
only
one
society among several
in
which
the
Christian tradition formed
the spiritual
and
intellectual foundation,
and the
other societies were
very differently organized from
the
Occidental. Early Christianity,
in any
case,
gave
no
such primacy
as did
Islam
to
social considerations; hence
it
was
all the
more acceptable, even
in a
religious perspective,
for
each
region
to
produce
a
form
of
Christian society congenial
to itself. At the
same time,
the
Occidental patterns
of
social expectation were
at
least
consistent with
a
Christian approach
to the
world
-
Christian
in a gen-
eral sense, that
is, not in a
sense limited
to the
Occidental form
of
Christianity.
We may
probably
go
further
and say
that they cannot
be
fully understood without reference
to the
persistent Christian challenge
we have outlined. Accordingly,
in
both Islamdom
and the
Occident
we
may identify cultural constants, even
on a
level where
the
searching
conscience
may
rest,
and see
contrasts between
the two
traditions
in
respect
of
them;
and
these constants
may
extend broadly over many
dimensions
of the
culture
and be
expressed
on a
highly abstract level.
A purpose
of our
comparison
is to
counteract premature assessments,
140 II Islam in a global context
if we cannot rule them out altogether. To this end, we must bear some
things in mind as presuppositions of both societies. We must make our
contrast against the background of any common necessities or commit-
ments that would produce a common pattern of which the individual
regions would be developing variant forms. Here this is not a matter
simply of a common agrarianate substratum, but of a common dynamic
situation, with an active historical dimension.
Apart from the broadest possible lines of what minimally distin-
guished any agrarian land tenure and any urban-based government,
there were no norms of social organization evidently common to all
agrarianate-level society. Yet there was one widespread tendency with
its own norms which, if allowed full play, could determine legitimacy in
a wide sphere: the tendency to subordinate everything to a great territo-
rial bureaucracy. Such a tendency could be traced back at least to the
great empires that arose in each of the core areas at the end of or soon
following the Axial Age. Where it prevailed, agrarian relations were
regulated, at last, by bureaucratic oversight from the center of imperial
government, cities were administered from there, even crafts guilds or
monasteries were likely to be subject to imposition of rules and even
rulers from above. This was the organizational side of the absolutist
ideal, invoked in the name of peace and equal justice against the tyranny
of the strong. In significantly differing forms, such a pattern dominated
many sectors of social organization to a great degree in the Byzantine
and the Chinese societies long after the fall of the early post-Axial Age
empires.
But territorial bureaucracy, though universally present in some de-
gree,
was more usually limited in its overall social effects by equally
potent alternative sets of social expectations. In the Occident and in
Hindu India, any tendencies toward territorial bureaucratic domination
were inhibited drastically by systems of deep-rooted particularism.
These two rich agricultural regions, flanking the central lands of Is-
lamdom on either side, had in common not only the obvious reverence
for images (which Muslims called idolatry) but also, less obviously, a
somewhat comparable social organization. In both societies, from the
time of the Rajputs and of feudalism, innumerable social bodies main-
tained or developed their private (caste, or corporate and estate) laws
and customs, and were integrated among themselves less by any com-
monly recognized authorities than by an intricately hierarchical system
of mutual obligations, in which every social unit retained its indefeasible
autonomy.
8 Cultural patterning in Islamdom and the Occident 141
Occidental
corporativism,
Islamicate contractualism
With the fall of the High Caliphate, most of such bureaucratic authority
as had prevailed in Islamdom disappeared, but it was replaced not by a
system of particularisms but by a unitary - or unitaristic - pattern of
legitimation that made Islamdom unique among the major societies:
what we shall call a "unitary contractualism." Under this head, we are to
consider more formally and abstractly the open structuring of Islamic
society which we analyzed more substantively in the chapter on the
social order. Its implications may come clearer if we contrast them to
what in the Occident may be called "hierarchical corporativism." Neither
the Islamicate nor the Occidental patterns were fully elaborated in the
Earlier Middle Period - rather, they were in process of formation: the
most creative moves of social organization were in that direction. That
is,
the patterns were at the peak, at that time, not of their formal prestige
but of their historical vitality.
The contrast between "contractualism" and "corporativism" will re-
call, in some of its aspects, the famous contrast between society and
community, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Especially "contractualism"
suggests status by achievement rather than status by ascription. As com-
pared with most preliterate and even peasant life, both the "cor-
porativism" and the "contractualism" here described are in the direction
of Gesellschaft: both are subject to impersonal, formal norms, within a
community impersonally and formally defined, and in both, the contrac-
tual principle plays a significant role. Yet as between them, Islamicate
contractualism had many features which suggest a greater emphasis on
the sort of legitimation in which personal achievement counts high and
relations are fixed by contract more than by custom. But even the Is-
lamicate pattern never escaped, historically, the presuppositions of
agrarianate-level society; it never approached the level of impersonal
achievement-oriented evaluations that has been associated with modern
technicalized society. The contrasts between such things as Gemein-
schaft and Gesellschaft, status by ascription and by achievement, deci-
sion by custom and by rational calculation, are always matters of degree;
the end result of even the most drastic shift in such directions always
seems to retain, in a new form, elements of ascription and custom and
personal community, so that in a new historical setting it in turn can
seem (to use another term in a popular but misleading way) "traditional"
rather than "rational." Here what matters is less the degree of "rational-
ity" than the distinctive functioning.
142
II Islam in a global context
In the Occident, ultimate social legitimation and authority were con-
ferred not on personal relationships nor on a given power structure but
on
autonomous corporative offices
and their holders as such. That is, legiti-
mate authority was ascribed primarily to such positions as kingship, vas-
salship, bishophood, burgherhood, electorship, membership in a guild;
these offices were autonomously legitimate in that fixed rights and
duties inhered (by custom or charter) in the office, in principle, without
authorization or interference from any other office; and they were corpo-
rative, in that they presupposed established social bodies, limited in
membership and territory, and themselves autonomous, within which
the holder of an office was to exercise its duties: kingdoms, municipali-
ties,
dioceses, duchies. Such autonomous public offices have occurred
everywhere, especially in ritual functions, but also otherwise, usually in
more or less incipient forms: for instance, in the Muslim qadi, the village
headman, the grand vizier. What was special in the Occident was that
this sort of office became the leitmotif of the whole conception of social
legitimacy. These offices, then, were felt to carry authority insofar as
they
fitted into mutual hierarchical relations within a fixedly structured total
social
body:
that is, they were to be constituted and exercised in accor-
dance with established rules of feudal tenure or ecclesiastical obedience
or privileges of estates; these rules, in turn, were to be binding both on
superiors and inferiors, and presupposed a closed system of mutually
recognized individual rights and duties which wove together the whole
of papal Christendom, under the leadership, perhaps, of pope and
emperor.
The hallmark of Occidental corporativism was its legitimism. For ev-
ery office there was one predetermined "legitimate" holder and any
other was "illegitimate," in the eyes of legitimists, no matter how long
and firmly he had been established. A monarch was "legitimate" if he
came to power according to the fixed rules that applied to that particular
office, however incompetent he might be - an infant, or insane; other-
wise he was a "usurper," however sound or unpopular a ruler. Even a
man's sons were divided into "legitimate" and "illegitimate" ones, ac-
cording as their origin satisfied the rules of the system, though per-
sonally he might make no distinction in his care for them. To be sure,
there were many disputes as to which claimant to an office was in fact
the "legitimate" one, but that one or another was indeed "legitimate"
and the others not seems never to have been doubted. At first sight this
might seem a peculiarly irrational Occidental aberration, but elements of
the approach, in a milder form, are to be found very widely spread in
8 Cultural patterning in Islamdom and the Occident 143
societies. But the Occidentals carried it to its logical extreme - while the
Muslims systematically excluded it almost altogether.
This corporativism was an admirable way of envisaging social rela-
tions,
elegantly worked out and to a remarkable degree effective in
practice. It has been compared to a Gothic cathedral, the form of which
was also worked out in High Medieval times. Both the "corporative"
tendency in government and the art of the Gothic cathedral, as well as
several other sorts of artistic and intellectual works of the time, seem to
reflect a common sense of fitness as to form. Restating our description of
hierarchical corporativism in slightly more general terms, we may say
that those who articulated the norms of the time seem to have seen
satisfying order in a pattern of autonomous fixed units arranged in
hierarchi-
cal mutual relations in a closed and fixedly structured whole. Writers cast
allegorical poems and even scholastic treatises into such a form, and
something of the same feeling is traceable in the honor paid to demon-
strative geometry as a model discipline and to the syllogism as a form
into which to put thoughts even when they were not very syllogistic in
content.
In Christian thought, in any case, the spiritually significant events of
history were seen as having miraculously unique status within a total
sequence of sacred dispensations, set off self-contained from ordinary
history. This answered to the sacramental organization and the redemp-
tive,
supernatural, role of the church. The Occidentals now stressed
even more than other Christians the autonomous corporate unity and
hierarchical structure of the church and of its hisotry from the time of
Adam.
Wherever a sense of fitness was called for, especially wherever valida-
tion and legitimation were consciously required, such a sense of style
could come into play: in art, in theology, in government, in etiquette,
even in science. It determined at least the form in which legitimation was
made, if it did not always make a great difference in substance. And this
sense of style could have sufficient effect upon practice to affect related
activities, where there was a less conscious demand for legitimation; for
certain types of expectation tend to prove mutually compatible, and so
reinforce each other. Thus could be achieved, at least for a few decades
in a portion of northwestern Europe, on the level of public expectations,
a relatively homogeneous style ("High Gothic") in a wide range of activi-
ties.
This style had been being prepared and formed, in some of its
aspects, for some centuries; and elements of it, at least, proved suffi-
ciently attractive to color a great part of Occidental culture for a long time
144 H Islam in a global context
after; but it may be regarded as peculiarly distinctive of the High Medi-
eval Occident.
The Occidental side of the comparison just sketched will (I hope) take
on substance from the reader's independent knowledge of the Occident.
The Islamicate side now must presuppose all that has been said in this
work. We will start by characterizing schematically an overall style an-
swering to the "High Gothic" in which our sketch of the Occidental side
culminated. Then we will go on to characterize the religious and the
social order, in particular, in terms of the overall style.
In Islamdom, the elements that went to make up a corresponding
style do not seem to have come to quite so sharp a focus as in the High
Gothic period in northern France, but there too a distinctive style,
partly prepared earlier and largely persisting in later times, was espe-
cially characteristic of the Earlier Middle Period, though (as in the Occi-
dent) never prevailing exclusively. To Islamicate "contractualism" in the
social sphere, the most appropriate analogy in the visual arts is doubt-
less the arabesque-type patterning, including geometrical and floral
interfacings as well as the arabesque proper, which came to full matu-
rity under Seljuk rule, more or less contemporaneously with the Gothic
cathedral. To put the overall style in a formula corresponding to what
we use for the Occident, the sense of good order demanded a pattern
of equal and transferable units satisfying a single set of fixed standards in a
field penetrable to several levels and universally extendable. The indefinitely
repeated rhythms of the arabesque, where often a bold obvious pattern
was superimposed on a subtler pattern at first barely noticeable, an-
swered to such a sense of form, as did the maqamat in prose and
several genres of verse, notably the symbolic masnavi. Something of
the same feeling is traceable in the honor paid to historical knowledge
and the passion for hadith isnad and Sufi silsilah. Geometry, so be-
loved in the Occident, starts from a minimum set of premises and
develops by a hierarchy of set deductions to definitive conclusions,
closing the argument in autonomous self-sufficiency. In contrast, the
indefinitely expandable corpus of historical reports, each documented
and certified on a level with all the rest, allows the seemingly chaotic
variety of life's reality to be reduced to manageable order without arbi-
trarily setting bounds to it either in extent or in depth of meaning.
The Islamic religious sense of the equal and coordinated responsibility
of all possible individuals for the maintenance of moral standards in the
natural world was probably not unrelated, from the beginning, to the
orientation out of which grew this Islamicate sense of style. But it was
especially after the fall of the High Caliphal state, among Jamai-Sunni
8 Cultural patterning in Islamdom and the Occident 145
Muslims, that this atomistic dimension of Islam became most explicit. It
was justified in kalam disputation and it was deepened into more inward
levels by the general spread of tariqa Sufism, with its silsilahs of indepen-
dent pirs bringing spiritual truth to each according to his capacities.
It was the enduring balance between sharia-mindedness and Sufism,
developed in this period on this basis, that made it possible for Islam to
appeal to every sort of temperament without sacrificing its egalitarian-
ism and its moralism. One can claim that, to maintain the church and its
hierarchy, Christians sacrificed both prophetic vision and mystical lib-
erty in some measure. That is, they were limited both in any direct
confrontation with the old prophetic themes, for the prophets were
largely reinterpreted as mere harbingers of Christ, and in an indepen-
dent growth of mystical experience, which had to be restrained within
the sacramental discipline of Christ's church.
2
In contrast, Muslims had
no single organizational authority over even particular sectors or local
groupings of the Islamic religious establishments, unless by arbitrary
and temporary superimposition. They looked, for the subtlety which
sensitive persons demand, not to the guided diversity of a church but to
direct personal deepening, individual by individual as he was capable of
it. Hence the tacit mutual toleration of ulama and Sufis. Yet so effective
was the correlative insistence on a unitary set of fixed standards, that,
unlike Buddhist monks or Brahmans, say, the ulama could not develop
freely independent standards, but were under effective pressure to maxi-
mize communal uniformity. The whole development of the contrac-
tualist sense of social order in this period, which expresses the same
overall style, was made possible by the corresponding developments in
religion. And as in religion, so in the social order the seeming simplicity
required considerable social sophistication to become so effective; it was
no sign of primitiveness.
The hallmark of the Islamicate social order as embodied in the ayan-
amir system might seem to be - over against Occidental legitimism -
what can be called its "occasionalism," the impression it can give that
everything was improvised as the occasion arose, that almost no weight
was given to established position and precedence once their immediate
force was gone. This was the institutional expression of the general
2
Such a contrast has been stressed by Henry Corbin in several works, including his
Histoire de la philosophie islamique
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964). It has also been hinted at in less
scholarly circles, as by Aldous Huxley in
Grey Eminence
(New York and London: Chatto
&
Windus, 1941), and elsewhere. Such writers have taken a personal position which not all
may share. But that this was a problem posed by the special structure of Christianity, and
that it called for a special solution (successfully or not) will be more widely granted.
146 II Islam in a global context
tendency
to
exalt individual liberty
at the
expense
of
any fixed status.
As
in
the
sphere
of
art,
of
course, such
a
principle was
not
inconsistent with
an elaborate surface formalism, adaptable
to any
substance.
If
Occiden-
tal legitimism sometimes
led to
self-evident absurdities, this Islamicate
"occasionalism" could
be
reduced
to the
arbitrary rule
of
violence.
Yet
Muslims insisted regularly that
the
candidate
for a
post
be at
least theo-
retically qualified
for it - and a
deposed caliph could
be
effectively
dis-
qualified
by
blinding, unlike
an
Occidental king.
And
such principles
allowed Islamdom,
in any
case,
to
make good
its
tremendous expansive
vitality
- not
merely
to
conquer
but for the
most part
to
hold what
it had
conquered. Here,
too,
there
was
method
in the
madness.
In contrast
to the
hierarchical corporativism
of the
Occident, what
I
have called
the
"unitary contractualism"
of
Islamdom meant that ulti-
mate legitimacy
lay not in
autonomous corporative offices
but in
egalitar-
ian contractual
responsibilities.
That is, legitimate authority was ascribed
to
actions that followed from responsibilities personally undertaken
in
such roles
as
that
of
amir
in a
town
or
imam
in the
salat
or
ghazi
on the
frontier
or
husband
in a
family.
The
model that defined public duties
thus
in the
form
of
personal responsibilities
was the
ingenious sharia
principle
of the
reduction
of
all social functions
to
either
fard
ayni,
a
duty
incumbent
on
every individual, or
fard
kifayah,
a
duty incumbent
on
only
so many
as
were required
to
fulfill
the
function
-
though until
the
func-
tion
was
fulfilled, potentially incumbent
on
anyone. Thus public duties,
as
a
special case
of
personal duties, came under
the
same sort
of
rules
as
any others.
If
those who fulfilled such duties made
any
agreement
in the
course
of
their labors, that
had the
same status
in
sharia
law as any
personal contract.
(We
have seen
an
example
in
such arrangements
for
succession
as
that attempted
by
al-Rashid
in
dividing
the
caliphal state.)
This personal, contractual, principle was extreme
in
the opposite direc-
tion from
the
corresponding Occidental principle
of
public, corporate
offices.
One may say
that most commonly
in the
great cultures some
special status
is
allowed
to
acts
or
property
and the
like ascribed
to a
social body, such
as the
state,
but
that such status tends
to be
looked
on
as
a
special case
of a
more inclusive moral
law
which applies,
in
princi-
ple,
to
persons
as
such.
The
status
of
royalty seems
to
have been such
among
the
Sasanians, where
the
royal
khvarnah,
as a
supernatural aura,
set
off
the monarch from other men,
but
only
so
long
as he
was divinely
deemed
fit to
rule.
The
Occidentals tended
to
push
the
special status
of
public acts
to an
extreme point,
in
their emphasis
on the
fixed autonomy
of
an
office;
a
point where there should
be an
unbridgeable cleavage
between private
and
public realms, private
and
public law, such that
the