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

#09–2017 Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2016; pp. 344; ISBN 978-1-119-10997-6 (paperback) With this book, Armando Salvatore, Professor of Global Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, presents the first volume of a forthcoming trilogy on the sociology of Islam. This introductory volume focuses especially on the role and function of civility in Muslim thought and practice, considering mainly the timespan of the Middle Periods, which are in academic and public discourse often associated with the slow cultural, religious, and material decay of the realm of Islam, up until the postcolonial present. In contrast to resting on the simplified and defective notion of retrogression, Salvatore challenges the reader to dare go beyond those rather naïve and basic (dis) qualification in a quest to examine the unique and ambivalent ways through which civility was crafted and remained intact in the Muslim world. To accomplish this, the book introduces a row of adjustments to key significations that are relevant in the respective academic and public discourse. Crucially, the very notion of civil society – a recurring trope in the analysis of Islamic societies and their presumed deficiency regarding their modernizing potential – is unmasked as a quite distinct feature of an essentially European quest for modernity and in its static and circumscribed quality unfit to present itself as a coherent concept for evaluating the attendant qualifications in non-European societies. Another word and concept that is crucial for understanding Salvatore’s approach is the term “Islamdom,” borrowed from Marshall Hodgson, to clarify the three-dimensional frame of comprehension followed through in his analysis: the religious (Islam), civilizational (Islamdom), and meta-institutional or traditional (Islam/Islamdom nexus and node) aspects of what is commonly referred to by using the disclaimer Islam(ic) (286). By understanding civil society as the specific way of institutionalization of civility in a European context, determined by the theory of the State as it emanated from the Westphalian order and attendant political theory, Salvatore argues for a more open conceptualization of civility to be able to incorporate divergent forms of comprehending and instituting forms of the knowledgepower equation. In acknowledging the challenge that Islam poses to solidified sociological categories, Salvatore reminds us about the strong focus (or obsession) of sociology as a field of knowledge production with the concept of modernity and equates that with “initial paradigmatic limitations of Western sociology”, as it proves unable to escape the comparative mode of sociological research (2). Here, he rephrases an argument he made in the edited volume Islam review 143