Eccentric modernity? An Islamic perspective on the civilizing process and the public sphere

Abstract

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia. The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process. While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context.

New Perspectives on Ethics in Islam [whole issue]

“…Adab referred to refined civility and propriety on the micro-scale of individuals that could realize an ordered and productive society on the macroscale of the imagined nation. It was closely linked to the reformist notion of tarbiya (upbringing) with its shift of the focus of Ottoman tanẓīmāt reforms from legal to moral reform by way of the rearing of national populations-also propagated by more popular pedagogical publicists in Egypt like ʿAbdallāh al-Nadīm (MCLARNEY 2016;SALVATORE 2016;FARAG 2001;GASPER 2001;SCHIELKE 2007). This educational discourse elided with an amplification of the meaning of siyāsa from the ruler's legal authority towards 'politics' in the modern sense of the collective interests and allegiances of the citizenry.…”

Lessons from the South

“…Here, in the public exposition of individualism and rationalised interests, the modern bourgeois order was apparently formed (see Habermas 1992). It tends to be assumed that the rest of the world lives the concept of the public sphere as an absence, rather than being the site of other modalities of public encounter, confrontation, and expression (see Salvatore 2011). The opacity proposed by embedded practices and lives elsewhere confound Occidental rationality seeking to render the world transparent to the universalising desire of its will.…”