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The Role of Islam in World History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Marshall G. S. Hodgson
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Abstract

Until the seventeenth century of our era, the Islamicate society that was associated with the Islamic religion was the most expansive society in the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere and had the most influence on other societies. This was in part because of its central location, but also because in it were expressed effectively certain cultural pressures–cosmopolitan and egalitarian (and anti-traditional)– generated in the older and more central lands of this society.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , April 1970 , pp. 99 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

page 101 note 1 The man who has done most to revise older ideas on the sixteenth century in the Indian Ocean is Jacob, C.van, Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society (van Hoeve, the Hague, 1955).Google Scholar The modifications of his thesis by Meilink-Roelofsz, M. A. P., Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (Nijhoff, the Hague, 1962), have not reversed his conclusions.Google Scholar

page 101 note 2 On Ottoman and other Muslim political and economic activity in the sixteenth century, an illuminating recent survey is Allen, W. E. D., Problems of Turkish Power in the Sixteenth Century (Central Asian Research Centre, London, 1963).Google Scholar

page 102 note 1 The master study on Persian literature now is that of Alessandro Bausani, in Pagliaro, A. and Bausani, A., Storia della letteratura persiana (Nuova Accademia Editrice, Milan, 1960), which pinpoints the newer insights into sixteenth-century poetry. I might add that Martin Dickson of Princeton University, though he has not yet published much, has helped those who know him perceive the cultural vigor and variety of the period.Google Scholar

page 101 note 2 Storey, C.A., Persian Literature: a bio-bibliographical survey, the volumes of which are still appearing, suggests in its sections on the sciences the wealth waiting to be investigated.Google Scholar

page 101 note 3 The most important recent writer to bring out the importance of Islamic philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is Henry Corbin: perhaps even more revealing than his works dealing directly with Mollâ şadrâ is volume I of his Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Gallimard, Paris, 1964).Google Scholar But already the Indian poet and inspirer of Pakistan, Muhammad, Iqbal, in the last pages of his The Development of Metaphysics in Persia (Luzac, London, 1908), had indicated to the perceptive reader what active seeds lay in Mollâ şadrâ especially.Google Scholar

page 104 note 1 Brunschvig, R. and von Grunebaum, G. E., Classicisme et déclin culturel dans l'histoire de l'Islam (Paris, 1957).Google Scholar

page 104 note 2 Robert, McC.Adams, , Land Behind Baghdad (University of Chicago Press, Chicago,1965), has shown what was happening in at least one small area.Google Scholar

page 105 note 1 The implications of Muhammad's campaigns toward Syria, in the light of Byzantine-Sâsânî vicissitudes at the time and of eàrlier Meccan history, have not yet been fully explored; Wm., Montgomery Watt, Muhammud at Medina (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1956), has gathered much suggestive material.Google Scholar

page 106 note 1 The work of Joseph, Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1950), brings out the remarkable role of al-Shâfi'î, but we have yet to pin down how it was that the basic expectations about religion that governed the formation of the Sharî'a came to be so close to those governing the Jewish Halakha law; studies of correspondences in detail between Shî'a and Halakha scarcely touch this deeper question. The parallelism cannot simply be. derived from primitive Islamic principles, for quite diverse consequences could be and were drawn from those.Google Scholar

page 107 note 1 Particularly ‘A Comparison of Islâm and Christianity as Frameworks for Religious Life’, Diogenes (1960), pp. 49–74Google Scholar (badly mangled in editing); and also ‘Islâm and Image’, History of Religions, vol. 3 (1964), pp. 220–60, where I also develop in more detail some of the argument here presented.Google Scholar

page 107 note 2 I have tried to pinpoint the relations among these lettered traditions as forming a world-historical phenomenon ‘The Interrelations of Societies in History’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 5 (1963), pp. 227–50.Google Scholar

page 109 note 1 Waizer's, R. summary of how these diverse strands were brought together in Arabic, in ‘Islamic Philosophy’ in History of Philosophy East and West, ed. Sarvepalli, Radhakrishnan, vol. II, pp. 120–48 (Allen and Unwin, London, 1953),Google Scholar has been reprinted in his Greek into Arabic: Essays in Islamic Philosophy (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1962).Google Scholar

page 112 note 1 The most ambitious attempt to analyze these events from a world-historical viewpoint, that of Franz, Altheim, Utopie und Wirtschaft (Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1957), comes to a very different conclusion from the present essay; it suffers from a drastic schematism as well as an arbitrary interpretation of details–its analysis of Muhammad, for instance, is weirdly anachronistic; but it has suggestive data.Google Scholar

page 112 note 2 The several works of Lammens, H., notably La Mecque à la veille de l'hégire, in Mélanges de l'Université St Joseph de Beyrouth (1923), which pointed out the extensive dimensions of the Meccan system, are full of over-daring suggestions and have been justly criticized; but their main conclusions still stand and have not even been fully replaced by the several subsequent studies in a similar vein.Google Scholar

page 116 note 1 Ira, Lapidus, in Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1967), has studied how, in Mamhûk Syria, the garrisons were in fact drawn into the urban structure of contract and patronage; so complementing the fundamental analysis of the separation of the occupying garrisons from the civilian life made by H. A. R. Gibb. (He has also-noted the intershading of merchant and ‘ulamâ’ families.)Google Scholar

page 119 note 1 On Timur, J. Aubin, ‘Comment Tamerlan prenait les villes’, in Studia Islamica, vol. 19 (1963), pp. 83–122,Google Scholar brings out the political alignments he depended on. One example among many of the gradual capture of organized Sûfism in the central areas for chiliastic revolution is studied by Molé, J. in ‘Les Kubrawiya entre Sunnisme et Shiisme aux huitième et neuvième siècles de l'hégire’, Revue des études Islamiques (1961), pp. 61–142.Google Scholar

page 120 note 1 Hartwell, Robert M., in a doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago in 1963, has made clear the comprehensive extent of the abortive industrial revolution in Sung China; thus throwing revealing light on the phenomenal cultural flowering in T'ang and Sung China.Google Scholar

page 120 note 2 For the development in a relatively backward part of Islamdom, Egypt, see David, Ayalon, Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamlûk Kingdom (London, 1956).Google Scholar

page 121 note 1 I have discussed this techuicalization in rather more detail in ‘The Great Western Transmutation’, Chicago Today (University of Chicago, Autumn, 1967), pp. 40–50.Google Scholar

page 122 note 1 The writings of Gunner Myrdal on the contrast between ‘backwash’ and ‘spread’ effects of increased investment in any given area are an invaluable introduction to the plight of the non-Western societies, especially since the Industrial Revolution.

page 123 note 1 I have gone into more detail on the world-historical situation of modem Muslims in ‘Modernity and the Islamic Heritage: Dilemmas of the Concerned Individual in the Modern Acceleration of History’, Islamic Studies, Journal of the Central Institute of Islamic Research, Karachi, vol. 1 (1962), pp. 89–129.Google Scholar