oping nations such as Hindu India or Confucian/Communist China rush for-
ward into technologically-based economic growth, the vast swath of Islamic
countries remain mired in stagnation and poverty.^5
Weber attempted to explain why, of perhaps thirty or more major civi-
lizations, only Western Christendom fostered goal rational economic action,
(zweckrational) and in turn rational modernity with its technologically based
economic growth and eventually, world domination. His analysis showed
that the unique legacy of Judeo-Christian monotheism included an activist
notion of God that intervened in human history. Christianity, unlike Islam,
valorized asceticism. This in turn fostered monastic orders that later inspired
a Protestant “inner determination” (salvation anxiety), a “this worldly” voca-
tionalism/sacralized as a “calling” with promises of salvation, and in turn,
a “methodological orientation” to everyday life seen as a career rather than
a collection of isolated moments. These values catalyzed the growth of the
bourgeois classes that would embrace a “disenchantment of the world”; pur-
posive rationality would become the dominant value in the economic, polit-
ical and cultural spheres of modernity. For the Frankfurt School, informed
by Lukács, capitalism fostered bourgeois categories of thought colonized by
Formal Reason, purposive rationality that in turn legitimated new forms of
domination. This rationality, as both a logic and form of goal oriented action,
served as both a catalyst for the growth of capitalism and its own legitima-
tion. But it also led to dehumanization and a carceral society. As such, this
rationality invited various critiques ranging from romanticism to fascism, and
in our current age, various fundamentalisms would re-enchant the world.
Islamic Exceptionalism
Many of the elements of purposive rationality were present in other societies.
In the West, this could be seen with the introduction of the “concept” in Greek
philosophy and the discipline of the Hoplites (Weber, 1978). Rome developed
a number of advanced technologies from weaponry to civil engineering and
architecture based on the arch and cement. But at the same time, most advanced
civilizations had specific structural and/or ideological barriers to rational
modernity. While, to be sure, aspects of Reason could be found in many early
From the Caliphate to the Shaheedim• 293(^5) The embrace of Islamisms may thus be “rational choices” for the individual, but
since these choices are to seek emotional gratifications, collectively, the “choices” may
not be all that rational.