To understand the appeal of contemporary Islamism, we will note that not
only did early Islam pose specific impediments to the expansion of rational
markets and/or meritocratic administration, but these legacies have endured.
The central feature of Islam was its seamless web of religious faith and moral
regulation with law, commerce and administration. While kadijustice, based
on the Quran, regulated commerce, so too were commerce and culture infused
with religious codes. Insofar as sacred law, shariah,was global and all per-
vasive, rather than sectorial, there was little space for secular discourses and
debates. Moreover, while Islam, like Christianity was a salvation religion, it
did not valorize asceticism and self denial, nor did it engender “salvation
anxiety”. Thus, for both its warriors and merchants, Islam did not foster the
conditions that led to self-denial, asceticism quarational control of affect as
an aspect of individual character. To be sure, while there is an obsessive con-
cern with cleanliness, the “anal-compulsive” character, wrought by anxiety,
was typically Western. In sum, Islam fostered structural barriers to the incur-
sions of modernity quarational commerce, rational administration and sec-
ular world views. Nor did Islam engender the kind of individual character
structure well suited to that kind of rational control. Islamic rationality was
cloistered in its schools and centers of learning. Thus despite the efforts of
foreign colonizers or indigenous elites to introduce rationality into the Islamic
world, despite the many modernizing and/or nationalist movements that
did in fact take place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the impetus
for modernization has more often than not been thwarted. The limiting case,
however, remains Turkey where the Western-oriented Kemalist revolution
succeeded. Despite various modernization movements, there are still many
limits to the diffusion of modernity. As a result, the relative weakness of
Islamic countries, vis a vis other nations, is a daily reminder of underdevel-
opment. (The economic and military power of Israel makes this blatant.)
British imperialism in India and China, and the embrace of communism
in the Chinese case, often led to some folks getting educations in the West
and/or exposure to Western ideas (see below, p. 308). This in turn often
encouraged the emergence of indigenous cadres dedicated to modernization-
especially political self determination. Eventually, as part of independence/
revolutionary struggles, there was broad public support for independence
and modernization. Chinese and Indian elites created spaces for purposive
rationality in the commercial sectors that in turn fostered transformations
that created spaces for rational administration and secular culture. The rev-
olutions of both Gandhi and Mao, anti-colonialism in one case, a civil war
296 • Lauren Langman