What Went Wrong
As most historians note, the growth of the Italian city-States depended on
trade with the Levant. The cultural efflorescence of Renaissance depended
on the preservation of Greco-Roman philosophy by Moslem scholars. But
while the Italian Renaissance established the conditions that would lead to
the Reformation in Christendom, why didn’t these same ideas foster a
Reformation within Islam that would create spaces for secular commercial
law and practices, for a democratic civil society, and in turn, public spheres
for the expression of diverse ideas? As Lewis (2002) put it, what went wrong?
The answer must consider material, geographical factors and ideological fac-
tors. 1) While there were many rifts within Muslim societies, for example,
between nomads and city dwellers, the merchants and warriors were inte-
gral parts of the same ruling strata. Further, the religious leaders were them-
selves often traders and/or members of trading families. Thus, the conditions
were not present for the rise of an upstart merchant class that would become
carriers of a secular social ethic that might challenge the dominant classes.
Moreover, insofar as its knightly classes were more likely to be term limited
tax farmers whose land tenures were at the pleasure of the State rather than
landowners as in Europe, vassalage did not develop. Perhaps class conflict
may be the moving force of history, but in the Muslim world, an upstart rival
class did not emerge. 2) Unlike Christianity in Rome or Byzantium, Islam
was a relatively decentralized religion. There did not exist an Islamic pope
or dominant “Rome” that might become a central focus for theological admin-
istration, critique and dissent (Collins 1998). Rather, there were major theo-
logical centers in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba etc. 3) While there
have long been variations in scholarly interpretations both in religion (ijti-
had) and philosophy, the mainstreams of Islam political thought were rooted
in Plato’s Republic, that legitimated a theocrat-king model of rulership that
in turn mitigated against political input from other stratum.
Given Islamic theology, asceticism did not play a role commensurate with
its place in Christianity. Muslim merchants were not unlikely to become bear-
ers of a “worldly ethic of practical action”. Nor might “salvation anxiety”
foster an obsessive compulsive, methodological orientation to everyday work
as a religious calling, a moment of a career. Given the then prevalent ideol-
ogy, the theologically derived, commercial-legal Hanafi codes that had once
promoted expansion and regional trade, patrimonial power arrangements
and its class structure, there was little space for the emergence of a new class
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