CHAPTER 1
Tradition and Modernity within Islamic
Civilisation and the West
Armando Salvatore
The Islamic civilisation in the modern world
‘In the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars might well have sup-
posed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim’ (Hodgson
1993: 97). With this statement, the comparative historian Marshall Hodgson
suggested that at the dawn of the modern era Islam was the most vital civilisa-
tion in the world and that it held a hegemonic potential over East and West.
Hodgson called Islamic civilisation ‘Islamdom’, in analogy with ‘Christendom’,
which is different from Christianity, intended as a religion. Islamdom was the
civilisation that had inherited and creatively recombined the cultural characters
and the political specifi cities of a vast and more ancient geo-cultural unit, the
Irano-Semitic area. According to Hodgson, at exactly the time of inception of
the modern era Islamdom reached the zenith, not only of its political power, but
also of its cultural creativity (ibid.: 100).
This particular strength of Islamic civilisation at the dawn of modernity did
not suddenly evaporate at the moment West European powers affi rmed their
primacy in long-distance maritime trade and discoveries, in particular with
the opening of transatlantic routes and the creation of colonies in the East and
West of the enlarged globe. The specifi c ways of blending power and culture
that constitute a civilisation continued to bring fruits well into the modern era
in the case of Islamdom’s three different, yet equally fl ourishing, empires: the
Ottoman, in a large area covering Anatolia, the Near and Middle East, North
Africa, the Balkans and other European regions; the Safavid, in Iran; and the
Mughal, in South Asia. Their models of state centralisation, control of terri-
tories and populations, and styles of ruling and administration partly survived
the traumas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which Western
Europe turned around the power balance with the Muslim world and gained a
hegemonic position over the Euro-Mediterranean area and into the Eurasian
depths. Yet, at least in the Turkish and the Iranian cases, the long-term, relative
strength of their socio-political formations can be measured by the degree of
resistance of their centres to the ongoing process of Western colonial encroach-
ment, which started to exhaust its impetus only between the two world wars of
the twentieth century.
In spite of this historical setting and of the early modern confi guration of