6 Islam and Modernity
being, nor as typologically distinct social formations, but as forms of the social
bond that are different but can become organically connected in various ways. It
is the combination of certain types of tradition with given processes of transfor-
mation that produces distinctive societies that we call ‘modern’. Modern societies
can be related to each other and form civilisational clusters to the extent they are
premised on similar combinations of traditions and modern patterns.
I propose to see traditions as bundled templates of social practice trans-
mitted, transformed and refl ected upon by arguments and discourses across
cultures and generations. The cultural codes of traditions are administered by
cultural elites but also depend on the active role played by practitioners, who
are primarily the common people or ‘commoners’. In this sense, traditions are
relevant both within pre-modern communities and – in a starkly mutated form
- within modern or modernising societies. Some authors have appreciated the
importance of cultural traditions for the formation of the collective identity of
social groups at the moment they attempt to enter modern society and fi t into
its rationalising parameters. This argument originates in some currents of social
theory, most notably, yet not exclusively, located in North America (Bellah
1970; Shils 1981; Taylor 2004). A simplifi ed variant of this approach has been
also adopted within development-oriented studies, also with regard to Muslim
majority societies, since the 1980s, basically as part of a larger trend of disil-
lusionment with earlier approaches to economic and political development for-
mulated within the paradigm of modernisation theory. Accordingly, traditions
should be considered as resources within processes of social and political change
that help prevent the spread of individual anomie, collective de-acculturation,
and their related, multiple backlashes affl icting various levels of social and politi-
cal life. Cultural traditions are thus considered potential assets for activating the
motivational prism of local actors and helping the work of those modernising
agents (including NGOs) that intervene from the inside or outside of a given
society in order to improve the well-being of populations.
Perhaps this perspective is not completely satisfying to our aims, since it still
retains a thrust of functionalism inherited from modernisation theory. Where
tradition was once considered the backward culture to be overcome via modern-
isation processes, it now bifurcates into a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ tradition: the type of
tradition that prevents development and access to modernity is contrasted with
a tradition that facilitates avenues of social progress. The line of demarcation
between a tradition doomed to reiterate its cycles of stagnation and rituals of
confi rmation of authority and a tradition that provides cultural orientation and
moral guidance to both elites and common practitioners through the uncertain-
ties of modern life and the abstractions of modern norms is reminiscent of an
idea that was already present in classic authors of social theory: think of Weber’s
emphasis on cultural and more specifi cally religious traditions as engines for
the rationalisation of life conduct (Weber [1920] 1988), or of Durkheim’s