214 Islam and Modernity
with Islam becoming – especially, but not only, at the hands of the new intellec-
tuals – a set of reifi ed doctrines and principles abstracted from the foundational
texts and ready to be ‘functionalised’ in any particular context (Eickelman and
Piscatori 1996: 37–45; on functionalisation of religion, see Starrett 1998). This
objectifi ed Islam is a very different construct from the discursive tradition of the
ulama, whose relevance to the modern world or its authority it often explicitly
contests.
These processes of social and religious change have continued in post- colonial
Muslim societies, in which they have been accompanied and reinforced in more
recent decades by an ever-accelerating globalisation. The world of medieval
Islam was, in many ways, remarkably cosmopolitan: the North African travel-
ler Ibn Battuta (d. 1368) was a most unusual fi gure in having visited lands that
are ‘equivalent to about 44 modern countries’ (Dunn 1986: 3, 12 n.), but the
sorts of scholarly and other networks he relied on during these travels, and the
language of scholarly discourse he shared with the ulama everywhere, were long
characteristic of the medieval Muslim world. For instance, over the course of
several centuries preceding the advent of colonial rule, scholars, merchants and
many others travelled from Iran to India, not only to fl ee political uncertainty
at home, but also in search of the rich opportunities a career in India offered to
many of them. The Hadramis likewise formed a network that was sustained not
only by memories of a common origin – in Hadramawt in the Yemen – but also
by commercial interests and, above all, by their scholarly credentials. As mer-
chants, Sufi s and scholars of hadith, they were not only linked to one another
across geographical distances and across generations; they also helped connect
local Muslim communities throughout the Indian Ocean, from the Malay–
Indonesian archipelago to East Africa, and received rich patronage from local
rulers for the ability to do so (Ho 2002, 2004). Yet, as important as medieval
cosmopolitans like the Hadramis were to the circulation of ideas, to bringing
facets of the Islamic scholarly tradition to local cultures and to linking these cul-
tures to the greater Muslim world, medieval cosmopolitanism bears only a faint
resemblance to the relentless and transformative fl ow of information, technolo-
gies and capital in the modern world. It is not only against the unprecedented
power of the modern state or against rival intellectuals that traditional loci of
authority have had to compete, though that competition continues unabated.
As many ulama increasingly recognise, the global fl ow of ideas also poses severe
challenges to their view of Islam and to the religious authority inexorably tied
to that view.
Articulations of authority – old and new
Observers of contemporary Islam have often viewed the ulama as mired in an
unchanging tradition that precludes any serious or sophisticated understanding