26 Islam and Modernity
The category of the ulama (or ‘men of knowledge’) should be understood in
broader terms than being equal with the category of the jurists (the fuqaha). The
ulama also encompass Sufi leaders and cannot be reduced to a corporate group
or to a professional identity. They represent those cultural elites who, basing
their credentials on some ‘orthodox’ form of knowledge and leadership, are best
positioned – thanks not only to their education but also to their social prestige –
to shape a public space by providing services of various kinds. The diversity of
opinions among them on various issues of both practical signifi cance and con-
ceptual relevance and the ensuing disagreements made them compete for the
support of the restricted public of their peers (al-khassa) on the more theoretical
questions, and of the commoners (al-amma), on the questions of public interest
(Rahman [1966] 1979: 261–2).
The modern state facing ‘religion’
The dominant model of modernity – combining economic factors linked to the
rise of capitalism, socio-political dynamics related to the formation of increas-
ingly centralised and bureaucratised states, and cultural orientations putting a
premium on individual and collective autonomy – refl ects the historical experi-
ence of European societies or, better, of some key fragments of north-western
Europe. The same applies to the concept of religion, which, in the form inherited
from different branches of the social sciences – chiefl y from the sociology of
religion – took sharp contours in the course of the same modern political trans-
formations and happened to refer to a differentiated – mostly though not always
privatised – sphere. These processes set the West European pattern of political
modernity apart from any alleged ‘alternative modernity’, Islamic or otherwise.
It suffi ces here, in the last part of this chapter, to sum up the peculiar rela-
tionship between tradition and modernity in the crystallisation of the European
hegemony over the modern world. The genesis of European modernity was
characterised, not by a sudden collapse, but rather by an implosion and radi-
calisation of key motives of axial traditions. At fi rst, this process consisted of
attempts to revitalise tradition. Yet most such attempts quickly exhausted the
internal resources of tradition and provided impetus to fresh visions that fed
into newly emerging power formations directly or indirectly tied to the modern
state. In particular, the radicalisation of the social and political transformations
initiated during the ecumenical renaissance led the religious reformers of the
early modern era to stress the innerwordly components of traditions. These
movements launched political challenges to institutional authority on the basis
of reasons of the ‘spirit’. In the process of upholding such reasons in a world that
increasingly recognised the autonomous sovereignty of politics as incarnated in
the modern state, the seeds were laid for fundamentalism, which emerged as an
essential component of the antinomies of the modern order (Eisenstadt 2000b).