Tradition and Modernity 5Bernard Lewis (2002) was not the fi rst author to ask the question What Went
Wrong? with regard to Islam. The limits of the arguments inhere in the question
itself, which is formulated and asked from the specifi c viewpoint of a long-term
Western hegemony extended over the entire modern world. It is a question that
already presupposes the uniqueness of the Western path to modernity.
There are two strategies that can challenge this entrenched bias. One
approach lays the stress on the importance to theorise about tradition before
analysing patterns of modernity. The other option reframes the issue of moder-
nity in terms of partly competing and partly overlapping patterns of modernity,
or ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000a). Under specifi c conditions, which
I will attempt to spell out, the two strategies might converge in delivering a dif-
ferent view on the potentials and limits of an ‘Islamic modernity’. This is the
combined approach pursued in this chapter and more broadly in the book,
an approach that is largely indebted to comparative civilisational analysis, an
emerging branch of study that tries to create a meaningful nexus between the
work of historians and the refl ections of social theorists (Arnason 2003).
Let us start with the notion of ‘tradition’. Recuperating a viable concept of
tradition is a necessary condition for overcoming the reductionist, evolutionist
and Eurocentric viewpoint that has marred most of the analyses of the relation-
ship between Islam and modernity. Tradition is a more specifi c concept than
the more general idea of ‘culture’. Tradition should not be understood as non-
refl exive, primordial culture but, more dynamically, as the ensemble of practices
and arguments that secure the social bond and provide cohesiveness to human
communities of varying scale. We need to disentangle the notion of tradition
from its lopsided identifi cation with all manifestations of socio-economic stag-
nation and blind dependence on unquestioned authority. In this sense, tradi-
tion is not the opposite of modernity intended as the manifestation of human
autonomy and creativity.
Yet the idea of tradition as a static, primordial culture is widespread in the
social sciences. Tradition thus conceived represents the internal limit of moder-
nity, what modernity falls back upon when it fails to deliver its promises of politi-
cal autonomy and cultural creativity. Accordingly, tradition is described as an
almost inertial terrain of human action. Depending on whether tradition nests
in non-Western communities or in civilisations of the past, its investigation is
consigned to ethnographic research or to philological analysis. Such a negative
notion of tradition has often been identifi ed with ‘religion’, which then happens to
be viewed in its most archaic forms. In this perspective, tradition is nothing more
than the iteration of the ritual constitution of communities, a mechanism that
excludes a capacity of innovation and prevents a transformation of communitar-
ian cohesion into more abstract and differentiated forms of the social bond, those
considered proper of modern societies. In contrast to this approach, I propose an
understanding of tradition and modernity neither as antithetical modes of social