Tradition and Modernity 7appreciation of pre-modern religion for providing fundamental, though still
defective, notions of solidarity (Durkheim [1912] 1967). By conceiving of tradi-
tion either as an impediment to modernisation or as a resource to it, traditions
are conceptualised from the viewpoint of a preconfi gured path to modernity.
Their viability is subjected to the parameters of judgement (nowadays often
called ‘conditionalities’) of modernising agencies linked to states, international
organisations and capitalist markets.
The necessary condition for overcoming these limitations and opening up a
path for appreciating the culturally pluralistic dimension of modernity and in
particular the specifi c way Islamic civilisation has engaged with modernity is to
deepen the attempt to reformulate the notion of tradition. We can benefi t from
an understanding of tradition as a bundle of arguments, concepts and practices
motivating the social agents (MacIntyre 1988). Tradition thus conceived is
essential to social action, communication and even cultural and institutional
innovation. It would be diffi cult to conceive of the social bond without referring
to the working of tradition demarcating a fi eld of practice whose maintenance
depends on adequate mechanisms of transmission and renewal of knowledge
through generations (Calhoun 1992; Salvatore 2007a).
This view of tradition can be enriched with Jürgen Habermas’s understand-
ing of the connective tissue linking social agents, which is integral to their life-
world and fosters their mutual recognition (Habermas [1981] 1987). Habermas’s
focus is on the sharing of motivations to action via patterns of communication
and understanding. The least common denominator between the approaches
of MacIntyre and Habermas – two among the leading social thinkers of the last
third of the twentieth century – provides us with a view of tradition that lays
stress on the communicative competencies that agents acquire by their engage-
ment with a set of practices and the corresponding learning processes activated
via communication and refl ection (Doody 1991). Here lies the bottom line for a
defi nition of tradition rooted in the micro-dimension of social action and social
relations. We thus avoid falling back onto a minimalist notion of tradition of the
type illustrated above, a view that is negatively charged by its unilateral empha-
sis on a macro-sociological dimension of socio-political change that is basically
blind to human difference.
Yet our goal to create a more equitable ground to assess Islam’s relations
to modernity cannot renounce capturing a macro-sociological dimension of
tradition that avoids the above-mentioned pitfalls. Not surprisingly, this is
possible through a theoretical opening to the long under-theorised concept
of civilisation. Johann P. Arnason’s civilisational theory is key in this respect.
Arnason’s approach strikes a balance between civilisation in the singular, that is,
modernity as a global civilising process in the sense highlighted by Norbert Elias
([1939, 1976] 1982) – a process that also confi gures the programme to overcome
civilisational differences – and civilisation in the plural, that is, a world of diverse