12 Islam and Modernity
basically coincided with the formation of organised community life. In countries
like France and Germany, comparative linguistics and comparative mythology
competed with text criticism and history in situating the forces of religion in the
constitution and reproduction of human society. Anthropology and sociology
fi nally joined in the fi eld of exploration and defi nition of the overlapping dimen-
sions of religion. In the emerging paradigm of the sociology of Emile Durkheim
and his school, religion became the overarching category for investigating the
nature of the collective forces providing cohesion to society via successive – ever
more abstract and in this sense rational – models of solidarity (Durkheim [1912]
1967; Tarot 1999).
The development and institutionalisation of the academic study of Islam and
the rise of Islamic Studies throughout Europe was integral to this development
(Stauth 1993). Biblical criticism played an additional role in this trajectory, pro-
viding the model for the study of the texts of the Islamic tradition (Asad 2003;
Johansen 2004). Yet the defi nition and typologisation of Islam as the cultural
source of a distinctive civilisation also played an explicit or implicit role in
the work of several social theorists who were not specialists of Islamic Studies.
Thus the study of Islam became integral to the concerns not only of language
and area specialists, but also of scholars within social-science disciplines, who
considered Islam as the closest unity of comparison for the defi nition of the
parameters of the social theory of religion. These parameters have since the
nineteenth century been moulded by refl ections on the long-term trajectory
of the civilisation of Latin Christendom in Western Europe, often starting
from Late Antiquity, passing through the Middle Ages and reaching up to the
early modern Reformation and Wars of Religion and the gradual affi rmation
of largely secular states and secularised societies via the Enlightenment. The
emerging parameters for the study of religion were part and parcel of the defi ni-
tion of the identity of Western Europe, or even of the ‘West’ or ‘Occident’.
The genealogy of religion within the Western path to modernity reached
as far back to the Roman civilisation: not surprisingly, since religio is not only a
Latin word, but also one imbued with a specifi cally Roman idea of what is due
to the gods by the Roman citizens in exchange for the function played by the
gods in the ritual constitution of both authority and community. As a specifi c
word and as an increasingly important concept, religio underwent far-reaching
transformations within Latin Christendom after the collapse of the Roman
Empire. Yet the seeds of its originally functionalist meaning have been retained
to our days. In a modern context the function of religion can be fl exibly shifted
back and forth between the religion of the state and the religion of the subject,
between publicness and inwardness (Tenbruck 1993).
It is important to note that neither the Greeks nor the Hebrews – mostly
invoked as the two civilisations of the ancient world that have provided the
key sources to the identity of the West throughout the long-term trajectory