Tradition and Modernity 13that culminated in its hegemony over the modern world – had such a clear-cut
notion of religion. If Islam also lacks a comparable word or idea, it shares a noble
company. The Islamic keyword din, usually considered the closest equivalent to
‘religion’, is more complex and diffuse and less functionally streamlined than its
Latin counterpart. Instead of designating a functional bond between men and
gods benefi cial to the health of the state, din indicates the somewhat open part-
nership between man and God and the potentially constructive moral tension
emanating from it. Starting from this basic meaning, din also encompasses other
layers of signifi cation, one of which denotes the way to be followed for human
beings to reach God (a meaning close to sharia), while another meaning focuses
the moment of judgment, as in the Quranic notion of yawm al-din, the Day of
Judgment.
In Western Europe the tension between the focus on a state function and
the insistence on the soul’s privileged relation to God and its salvation was left
unresolved, until, with the constitution of the modern state a compromise was
struck between the state’s control of the religious fi eld and the sovereignty of
the soul, between publicness and inwardness. This normative arrangement
is, however, unnecessary from the viewpoint of the historic dynamics through
which the Islamic din was incorporated within socio-political structures. The din
(‘religion’) and the dawla (‘state’) designed distinct though at times overlapping
fi elds of social activity and production of human value. Interestingly, perhaps,
the conceptual pair comes close to the way culture and power are conceptual-
ised within comparative civilisational analysis: not as the facing of church and
state intended as two separate institutions, nor of the private and the public as
two distinct spheres, but as two poles of activity and sources of value that per-
manently contribute to each other’s defi nition while retaining their principled
autonomy.
The reasons why Islam has often represented a civilisational model neatly
contrasting with the European historical trajectory of transformation of religion
and of its relations to the state cannot be reduced to cultural asymmetries, to
a divergence of linguistic sensibilities or even to an alleged defi cit of Islamic
traditions to turn the tension inherent in the God–man relation into a socially
fruitful and politically progressive differentiation of societal spheres. The West
European tendency to insulate Islam as a convenient Other within easy grasp
has paradoxically to do with the closeness and density of interaction and com-
petition with the Islamic civilisation and the related political centres more than
to any purported cultural distance or radical civilisational alterity. As much as
it denies mutual interaction and exchange, essentialism is the product of them.
Therefore, if the sociology of religion of European origin is intimately connected
with the sociology of modernity, which has been primarily understood as a dis-
tinctive product of European civilisation, then Islam is both internal and exter-
nal to this historical trajectory: while it constitutes an ensemble of social and