Tradition and Modernity 15The breakthrough of prophetic religions and the rise of Islam
Locating Islam within the fi eld of civilisational analysis might be greatly facili-
tated by referring to the approach thus far known as ‘Axial Age theory’. This
strand of theory was initiated by such scholars – variably linked to Max Weber
and Weberian circles in Heidelberg – as Karl Jaspers, Alfred Weber and
Eric Voegelin. The theory rests on the hypothesis of a radical transformation
of social life facilitated by the fi rst basic differentiation of social fi elds out of
archaic, holistic communities regulated by cyclical patterns and mythical views
of the cosmological order, and out of the archaic states that took shape in some
regions where irrigated agriculture fl ourished in organised forms, such as Egypt
and Mesopotamia. This approach is particularly suitable to explain the inven-
tion or discovery of ‘transcendence’ across various civilisations in ways that
highlight their plural and interactive dimension. The qualifi cation of this histori-
cal, comparative and theoretical approach as ‘axial’ and its original reference to
a specifi c ‘age’ are due to the fact that the philosopher of history Jaspers wanted
to revise Hegel’s dictum defi ning Christ as the ‘axis’ of human history. Jaspers
overcame this euro-(Christo)-centric approach by considering not the advent of
the Christ, but an epochal upheaval, cutting through the fi rst millennium BCE
and spreading across various Eurasian civilisations, as the axis of human history,
and thus deserving to be called ‘axial’ (Jaspers [1949] 1953).
Especially in its Western components – intended as embracing the wider
Euro-Mediterranean area and its adjacent civilisational cradles of the Fertile
Crescent, and therefore also embracing what is conventionally designated as the
Near and Middle East, including the Irano-Semitic region – a new type of reli-
gion emphasising a transcendent God became a key arrow of the axial transfor-
mations and of the civilisational impetus originating from them. This is clearly
the case for Hebrew prophecy, but it also concerns Greek culture, including
philosophy, which articulates transcendence in original ways (Eisenstadt 1982).
Transcendence matters here, sociologically and not theologically, for facilitating
the emergence of human agency through what is conventionally identifi ed as
the transition from mythos to logos or the emergence of human refl exivity out of a
holistic and symbolically dense view of cosmic order. The idea of transcendence
associated in particular with monotheistic religions helps in constructing values
that transcend the human activities tied to the daily necessities, the ‘world’ as it
appears: it projects beyond it another possible world. The main novelty of the
axial breakthrough resides in ‘the capacity of human beings to refl ect upon and
give expression to an image of the world as having the potential of being differ-
ent from what it was perceived to be here and now’ (Wittrock 2005: 262).
In this approach the religious dimension of civilisation is spelled out in terms
that are familiar to social-science categories, without becoming squeezed into
the narrower paradigms of the sociology of religion. The Axial Age theory