16 Islam and Modernity
is itself the manifestation of the process through which a long-term essential-
ist and Eurocentric trend in describing the purportedly ‘normal’ trajectory of
differentiation between society and religion becomes open to contestations,
revisions and variations, by taking into account the formative experience of non-
European civilisations. Accordingly, the crucial breakthrough in human history
that is common to the civilisations of the West and East lies in a tension between
the mundane world of material needs and power drives, on the one hand, and
another world, indicated in the Western–Abrahamic, prophetic manifestations
of the axial breakthrough as the ‘hereafter’, on the other. Value is constructed as
an immaterial source of power facilitating repertoires of intersubjective under-
standing and connectedness between ego and alter basically alternative to those
taking form within the mundane sphere and that are mainly identifi ed with
structures of domination and modalities of accumulation of wealth: the fi eld of
material power at large. In many ways, the problem of how ego has to relate to
alter is refl ected in the problem of how the world has to be related to the after-
world. The inscription of ties of brotherhood and solidarity into the social bond
necessitated the projection of the human alter onto a transcendent Alter, usually
defi ned, within Western axial civilisations, as God. In this frame the transcend-
ence of Alter secures a permanent translation of the intersubjective tension
inherent in human action into generalised values and categorical obligations. In
a further step, transcendence also facilitates the construction of a public realm
where individual action is judged by criteria of accountability measured by its
fi tting into the common good of a given community or of humanity. Caring for
alter as manifested in the so-called Golden Rule summarising a human ethic
of reciprocity (from Leviticus to the teachings of Confucius) is the solution to
a tension that is perpetually recreated in human and social life. This tension
is ever and again framed in fresh narrative forms, as in prophetic speech or in
the teaching of sages, but also via philosophical refl ection that, most notably in
its Platonic orientation, also made use of symbols and narratives, reframed in a
dialogically refl exive fashion.
We can thus decouple transcendence from a cosmological typology and
consider it the engine of a specifi c type of discourse proclaiming the incom-
pleteness of the mundane order and the need to transcend it. In particular, the
axial discourse makes the power holders accountable to a transcendent power
or divinity, which takes over the traits of unitary and supreme majesty over the
cosmos, over human society and over the individual soul. The emergence of this
pattern of accountability was accompanied by an institutionalisation of theologi-
cal, juridical and philosophical discourses, and therefore by the crystallisation
of a basic differentiation in the leadership of socio-political communities. This
differentiation separating priests, scribes and scholars from the ruling class was
not unknown to pre-axial formations. But the novelty of the axial breakthrough
is that the cultural elites, which do not control the means of coercion and of