18 Islam and Modernity
‘Religion’ and ‘politics’ are two poles of human endeavour constantly implying
- and impinging on – each other. To sum up, while the axial breakthrough dis-
solves the archaic unity of religion and politics (Gauchet [1985] 1997), ‘the civi-
lisational potential of religious traditions and transformations is most effectively
realised in conjunction with political structures’ (Arnason 2006b: 104).
In this sense, all civilisations that claim an axial pedigree, including Islam,
are structured via a differentiation between the two realms and reinstitute a
much more dynamic relationship between the sphere of culture, now centred
on transcendent visions, and the power incorporated in institutional arrange-
ments. In this framework, momentous new foundations of religions like the
rise of Christianity and the emergence of Islam should be considered as
re-combinations and new systematisations of older axial repertoires. These
legacies provided patterns for distinguishing, and yet reconnecting, the realms
of religion and politics. Religion is here not an autonomous sphere, bur rather a
meta-institutional source of a new, immaterial dimension of human power and
a fi eld for its contestation. The way power is related to its ideational underpin-
nings and modes of cultural articulation is subject to variation across differ-
ent religious traditions. The emerging authorities within the newly instituted
religious traditions – church leaders in the Christian case, more diffuse and
less institutionalised authoritative roles in the Islamic case – struggled against
heterodox challenges via the creation of more solid orthodoxies than it had
been possible in the original axial breakthrough. In this way, they were able to
upgrade the universalistic potential of older traditions and effectively transcend
consolidated civilisational boundaries.
The consolidation of Islam and the emergence of the
commoner as the carrier of the common good
A balanced assessment of Islam’s specifi c contribution to the axial framework
could be that, for being the last and most consciously managed manifestation
of the axial civilisational breakthrough within the Western part of the Afro-
Eurasian hemisphere, Islam also marks the triumph of the ‘commoner’. This
motif had already been central to the preaching and teaching of key axial
characters such as Isaiah and Socrates but had remained underappreciated
in further developments. Islam incorporated from its origin the idea of a new,
synthetic re-pristination of key aspects of those axial features that promoted a
human orientation to the ‘common good’. It brought about their, so to speak,
mainstreaming and universalisation across a broad transcivilisational ecumene
cutting through Europe, North Africa, the Near and Middle East and other
regions situated further east and south-east across the depths of the Eurasian
continent. The Greek philosophical heritage had a substantial infl uence on key
aspects of Islamic traditions and was more harmoniously amalgamated with the