Tradition and Modernity 23components of Persian and Turkic origin. This period also witnessed the unfold-
ing of the heterodox challenges of Shii groups and potentates towards the Sunni
‘orthodoxy’. This dynamic will be carried over into the modern era with the
rivalry between the Sunni Ottoman empire and Safavid Iran, which became the
new stronghold of Shia.
The most signifi cant commonality between Latin Christendom and Islamdom
during the ecumenical renaissance was represented by the rise of mystically
oriented movements drawing on the imagination and needs of the common-
ers, including city-dwellers. These movements, though potentially heterodox,
were for the most part integrated into the orthodox mainstream and affected its
institutional confi guration both within Latin Christianity and Sunni Islam, with
enduring consequences lasting till our days. They were equally signifi cant, in
both civilisational realms, in their work fi nalised to enhancing the social salience
of the commoners and their desires for a renewal of norms and lifestyles within
wider socio-economic trends spurning urban economies and cross-regional
trade (Arjomand 2004; Rahimi 2006). More than highlighting the divergent
paths of Western Europe and the Muslim world in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries, we should stress the importance of a comparative view of this
age of ecumenical renaissance between both civilisational areas. A better per-
spective for illustrating the paradigm of ‘multiple modernities’ can be the result
of this analysis, which outlines a signifi cant background to the investigation of
the relations between Islam and modernity provided in the following chapters.
In Europe the rise of heretical movements and the simultaneous emergence
of radical mendicant orders – in particular during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries – manifested the pressures, on ecclesiastical institutions, of the practi-
cal necessities and aspirations of renewal that spread among the popular classes
and the rising urban middle classes. A similar role was played within Islam
by Sufi sm and the struggles surrounding its co-optation into the new forms
of orthodoxy. Through subsequent waves, not only of military conquest, but
also of religious conversion (that were in most cases temporally dissociated
from each other), Islamdom became during this epoch a simultaneously Euro-
Mediterranean and Asian ecumene, building a strong presence in Central
Asia, in parts of China and especially in India, while also reaching out as far as
South East Asia. On account of political and economic power, as mentioned at
the beginning of this chapter, the cumulative result of the transformations that
took place during this period of renaissance prepared the terrain for a peak of
Muslim ascendancy on a world scale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(Hodgson 1974, 1993).
During the ecumenical renaissance Sufi sm became ubiquitous in the Muslim
world thanks to a fresh wave of diffusion and institutionalisation of mystical
paths as practised in the brotherhoods (turuq). Sufi sm increasingly represented
the most powerful challenge to the hegemony of the jurists. Later it will become