Читать книгу Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit - Bruce B. Lawrence - Страница 8

In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the blogger Riverbend observed: “What is civilization? It’s not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers, and McDonalds. It’s having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs …”¹

How do we define civilization as the deepest recognition of mutual and interactive sanctities? Riverbend’s shibboleth is mine: finding the connection and fostering the opportunity to recognize, then engage seeming opposite, even hostile others who are no less human for being unlike us.

No global civilization can exclude Islam, but how to include it? The search for an inclusive civilizational ethos worthy of the name reached a tipping point for me in the United Kingdom last year. It was mid-February 2019. I was at the University of Exeter as a visiting scholar in residence. We had just completed a 2-hr lunchtime workshop. I got to pick the topic and the title for the talk. My title: “Islamicate Cosmopolitan?”

The title, posed as a question, was intended to be provocative. What is Islamicate? And who qualifies as an Islamicate cosmopolitan?

After an intense exchange that went beyond the usual lunch hour, we were about to disperse when a senior colleague asked: “So what?”

“So what?!” I rejoined, in surprise.

“You have made our lunch hour into two hours,” he joked, adding “You have reflected on all the options and argued for a new tongue twister—Islamicate cosmopolitan. But do you really feel that this phrase is an epistemic turn worth pursuing? Where can one find a guide for the perplexed, some text illumining our understanding of both Islamicate and its coordinate term, cosmopolitan?”

This manifesto is my answer to my colleague’s challenge. My motive is also my hope: to enliven each term with the other, Islamicate as cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan as Islamicate. But each needs a further referent, and so I am introducing a still broader trope: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, itself the entry way to civilizational options at once inclusive and enduring.