The Dissonant Politics of Religion, Circulation and Civility in the Sociology of Islam

This chapter explores how the sociology of Islam can contribute to moving beyond looking at Muslim politics through the imperial and post-imperial lenses of Islam vs liberalism. Combining Marshall Hodgson’s sociologically nuanced narrative of the “venture of Islam” in history and a reinterpretation of Norbert Elias’ civilizing process, the study rearticulates Muslim politics in history as inherently rejecting those lenses. This is a type of politics investing in circulation rather than of drawing and policing the boundaries of polities, self-regulating selves, and domesticating and subjecting others. Far from nostalgically proposing a pre-Westphalian idyll immune to the dilemmas of how to cope with the aporias of liberalism, this contribution spells out how we can rebalance our political heuristics by investing in a sociological commentary on the virtues of transborder connectedness and global civility.