PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The sociology of Islam is an emerging, strategic field of inquiry, teaching, and debate located at the delicate intersection of a variety of disciplines, including sociology, history, Islamic Studies, anthropology, comparative religion, and comparative civilizational analysis. It deals both with conceptual questions and historical interpretations as they originated back in the 1970s, particularly in the pioneering work of Bryan S. Turner and his commentary on Marshall Hodgson's monumental trilogy The Venture of Islam. Covering this field of study is a longer-term undertaking that cannot be completed in one volume. This is why this book was born with an introductory intent and use value.

While the beginnings of the sociology of Islam should be traced back to Bryan S. Turner's Weber and Islam (Turner 1974), my own entry into the field as a scholar goes back to the early 1990s and coincides with the beginning of my PhD dissertation, which I completed at the European University Institute, Florence in 1994 and published in 1997 (Salvatore 1997). Yet my baptism of fire into the sociology of Islam occurred when I taught my first graduate seminar, in the winter of 1995, at Humboldt University, Berlin. The seminar was titled, in a kind of self-indulgent provocation, 'Is a Sociology of Islam Possible?'

Clearly, whatever the sociology of Islam was by the mid-1990s, it still appeared fragile, dependent on scattered contributions and intermittent collaborations among individual scholars. Still absent, or at best latent, was the sense of a nexus between historical and empirical work, on the one hand, and whatever we happen to call 'theory,' on the other. In the summer prior to that graduate seminar, right after my arrival in Berlin, I convened a small panel on the sociology of Islam at an international conference sponsored by the leading social science journal Theory, Culture and Society. The event took place, by sheer coincidence, in Berlin. The journal editor, Mike Featherstone, had months earlier suggested to me that I invite Bryan Turner and Georg Stauth as speakers to the panel. I had never met them before, though I had read a lot of what they had published, including their co-authored works. These included Nietzsche's Dance (Stauth and Turner 1988) which, though devoted to a philosopher, was largely an alternate reading of the genesis of sociology which was to have an impact on my own understanding of the sociology of Islam. During the panel, I was struck by the difference between Bryan's and Georg's papers (and, more generally, approaches), since I had until then strictly associated their names as scholars with each other, and both of them together with the sociology of Islam. Even more, from that point onward, I admired what they had accomplished together, by being able to build powerful synergies and by combining their different sociological geniuses. Twenty years later, I am still profoundly attracted to the scholarship of both Bryan Turner and Georg Stauth and my debt to them in my own venture into and across the sociology of Islam is correspondingly high.

Since the summer of 1995, Georg Stauth has been an invited speaker at every institution I have worked for. His assiduous presence and our serial conversations have fed into my endeavors to develop an original yet balanced approach to the sociology of Islam. Georg has consistently responded to my cultivation of his rich and complex scholarship by offering me the chance to co-edit with him the Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam until it ceased publication in 2008, and by inviting me to be a member of the research group he directed at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, on 'Islam and Modernity' between 2003 and 2006.

This trajectory of twenty years culminated in a conference that took place in June 2015, just a few weeks before this manuscript went into production. The conference's topic was quite straightforward, 'Sociology of Islam: Reflection, Revision, & Reorientation' and I contributed to it a paper on "The Sociology of Islam and the Rise of China." It was convened by the Sociology of Religion section of the German Sociological Association and took place at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) of Ruhr University, Bochum. The event was inaugurated by a keynote given by Bryan Turner which looked back at forty years of development in the field. Georg Stauth was not present and we missed his critical mind. His absence was for us a healthy warning on how the incessant, climactic politicization of Islam-related themes within the global public sphere presents a serious challenge to the sociology of Islam.

Yet this politicization is also a major reason why a viable sociology of Islam is urgently needed. As Bryan Turner reminded us in his introductory keynote, this field of study, born in the 1970s parallel to-yet independent from-the critique of Orientalism, was propped up by 9/11, alongside other academic fields dealing with Islam from the angle of modernity. The sociology of Islam should avoid being suffocated by this politicization while aiming to retain a scholarly significance and contemporary relevance by also speaking to the concerns of colleagues and students within political science and international relations, as much as it entertains key dialogues with scholars from history and anthropology. Not by chance does this introductory volume address the key dimension at stake in the majority of such conversations, namely power. I hope that this book, due to the consistent interdisciplinary porousness of the sociology of Islam from its beginnings, will attract the attention of practitioners of all academic disciplines concerned with power as well as that of a lay public interested in what-with a crude shorthand similar to those I tried to deconstruct in my PhD thesis more than twenty years ago-we often call 'political Islam.' This construct increasingly depends on Western-and more recently Chinese-perceptions and interests more than on the inner and outer complexities of the diverse social dynamics variably associated with Islam. The sociology of Islam does not ignore this interpretive syndrome but works to shield its object-namely the nexus of religion and civility produced by social forces associated with Islam-from the risk of a preventive, and potentially devastating politicization determined by the interests of powerful observers more than by the concerns of embattled actors.

In pursuing the goal of investigating the nexus of religion and civility, this introductory volume adopts a combined historical, theoretical, and comparative perspective, while it privileges key entanglements that push forward the classic boundaries of comparison. Historical references in the book are of crucial importance, yet by necessity selective. They reflect key periods, characters, or formations and illuminate particularly significant, long-term, and transregional processes of transformation. The main emphasis is on how social relations produce associational bonds and institutional configurations: therefore I opted to explore the unfolding of what I call 'the knowledge-power equation' and the way it produces patterns of civility. The book refers most consistently to the core 'Nile-to-Oxus' area of the Islamic ecumene and to its Central Asian and Mediterranean extensions.

While absolute comprehensiveness is unrealistic in a single, introductory volume, the trilogy that it intends to introduce (also in association with the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, a textbook that I have been editing together with Roberto Tottoli and Babak Rahimi over the last few years) will rebalance such initial regional and thematic foci. Ideally, the present volume should be followed by one dedicated to The Law, the State, and the Public Sphere and by a concluding study on Transnationalism, Transculturalism, and Globalization.

The book is primarily addressed to the same type of audiences and thematic discussions that generated it in the first place: classes of advanced undergraduate and graduate students on the one hand, and interdisciplinary explorations and debates with fellow scholars on the other. Social activists and policy analysts might also find inspiration in the proposed sociology of Islam for facilitating an understanding of Islam as a longer-term force providing a socio-cultural nexus and an institutional glue to a variety of relations and arrangements.

The Introduction situates the sociology of Islam in its historical and disciplinary context and provides a first discussion of the basic concepts used in the volume. Chapters 2 and 3 refer to the epoch that Marshall Hodgson (whose majestic historical trilogy provides the main source of inspiration for the sociology of Islam) called the Middle Periods (mid-10th to mid-15th centuries). Chapters 5 and 6 embrace early modernity and the colonial stage of late modernity. Chapters 1 and 7 discuss theoretical questions directly relevant to the analysis, while Chapter 4 adopts an explicitly comparative perspective. The Conclusion summarizes the results of the exploration while also providing an initial bridge to future studies and volumes.

Thanking all the colleagues who have directly or indirectly enriched my path through the sociology of Islam would appear as a replica of my email inbox of the last twenty and more years. In what follows, I remember as many as I can among my...