Contending Modernities and the Sociology of Islam. CANCELLED

The sociology of Islam has become a vital track of original research, in both historical and contemporary perspectives, on Muslim majority societies and Muslim minorities since after the 1980s, through establishing significant links to wider conceptual debates in social theory and cultural studies. This research program paralleled a larger sociological trend that privileged a comparative perspective in the exploration of modern developments and dilemmas in the West, East Asia, and the Muslim world, while also questioning (and reconstructing) the controversial notion of civilization.

The paper will argue that while the sociology of Islam benefits from a comparative perspective and a corresponding theoretical revision of Eurocentric postulates, it cannot be completely satisfied by them and should place its endeavors in a more explicit context of exploration of not just parallel and multiple, but of contending modernities. This field of study has thus the potential to unsettle evolutionist conceptions of modern society even more than purportedly anti-Eurocentric approaches and immanent critiques of modernity within social theory are able to do. This specific potential of the sociology of Islam is implemented by questioning the comparative perspective itself, to the extent it focuses on parallelisms and diversities more than on the complexity of entanglements (which are as much cultural as they are economic and political) between articulations of Western modernity and concurrent developments in the Muslim world.

The suggested path is to take charge of what is specific to Islam and Muslim actors vis-à-vis the parameters of Western-centered modernity without exceeding in any anti-essentialist immunisation, which if pushed too hard (e.g. as many scholars and analysts are doing under the impact of the recent and ongoing revolts in the Arab world) would bring us almost back to square one, i.e. to an absolutization of stale Western parameters of political, economic and cultural modernity.