Revisiting Weber and Islam

When I published ‘Islam, capitalism and the Weber thesis’ in the BJS in 1974 (Turner 2010 1974a), there was relatively little written about Weber's comparative sociology of religion and even less about his fragmented commentary on Islam. At the time the principal exception was probably Maxime Rodinson'sIslam and Capitalism (1978 1966) which had first appeared in France in 1966. Weber had not of course produced a full length study of Islam to match his research on the religions of South Asia and China (Weber 1951 and 1958a). I had come to study this aspect of Weber's sociology following a series of lectures on comparative religion at the University of Leeds by Professor Trevor Ling whose approach to the historical sociology of religious institutions inspired me to study Islam within a similar framework (Ling 1968). My BJS article therefore laid the foundations for a much more ample treatment of the issues in my Weber and Islam (Turner 1974) which appeared in the same year and which was generously reviewed by Ernest Gellner (1975) in Population Studies. One might say that these early steps in fact laid the foundation of my subsequent academic career. There has unsurprisingly been in the intervening three and a half decades a steady stream of commentary on both Weber's sociology of religion and his observations on Islam, but despite the sustained criticism his sociological approach has not been radically surpassed in comparative sociological studies of religion. This assertion is fully justified in the light of such outstanding contemporary publications employing Weber's conceptual framework as Stephen Sharot'sA Comparative Sociology of World Religions (2001). The literature on Weber's sociology of religion is now substantial, but it is also critical. Suffice it to say that Weber's vision of ‘Asian religions’ has been condemned as an example of Orientalism in which a dynamic West is contrasted with and counter-posed to a stagnant East. The debate about Orientalism was ignited by Edward Said'sOrientalism in 1978 and this general critique of western scholarship was followed by more specific assessments of the Weber legacy as an example of sociological Orientalism (Eisenstadt 1985; Lehmann and Ouedraogo 2003; Love 2000; Salvatore 1996). Despite these criticisms, Weber's approach remains valid as a general framework, partly because, while Said's account of Orientalism provided some valuable criticisms, it did not provide – and probably did not set out to provide – a convincing or systematic alternative. It is not clear what concrete methodological directives follow from the Orientalist critique apart from some general recommendations about being more self-reflexive about underlying assumptions or sensitive to persistent and recurrent bias or critical of hidden racist assumptions, but these prescriptions are hardly original or controversial. What comes after the critique of Orientalism apart from more textual deconstruction? Perhaps the most substantial commentary on Weber's study of Islam came from Wolfgang Schluchter'sMax Webers Sicht des Islams (1987) which was subsequently translated as Max Weber and Islam (Huff and Schluchter 1999). The contributions to this collection were overwhelmingly critical of Weber, but there was also considerable disagreement over the actual value of Weber's approach. While Weber's description of Islam as ‘a warrior religion’ was criticized, Toby Huff and Patricia Crone pointed to the social importance of slave armies (‘the slaves on horses’) and jihad in the formative period of Islamic expansion. Subsequent research has also rejected the relevance of Weber's version of the church-sect typology as an ideal type of Islamic institutions and reformist movements. In addition it is clear that the historical development of Islam cannot be explained merely by military coercion. The spread of Islam in Bengal for example demonstrated that the appeal of Islam was the work of charismatic individuals and an outcome of the peaceful evolution of a pious ideal among the peasantry, while the emergence of Islam in South-east Asia was the work of itinerant traders and preachers. Weber's theory of patrimonial bureaucracies however finds some support in recent historical research on the institutionalization of rulership under the Mughals of India. But let us turn briefly to what Weber actually argued with respect to Islam. First he attempted to understand the role of Muhammad as an ethical prophet, whose revelations in the Qur'an challenged the traditional values of Arab society. This analysis was part of a more general study of religious authority, of which the charismatic breakthrough was the major dimension. Weber's view of the Prophet in comparison with his sympathetic analysis of the Old Testament prophets in Ancient Judaism (1952) was clearly not complimentary and he was more impressed by the Prophet as a military leader and the founder of a state. Secondly, Weber was interested in a related set of issues about the relationship between religious and secular power, namely the issue of caesaropapism. The prophetic Abrahamic religions of revelation in principle stand in opposition to the empirical world where violence, injustice and cruelty are dominant. The problem with all revealed religions that promulgate an ethic of charity and mercy is the establishment of religious authority over secular processes of political power and economic activity. This never- ending struggle between the ideal world of the community of brotherly love and the brutal reality of everyday life has been the principal religious leverage towards social change in human societies. These tensions between sacred values and the empirical world of brutal violence pre-occupied Weber throughout his life as an issue central to ethical debate. These tensions around the idea of brotherly love are explored in the recently translated biography of Weber by Joachim Radkau (2009) but interestingly Radkau's otherwise exhaustive study contains no specific references to Weber's interest in Islam. Thirdly Weber provided a comprehensive account of Islamic law which contributed a further illustration of the dynamic relationships between revelation and the rationalization of Muslim orthodoxy in the tradition (sunna) of the Prophet known through a chain of authority of witnesses (isnad). This tradition is the hadith and Islam came to be constituted around the law, the book and the prophet. More precisely, orthodox Islam is the religion of the beaten path (sunna) of the Prophet. Weber came to argue that this closure of interpretation in Islamic religion (ijtihad) became a major ideological barrier to social change because the gap between law and reality could only be resolved through ad hoc legal decision-making. Fourthly, Weber claimed that the city in the West had distinctive features that promoted the rise of citizenship and democratic civil institutions (Weber 1958b) By contrast the city in the Middle East was essentially a military camp in which tribal and familial allegiances had never been totally broken down by the idea of religious belonging. The Middle Eastern city could not therefore have emerged as the foundation of autonomous civil institutions to limit the power of the state. His study of urban conditions in fact constituted a theory of proto-citizenship. These four core dimensions of Weber's analysis were the foundations of what has proved to be an exceptionally comprehensive and enduring approach to the history of Islamic civilizations. To express this core more succinctly, we might suggest that Weber's sociology of religion was primarily concerned to understand the consequences of personal piety. In this light, the sociology of religion should examine fundamental differences between religious traditions in terms of the emergence of a pious self. Following the perspective of Marshall G. S. Hodgson, the core of Christian belief was a world view constructed around the idea of personal responsiveness to redemptive love and the historical actions of a personal God, imminent in a corrupt human society through a series of dramatic sacrificial acts. By contrast, the core of Islamic faith was the demand for personal responsibility towards God who has established a transcendental framework for moral order through the revelation of law. The unity of what Hodgson (1960) called ‘Islamicate culture’ was developed through this ‘Sharia-mindedness’– an ethical orientation constituting the inner conscience of Muslim piety, and expressing opposition to the hierarchical and despotic systems of power that characterized the Mughal, Safavi and Ottoman empires (Hodgson 1974). It was the pious and learned scholars (ulama) who developed the religious activities that cultivated this Sharia-mindedness as the major religious impulse in Islam against the corrosive consequences of bureaucratic state power. I am of course in outlining a cultural sociology of piety suggesting that Weber's notion of personality and life orders can be interpreted as equivalent to the idea of a ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault 1997: 224). Sharia-mindedness requires discipline to produce a special type of personality and hence Sharia-consciousness involves a technology of self understanding. What is missing in both Weber and Foucault is the recognition that the construction of piety, especially in modern reformist Islam, owes a great deal to the role of women in the transmission of piety across the generations. This issue has become a major topic of modern research (Mahmood 2005; Tong and Turner 2008). I shall conclude by referring to some gaps in this Weberian tradition which have emerged as fertile grounds for new research. Weber's sociology of Islam, given his historical sources, was largely directed at the Middle East to the neglect of south-east Asian Islam. The same research bias still exists today and hence we need more research that might test Weber's approach against social and cultural developments in Malaysia and Indonesia – the most populous Muslim society. Weber's cultural analysis nevertheless remains pertinent to issues in the region for example with respect to the so-called ‘Asian values’ debate and to the revival of religion in China and Vietnam. With the evolving debate about religious terrorism especially after 9/11, the research landscape around Islam changed dramatically with an overwhelming interest in radical or political Islam as illustrated for example by the research of Mark Juergensmeyer in Terror in the Mind of God (2003). However, the balance of research is now out of kilter. There is too much research focused on fundamentalism and on the radicalization and alienation of Muslim youth. By contrast some of the most significant contributions to our understanding of Muslims in the modern world have shown that the majority are mainstream and moderate (Pew 2007). We need therefore more systematic research on diasporic Muslim communities in the West rather than a concentration on radicalism in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia. In addition, important research is now emerging on popular culture and Muslim youth and the role of the media in orchestrating religious debates on the Internet and in public culture (Eickelmann and Anderson 2003). These contemporary issues necessarily lie outside of the terrain of Max Weber's sociology. In retrospect, we can say that my article was valuable in attempting to sort out the complexity of Weber's argument and its application to Islam. It was analytically useful in seeking to distinguish between Weber's treatment of Islam as a failed case of inner-worldly asceticism and his political sociology of Islamic states and empires. In proposing a distinction between different versions of the Protestant Ethic thesis and the broader Weber thesis, I attempted to defend the relevance of Weber's study of patrimonial bureaucracies and the peculiar features of the social structure of early Islam, while being critical of Weber's account of early Islam as a ‘warrior religion’. The over-riding problem in Weber's account is that Islam has many of the characteristics of an inner-worldly ascetic religion and hence one might expect a relationship between Islam and capitalism. Looking back at this debate and my own BJS article, there are a large number of empirical and theoretical issues that still have to be addressed if we are to improve our understanding of what we might call the cultural sociology of capitalism.