The Attractiveness of Muslim Culture: Light notes on Hodgson' seminal work: Venture of Islam
‘Cultural gradient’ is one term Hodgson used to explain a facet
of the spread of Islam across wide areas in Asia and Africa. ‘Cultural
gradient’ according to Hodgson is a process where “elements of culture tended
to move from the most cosmopolitan centers to the most isolated.”[1] This may sound rather
counter intuitive given the natural inclination of people to migrate to where
wealth and power are concentrated. Marginal or peripheral areas tend in general
to be emitters not receptors of migrant influxes. Hodgson points to a scenario
where the material and intellectual wealth endemic to the centers spills over
to “smaller towns…and the countryside…and even [get] into the remotest region,”[2] through human
migration. Indeed, such a spillover is not always made of wealthy
men risking what they have to see new territories, nor was it comprised
entirely of men who were driven by a sense of mission, even though a percentage
of these moved to wherever they felt their mission will achieve some success.
Expectedly, with the passage of time attractive centers lost their attraction after
the opportunities they had initially generated became scares and outnumbered by
those searching for them. Recent migrants from less stable regions, the
new generation which emerge from within these centers and those of lower
classes who stood to gain little or nothing from remaining in such centers all
eventually saw the need to move elsewhere as they were unable to carve in spaces
wide enough to accommodate their hopes and dreams. The ‘opening’ through trade
or raid of a new territory presented a frontier of hope, a road to prosperity
and a safety valve (against class clash) that did not exist otherwise.
This movement from centers to peripheries leads to the
propagation of the intellectual systems that prevailed in the old centers to
wherever the new migrants settled. Applying this model to Islamic history,
Hodgson noted that “After an area came under Muslim rule Muslim cadres quickly
formed. Traders, administrators, architects, poets, wandering Sufis, soldiers, ‘Alids
…all tended to drift into the newly opened territories to take advantage of
fresh opportunities.”[3] Of the new comers
“adventurers were attracted by a freshly unsettled situation where everyone
with quick wits and a Muslim name might hope to make his fortune…[and] very
soon mosques were built and towns took on an Islamicate veneers.”[4]
This process brings to mind Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis on
the role of ‘Frontiers’ in American culture. Turner’s thesis, which he
formulated around the end of the 19th century, stipulates that the
American character has been defined by the ‘Frontier Experience.’[5] Frontiers, that is the
prospect of shifting, expanding and never ending frontiers provided both a
physical and intellectual space to ‘break the bonds of customs,’ to create new
institutions and hence to prevent social clash. The end of the era of
expanding frontiers brought to the fore social tensions, questions of big
magnitude that dominated the American scene for the first half of the 20th
century. Evidently, Hodgson must have been aware of this thesis and
deliberately chose not to allude to it. Perhaps Hodgson decided against such
comparison because of the apparent and essential difference between the two,
namely the violent and bloody nature of the westward expansion in the US
history. As Hodgson rightly noted Islamic expansion was realized in part by the
use of peaceful means such as commercial and intellectual interactions. Another
crucial difference resides in the fact that even when the initial Muslim
capture of an area was achieved by military means, the ultimate conversion
takes place in leaps and bonds in peaceful times and even as Muslim lose the
political control of the area. In contrast, the westward expansion in the US
was a colonial mission (not a cultural one), where locals were dispossessed and
often purged out.
However, there are some striking similarities between this
process and the one described by Hodgson above. More importantly, Hodgson overlooked
the impact of exploring new frontiers on the development of Muslim societies
(beyond gaining new converts). Here is where Turner’s thesis could have offered
some useful insights to understanding not just the impact of the migration once
a new frontier was discovered, but also the energy that made the search for a
new frontier a recurrent phenomenon, a social and political necessity.
There is also another point that was not explored in Hodgson
treatment of the issue and its may help explain why certain centers rose to
prominence only to loss such status in a short period. It may be instructive in
trying to understand why different aspects of life have never been developed,
why whole areas of sciences and technology never been explored despite the
presence of an opportune scholastic and material environment to explore them.
On the positive side the presence of frontiers provided a relief
for social and political pressures that accumulated when the once abundant
opportunities in urban centers have ceased to exist or in the least shrank—thereby
closing the avenues for class mobility and creating thus the potential for
social agitations. But on the other hand, the presence of such shifting
frontiers emptied towns of their young and energetic minds that could have
invented new scientific or political methods that would have, in turn,
ameliorated the efficiency of resource management and consequently improved the
conditions of their own communities. It is often the closure of horizons that
unleashes the 'fever pitch' of human ingenuity!
[5] - For further info on this see The Significance of the
Frontier in American History, by the American historian Frederick Jackson
Turner (d. 1932).
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