The Formation of Islam Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800

In a book entitled Medieval Islam: A Study in Cultural Orientation, the Orientalist G. E. von Grunebaum asserted that the difference between medieval and modern societies, in the Islamic Near East as well as in Christian Europe, could be located most clearly in the shift in the locus of social identity. In the “Middle Ages,” he said, religious affiliation was the fundamental component of an individual's outlook, and of his and others' understanding of his place in the world. Only on a secondary level would he think of himself as rooted in a local society, or bound to some local center of political power. And only as an afterthought might he think of himself as part of a larger national or ethnic community. “The gradual reversal of the strength of these loyalties,” von Grunebaum argued, “marks the close of the Middle Ages.” Like many grand themes of Orientalist scholarship, von Grunebaum's observation perhaps contains a certain truth. But it also obscures a great deal through over-simplification. As we have seen, the question of religious identity, even as late as what we have called the “Middle Period,” was in fact a complex matter, and its complexity did not evaporate in the years after its close. Moreover, as anyone who reads a newspaper in the early twenty-first century knows, it is by no means clear that, of religious, local, and national identities, the former has been relegated to a place of insignificance.