Islam and World-System

As an essentialist Hindu with all my situational ethics (or lack of
it), I think, the Samman, Stremlin, Sherman, Boles, Hussain and Wager
debate raises two kinds of problems: one ethical and the other
analytical. Our inability to make the distinction between the two
spheres, addressed to two different audiences, is why we may be
talking past each other.

Samman is responding to the immediate ethical need to historicize
Islam, relentlessly, and repeatedly, only because the hegemonic
discourse all around us, essentializes it endlessly. That is the
political task in the U.S. (may not be in other places - if I was a
Muslim in Afghanistan I may be talkling differently in the local
context).

Hussain, Sherman and Stermlin are addressing the WSN audience, where
it can be generally assumed that people do historicize and rarely
'blame the victim' - what Samman seems to be terrified about. Given
that, they move on to point to the problem of continuities and
discontinuities of our historical pasts. How much of our present is a
product of our past? How long does that past reach back? Does it vary
with various parts of our present? That is our analytical task and
separate from our immediate ethical task.

Boles and Wager, add another wrinkle to that problem of historical
dis/continuity, by adding the problem of the specificity of the local
and its relationship to the whole. How does the Islamic part, shape
the World-System? How does the W-S shape, inform, undermine the part?

Then there is the old, persistent, and unresolved problem of
structure and agency. Of course all of us know the problem, but we
cannot solve it, because it is one of those essential antimonies of
our existence - how constrained are we by our worlds, and as Marx said
how much do we make it in our own image. It depends: when, where,
who?

Finally, I will (along with Wager) raise my own sinful doubts about a
"system." Analytically that is where the problem hinges. I have always
considered the "system" part of the WS over-stated. Maybe it is time
to also look at fragments, and the world as fragmentary... the problem
of course with that is meaning making becomes more difficult.
Furthermore, "systems" are in time overwhelmed by empirical variety
and diachronic transformations. Time is the great corrupter of all
systems and that is why Hindus - arguably some of the most insistent
builders of deductive rational systems - consider it to be evil and
empirical variety merely an illusion. Remind you of anybody? The
problem of course for all system oriented thinkers is how to describe
change while retaining coherence. The problem is shared by all
analytical systems, but heightened in WS analysis. 

Thanks for listening.
Krishnendu Ray