The Public Spheres in Medieval Islamic Societies

Abstract

In his book The Venture of Islam, Marshall Hodgson (d. 1968) draws our attention to distinctive religious institutions—i.e., the sharī‘ah law, waqf, and Sufi orders—that played a significant role in the social and civic life of medieval Islamicate society. This paper discusses how medieval Muslims, elite as well as non-elite, used their social agency in the public sphere. It evaluates the effectiveness of these civic institutions for the public good. It attempts to identify how these religious institutions served peoples’ religious, spiritual, social, political, and material needs. ‘Ulamā’, Sufis, rulers, the wealthy elite, and the commoners used their religious, social, and political agency in this sphere for the betterment of the common people. While challenging the medieval despotism thesis, this paper attempts to defend the argument that medieval Islamic society had public spaces in the form of waqf, sharī‘ah law, khānqāh, and madrasah in which the whole social strata participated. Significantly, this paper argues that medieval Islamic societies did not merely have a single authoritarian sphere of social activity in which only the elite had agency; rather, there were multiple public spheres where people, recruited from a range of private spheres, expressed different modes of social agency.