Ernest Gellner
Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) is known as one of the greatest intellects of the twentieth century. I met him initially in 1985, when I was a student at Edinburgh University, and where he had come to give a paper. I then went in 1986 down to Cambridge to study with him. At that point, he was at the peak of his fame, travelling incessantly to give seminars across the world. He was at his best, however I think, when commentating after a seminar paper which he could do brilliantly, and also in his writings which have a remarkably stimulating denseness of thought. I knew him only for the last decade of his life, but I was clear that I wanted to study with him after reading in the basement café of the Appleton Tower in George Square, during my last year as an undergraduate, the long introduction he wrote to Evans-Pritchard’s Essays on Anthropological Thought.
Gellner once remarked to me that he divided in his own mind his work into themes upon which he would base a lecture when invited: nationalism; the sociology of Islam; the emergence of modernity; postmodernism and reason, and so on. My own immediate way into his work was through one of these: his Muslim Society, and its related monograph Saints of the Atlas, which I had read during my first fieldwork in Morocco, in 1985 for my MA thesis at Edinburgh.
Gellner’s work on Islam is regarded widely as being less successful than his work on nationalism, which was a huge hit. Yet, over the course of my work firstly in Morocco, and then in Turkey over many years, I came to the conclusion that his theory, outlined in the first chapter of Muslim Society was indeed viable. Once I realised this, I made a much more extensive study of his wider writings, which I still find of fundamental assistance today when thinking about modernity, whatever their faults. Summing up simply, but not I think misleadingly, Gellner’s – justifiable - claim is that literal belief in Islam is possible to sustain with modernity, or in other words, the idea that secularisation is the inevitable concomitant of social change is mistaken.
References
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1981 A History of Anthropological Thought, edited by André Singer; with an introduction by Ernest Gellner. London; Faber and Faber.
Gellner, E. 1969 Saints of the Atlas, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Gellner, E. 1981 Muslim Society, Cambridge: CUP.
Shankland, D. 2003 “Gellner and Islam”, in Social Evolution & History, Vol. 2 No. 2, 118–142. Open access at: Editor’s Preface (sociostudies.org).
Shankland, D. 2022 “Gellner: Right and Wrong”, in Ernest Gellner's Legacy and Social Theory Today, edited by Petr Skalník. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pages 365-400.