Hodgson’s Error or the Proliferation of Terminology

In his Venture of Islam, posthumously published in 1975, Marshall Hodgson presented a grandiose scheme of his view of the history of the Islamic world, in which he opposed the Eurocentric view of history in most contemporary studies of Islam. To support his novel approach he introduced a number of neologisms as technical terms, of which ‘Islamicate’ and ‘Persianate’ became widely known. In the present essay I investigate critically the provenance of this terminology and I take to issue the growing use and popularity of these and similar terms in contemporary studies of Islam.