Modernity

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MODERNITY

The European penetration of the Near East and India and the decline of Muslim ascendancy in these regions in the nineteenth century precipitated the crisis that defined the responses of Muslim intellectuals to European modernity. The key thinkers in the nineteenth century, who continue to influence contemporary attitudes in the Islamic world to modernity, were the so-called Islamic modernists, such as Jamal al-Din Afghani (1839–1897), Muhammad ?Abduh (1849–1905), and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898). Although there were some differences between these thinkers, their work was governed by the same project, which was to show that Islam was consistent with the rationality of the European enlightenment and the development of modern science. As such, they argued that there was no fundamental incompatibility between modernity and its narrative of progress, and Islam as a religion. They tended toward a rationalist interpretation of the Qur?an, in which whatever appeared to be in contradiction to rationality could be interpreted symbolically and allegorically. As a consequence of this they argued that the meaning of the Qur?an was accessible to everyone. In other words, there was no need to rely on the technical and elaborate procedures of tafsir, in which the ulema trained in the traditional Islamic sciences were conversant.

These two tendencies in Islamic modernism also reflected in part the major impact of print on the Islamic world in the modern period. From the nineteenth century onward, the availability of the Qur?an in print, and its concurrent translation into local languages, struck at the very heart of the traditional system of the oral transmission of knowledge, in which the charisma of the teacher as a living embodiment of knowledge was crucial. The multiplication of texts through printing made unsupervised reading possible. This in turn meant that it was possible to engage with religious texts without the mediation of the formally trained ulema.

These tendencies in Islamic modernism, and the impact of print, lie behind the works of a number of important Muslim thinkers in the twentieth century, in which the engagement with European modernity was a key theme. It is particularly evident in the commentaries on the Qur?an by Sayyid Abu l-A?la? Maududi, the founder of the fundamentalist Jama?at-e Islami. Maududi himself was not a formally trained ?alim, but it is precisely because of this that his ideas and thought played a crucial role in the development of what is called Islamic fundamentalism. These tendencies are similarly evident in Muhammad Iqbal's (1893–1938) The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934). This work exemplifies Islamic modernism's response to European modernity both in its style and its content. It purports to show how the Qur?an is entirely consonant with the major discoveries of European science, and it is wide-ranging in its eclectic use of European thinkers. Iqbal's engagment with the Qur?an is singular and unmediated by any sense of tafsir in the traditional sense of the word.

Islam's relationship with modernity has been the defining theme of the work of major Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The strategies of interpreting the Qur?an, and its relocation as a sacred text in the act of individual and unmediated reading, are in fact among the major consequences of the impact of modernity on Islam. However, the role of modernist thinkers as spokesmen for Islam vis-à-vis European modernity also points to some other features of the impact of modernity on the Islamic world.

First, it is clear that there are a multiplicity of Islamic voices engaging with European modernity. This in part is also a consequence of the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by Ataturk, so that even symbolically there is no single figure-head in the Islamic world. This, together with the undermining of the authority of the formally trained ulema, has meant that there are competing voices for Islam with no clear procedures or authorities to adjudicate between them.

Secondly, Islamic engagements with modernity can be read in two overlapping ways. In part, the relationship of Islamic thought to European thought is mimetic; that is to say, in the work of Afghani, ?Abduh, Iqbal, and others, such as the poet Altaf Husayn Hali (1837–1914), Islam is refashioned into a mirror of European modernity. At the same time, though, Islamic modernism also teases out, generally unselfconsciously, the contradictions in European modernity itself. Islamic engagements with modernity are at times ambivalent, rather than mimetic alone. As such, these engagements can be read alongside the works of European philosophers, such as those of the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault, who have explored the tensions in modernity, arguing that it is less a narrative of progress than one of repression.

Thirdly, nowhere is this ambivalence to modernity more evident than in the attitude to the nation-state demonstrated by the thinkers mentioned above. There is an obvious tension between the modernist attempts to define a pan-Islamic, worldwide community, theoretically made possible through innovations in technologies of communication, and the fundamental reality of the nation-state, some with Muslim populations that are hostile to each other. The very attempts by Afghani, ?Abduh, Iqbal, and others to reinterpret Islamic law as a legal system in keeping with a modern state is indicative of the powerful reality of the nation-state as the organizing principle of the world in the twentieth century. Furthermore, given the fact that the nation-state tends toward monopolizing all sources of authority, as long as it remains in existence, it is unlikely that the ulema will recover the authority they enjoyed in the pre-modern Islamic world.

The engagement of Islam with modernity remains open-ended and multivocal. Having said that, it is important to note that no Muslim thinker has argued for rejecting European modernity in toto in the way that the famous Indian nationalist leader, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), tried to do in his life's work. Although there may be problems regarding the feasibility of Gandhi's position, the fact that the possibility of any alternatives to European modernity has not been explored in any depth in Muslim thought is powerful testimony to the sway that European modernity has held over the Islamic world since the early nineteenth century.