REVIVING PREVIOUS TIMES AND EXPANDING HORIZONS: Islam and Modernity in global historical perspective (original) (raw)

Whether modernity is equated with Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, or Industrial Revolution in the West, or with Islamic reformism, Tanzimat, or Nahda in the East, it can be safely assumed - considering the vast, often polemical, literature the notion has nurtured - that a basic dimension lays in new engagements with time and space. Modern representations of time have been characterized both by a break with the immediate past, and a curiosity about earlier ages. The surge of interest in classical times is a well-known feature of European Renaissance that gave birth to myriad new intellectual activities, from collecting manuscripts and antiquities to circulating widely printed texts and engravings; new cleric figures, legitimized by their erudition, emerged in the process and paved somehow the way to the formation of the modern state. Shifting representations of ancient times in the Muslim world have generated less scholarship but are no less revealing. The Sublime Porte’s awakening to the political value of antiquities since the mid-eighteenth century is a good example of increased and novel uses of the material past. The modern reception of classical texts such as Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah offers another perspective. The new forms of historical writing that resulted in turn gave birth to a new class of literati that transformed in the long run established social stratifications and professional identities. Contested memories of things past may represent another crucial dimension of modernity, and this is nowhere more visible than in the enduring grief caused by the recurrent eruptions of violence that have characterized our modern times and the fragmented narratives they have legated. Outbursts followed in some instances dynamics of religious redefinition, that eventually fueled sectarianism and ascribed ethnicity to persuasion – a process that can be viewed indeed as inherent to modernity, whenever and wherever it takes place. The incorporation of the world into the systems of knowledge is an equally salient feature of modernity that took varied forms and meanings depending from where it is viewed. Europe turned to distant civilizations to debate domestic issues as early as the seventeenth-century, at a time when an already exhausted Ottoman imperial system was being conscious of the limits of its model and forced to come to terms with European military and economic supremacy. By the nineteenth century, emulating European governance and culture had become standard currency throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, producing along the way many an idiosyncrasy. Pleas have been made to think the integration of nations into the international state system in global terms, rather than in a Eurocentric way. French culture did dominate the social life and cosmopolitanism of many port cities around the Mediterranean in the imperial age, but Western Europe was soon to cease being the only location of authority at world scale. Japan emerged after its 1905 military victory over Russia as a privileged counterpoint to modernization without the imperialism and race ideology associated to the West. The interest in non-Western modernity is well reflected in the increasing number of Middle Eastern writings on the East that followed. These flows and counter-flows invite to challenge diffusionist notions of modernization (i.e. its gradual dissemination from Europe to the rest of the world), and to acknowledge the social dynamics that existed in many societies before, and beyond, their encounter with the West. They suggest not neglecting the long history of entanglements and transnational conditions that went into the co-production of modernity anywhere. The Spring school invites to rethink the temporality and spatiality of modernity over a long time span and within enlarged geographies. It aims at pluralizing the notion of modernization, by trespassing usual national and civilizational boundaries.