Modernity and the Muslim World (original) (raw)
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Islam and Modernity-A Selective Influence of the Capitalistic Set-up
2011
Modernity is a term referred to the complex trends of thought which led mankind to the present age with far reaching consequences. The socio-cultural milieu, we are living in, is, nonetheless, a product of modernity. Though as per experts and critics of the field, modernity ended by the beginning of the later half of the 20 th century and is no more relevant now. Currently the real topic to be discussed is post-modernity, which is also perhaps in the last phase(s). We, however, may not claim to be surviving in the post-modern era, because we are still at pre-modern stage of history especially in the context of Islam and the Muslim World. Hence, for us this topic still bears vital significance though outlived by the contemporary world. Generally speaking, modernity started from the 17 th century and lasted till fourth decade of the 20 th century. It appeared as a markedly visible and dominant trend by 18 th century and Industrial Revolution of the 19 th century practically converted ...
Is Islam Compatible with Modernity? An Analysis of Modernity as Modern Civilization
Sunan Kalijaga: International Journal of Islamic Civilization, 2020
The relation between Islam and modernity as modern civilization is frequently faced contradiction. The disclaimer of a secular state for instance, leads to the debate by which the articulation of some Muslims who reject it is much more than those who accept it. Another example is humanism such as religious freedom and capitalism, although the disclaimers of these two issues are softer than those who denied the nation-state. However, the conceptual analysis points out that Islam is compatible with modernity as modern civilization. The main reason is that Islam was first emerged as a critic against the previous religion that was not engage the social transformation for the Arab society before Islam. Islam is also encouraged contemporary thought and social reform with the concept of ishlah (reform) and tajdid (renewal). If this case is measured based on the dimension of modernity, it obvious that Islam Islam as a teaching/conceptual frame/mindset in this article does not have conflict ...
REVIVING PREVIOUS TIMES AND EXPANDING HORIZONS: Islam and Modernity in global historical perspective
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.
ISLAM AND THE FAILURE OF MODERNIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Th is paper tries to see the encounter between Islam and modernity in the countries where the majority of the inhabitants are Muslims, particularly in the Middle East that is currently in the state of turmoil. In General, modernity failed to adapt to the Islamic states, for example the failure of democracy, which became the current joint attention in some Arab countries where the iron fi st regimes are still a part of the political system. Furthermore, this paper attempts to see why modernity is diffi cult to adapt itself in the Middle East which began to build relations with Europe in the 18th century. Bernard Lewis, an expert who focuses on the Islamic world, argued that the failure of modernity in the Middle East and Islamic countries because of cultural factors and understanding of religion that hampered the pace of modernity. Th e understanding of religion is still centered on debating the democratic system and gender equality which come from the West; all of which is part of modernity. In addition, the young generations that learn a lot from the West, are not given broader space to apply their knowledge in developing and setting up a system of nationhood and statehood. Th ese are the core issues that will be discussed further in this paper.
2016
Taking its point of departure in the conceptual debate about modernities in the plural, this article presents a heuristic framework based on an interpretative approach to modernity. The article draws on theories of multiple modernities, successive modernities and poststructuralist approaches to modern subjectivity formation. In combining conceptual tools from these strands of social theory, we argue that the emergence of multiple modernities should be understood as a historical result of idiosyncratic social constructions combining global social imaginaries with religious and other cultural traditions. In the second part of the article we illustrate this argument with three short excursions into the history of Islamic reform in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this way we interpret the modern history of Muslim societies as based on cultural conflicts between different forms of social order and individual identities similar to those present in European history. Contrary to the European experience, however, religious traditions gradually assumed an important role in defining 'authentic' Muslim modernities, leading to a relatively hegemonic role of so-called Islamic modernities toward the end of the 20th century.
Tradition and Modernity within Islamic Civilisation and the West
Quote as: Salvatore, Armando. 2009. “Tradition and Modernity within Islamic Civilisation and the West,” in Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates, ed. Muhammad Khalid Masud, Armando Salvatore and Martin van Bruinessen, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 3-35. A major assumption running through the social-science literature, from the founding fathers onwards, has been that modernity occurred only once, in the West, because of specific conditions that did not exist in other civilisations. The latter, including Islam, were implicitly characterised by the absence of one or more crucial features. According to this approach, non-Western civilisations could at best achieve modernity through its introduction from outside. More recent theoretical work has questioned both this assumption of the uniqueness of the West and the corresponding conception of modernity as singular. Informed by these theoretical advances, this chapter takes a new look at modernity and at what precedes it or inhibits its emergence: tradition or traditions. The latter have often been considered, from the viewpoint of Western modernity, as little more than remnants of earlier societies and cultures, which would have to be either absorbed or destroyed in the course of modernisation. In this perspective, the relation between Islam and modernity can be only one of deficiencies (measured by Islam’s alleged insufficient capacity to supersede traditions), dependencies (on Western modernity) and idiosyncracies (in terms of distorted outcomes of a dependent modernisation). Questions such as What Went Wrong? with Islamic civilisation vis-à-vis the modern world hegemonised by the West inevitably come up as a result of static and unilateral views of tradition and modernity and their relations. The attempt to overcome an approach dominated by the measurement of deficiencies, dependencies and idiosyncracies is aided by a conception of civilisations as unique constellations of culture and power, in which a tradition is the dynamic cultural dimension of a civilisation. This definition helps overcoming Eurocentrism and allows us to conceive of different pathways to modernity in the form of multiple modernities. Facilitated by the findings of historians and social scientists who have demonstrated the dynamism of Islamic civilisation well into the modern era, the chapter points out the distinctive factors of strength of Islamic civilisation, alongside features that in the historical process turned out to be weaknesses vis-à-vis the encroaching West. Its (relative) strength consisted in more inclusive patterns of trans-civilisational encounters and networking, and its (relative) weakness lay in a limited capacity to enable the autonomy of the political process vis-à-vis traditional authorities, and as a corollary to legitimize the unlimited sovereignty of the modern state.
Islam and modernity, Towards New Paradigm (Historian)
it is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things. A. Einstein 1 But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.
Islamic Tradition and Meanings of Modernity
The debate about the compatibility of modernity and (the) Islamic tra- dition is, at this point, centuries old. This article analyzes some of its most recent expressions. The guiding question here is one about the meaning(s) of modernity and its impact on our general understanding of this particular religious tradition. We are often led to believe that this tra- dition is uniquely ill-equipped to absorb or make use of modernity’s con- ceptual repertoire and its supposed liberating power. It therefore follows that the proponents of Islam and of liberalism are at odds with each other, primarily due to the assumption that they occupy different paradigms of understanding, knowledge, and even of hopes and aspirations. This arti- cle seeks to identify some elements of this, arguably erroneous, presump- tion by presenting an overview of several oft-repeated arguments related to modernity and Islamic ethics. Modernity, as it relates to shifting public conceptions of freedom in Muslim-majority societies, has proven to have tremendous mobilizing power. Social actors continuously contest such ideas as freedom, religion, and related issues in the realm of civil society. One such discursive shift underway is the ‘Arab Spring’, arguably one of the strongest indicators of the ongoing process of modernity within Arab societies on multiple levels – a process that is deeply unsettling and entirely open-ended in terms of cultural and socio-political outcomes.