Islam, Modernity and a New Millennium Themes from a Critical Rationalist Reading of Islam (original) (raw)

Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates

Quote as: Masud, Khalid, Armando Salvatore, and Martin van Bruinessen (eds). 2009. Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. This textbook is a pioneering study providing an introduction to and overview of the debates and questions that have emerged regarding Islam and modernity. Key issues are selected to give readers an understanding of the complexity of the phenomenon from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The various manifestations of modernity in Muslim life discussed include social change and the transformation of political and religious institutions, gender politics, changing legal regimes, devotional practices and forms of religious association, shifts in religious authority, and modern developments in Muslim religious thought.

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.

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 ...

Modernity and the Muslim World

In this paper I analyze the expansion of modernity and its influence in the Muslim world. There are broadly two competing streams of thought that explain the impact of modernity on the Muslim world. One argues that the factors are mainly socioeconomic and that the Middle-East suffers a developmental crisis, the other argues that the factors are mainly socio-cultural and that there is some kind of a clash of civilizations. My conclusion is that both factors play an important role and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Modernity and the disintegration of the last Muslim Empires

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.

Islam's Unique Enounter with Modernity: Intellectual Discourse and Political Project

2012

Islam has a dissonant relationship with modernity in that it agrees with central aspects of this epochal phenomenon and parts ways with others. This is the key to understanding how Islam engages with the two main components of modernity, namely its intellectual discourse and its political project. A thorough study of Islam's intellectual tradition reveals, in Ernest Gellner's words, that Islam agrees with basic orientations of modernity like universalism, rationality and the emphasis on following the law or the sharia, while it strongly shuns secularism. This opens the way to what is termed multiple modernities where a particular civilization charts its own way to progress, gender equality, empowerment and representative government, while adhering to the principal components of their heritage and ethical traditions. It will be argued in the course of the article that this position is unique to Islam as recent historical experience has shown that other, non-western, societies...

Islam Under the Conditions of Modernity

2015

The article proposes a possible methodological perspective for conceptualizing Islam and modernity in the context of the dichotomy "traditional vs. modern". The author outlines the different images of Islam in their specific sociological profiles as related to (and stemming from) the canon of norms that constitute the Islamic community and construct community ties, the basic resource of which are religious values. A scrutiny of the modes of difference and otherness through the lense of neighbourhood reveals otherness to be a latent conflict factor susceptible to political mobilization and populist manipulation. The author identifies the problem fields that generate the clash between secularism and Islam.

Islam and Modernity - Theorizing Challenges of Modernization between Orient and Occident

Current excesses of violence by Jihadist-Salafist groups like the so-called “Islamic State” or the “Nusra Front” are regularly justified on religious grounds, claiming to represent “true Islam”. Intellectuals from both, the Arab and the Western world openly criticize the silence of Muslim scholars with regard to theses escalations and connect the root causes for extremism with a crisis of the religion of Islam itself. Their pivotal question is: How should Islam relate to the modern world? Or: Can and should Islam change? By engaging with literature by scholars from both, the “Western” and the “Arab” world, this course aims to understand the current dilemma Islam is facing - as a religion, but especially as a comprehensive Weltanschauung. After acquiring a basic understanding of the religion of Islam and its concepts of political and social community, the students discuss different theories of “modernity”, “anti-modernity” and “alternative modernity” in relation to notions of “tradition”. Based on these preparations, the course engages in pre-structured discussions on the current debates between “Orient” and “Occident” on modernity, as well as the public discourse in the Middle East on the topic. At the end of the course, the acquired understanding of the current dilemma of “Islam” is interpreted with regard to its implications and challenges for the societies of the Middle East, but also Europe as its neighbor and home to a significant Muslim minority.

Muslims and Modernities: From Islamism to Post-Islamism?

Religious Studies and Theology, 2013

A is article problematizes the complexity of Muslim approaches to the question of modernity. It challenges both a hegemonic voice of a singular and superior Western modernity and an essentialist Islamist response to modernity. It examines the alternative approach of multiple modernities. is approach calls for a critical dialogue and negotiation between tradition and modernity, expedites the possibility of emerging Muslim modernities, and a gradual shift from Islamism toward post-Islamism in the Muslim world.