Islamic Revival as Development: Islam, Democracy, Modernity since the 1950s (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reinventing Islam, Sublating Modernity: A Conflict of Enlightenments
Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence (special issue: Conflicting Conflicts, edited by E. Lapidot & L. Di Blasi , 2020
The present paper aims to show how the return to Islam initially conceived by Muslim reformists has not been simply a conflictual reaction to the secular ideology sustaining modernity, but rather an effort to transform Islam into a religion within modernity. It argues that this return has in fact been a major paradigm shift within the theologico-political discourse of Islamic tradition and that it is this very shift that led to the reformation of this religion. In this perspective, this study shows how the reactivation of sharia by reformist thinkers did not mean a rejection of the Islamic intellectual tradition, but it was precisely the result of the encounter between this tradition and the modern social sciences. The paper then reconstructs the dialogue between Muslim reformists and 19th century European thinkers, dialogue which was crucial in shaping Islamic reformation. It shows to what extent reformed Islam was a response of Muslim reformers to the diagnosis of the project of modernity made by European reformist thinkers such as François Guizot or Auguste Comte. Through their confrontation, the paper develops a comparison between the theoretical backdrop of European modernity and the premises of Islamic reformation as two alternative conceptions of the Enlightenment project. By discussing Kant, Foucault, Habermas and Koselleck's thesis on the historical and philosophical roots of the European Enlightenment, this study ultimately seeks to understand in which way the theological structure of Islam has led the project of the Islamic Enlightenment in an analogous but fairly differentiated direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.