Islam in the Modern Age
The Nawawi Foundation invites you to join its spring course Islam in the Modern Age at the University of Chicago, Wednesday evenings 7:30-9:00 p.m. beginning April 5th, 2006. This seven-week series will focus on Islamic intellectual and political developments—revival, reform, modernism, and Islamist activism—as they emerged and developed during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
I’ve always have wanted to attend courses held by the Nawawi Foundation, but the timing and location have always been very inconvenient for me. The course, Islam in the Modern Age sounds very interesting. I am hoping I can make this one.
Many times it seems that we are expected to make sense of the problems of the modern Muslim world by providing commentaries on verses of the Qur’an or Traditions attributed to the Prophet, as if present-day complexities grew directly out of scriptural readings. In reality, the last three hundred years of communal Muslim experience provide direct background to much present-day Muslim thought and behavior, be it forward-looking “modernist,” rigidly “fundamentalist,” or somewhere in between. It was during this complex and highly varied period that modern “Islamic and Islamist thought” emerged and took on the varieties of molds and shapes that distinguish it today.
Islam in the Modern Age will focus on the legacy of these last three centuries. It will examine, first of all, what is meant by “modernity” and the different ways that Muslim thinkers, traditional scholars, and activists have understood and responded to it. From one extremity to another, the Muslim world witnessed the prolonged rise of the West over the last three hundred years and noted its remarkable scientific and intellectual creativity, powerful economic development, and military expansion. Muslims everywhere knew that something fundamental had changed in the world. Some were convinced that they themselves had lost their source of inner vitality and means to regaining lost power. While there were those who blamed the Western Other, many other Muslims were introspective, blaming their own failures instead of others. A famous nineteenth-century Muslim poem read:
is caused by us,
The flames that devour us from left and right
are caused by us.
Most Muslim thinkers identified five sources of weakness in their confrontation with modernity: 1) military, 2) economic, 3) intellectual, 4) political (constitutional), and 5) cultural. How many of them understood the true nature of that weakness by grasping the reality of modernity as an utterly novel and all-embracing economic system? For their part, Muslim societies remained entrenched in fundamentally pre-modern and agrarian ways, which remained the basis of their cultural development. Wealth was agrarian surplus, and the dominant social hierarchies were still very much constituted by realities of a pre-modern agrarian order. If Muslims were to meet the West as equals in the modern age and renew the fiber of their formerly dominant world civilization, they would have to cross new and dangerous cultural divides. They would have to move past the molds of the pre-modern agrarian-based world into the modern world of scientifically based industry, modern finance, and banking.
Leading Islamist activists of the twentieth century like Rashid Rida declared: “All we need to acquire from Europe is its scientific achievements, technical skill and advanced industries. The acquisition of these aspects does not require all this amount of Westernization.” Rida’s theme would dominate much Islamist discourse until the present day, while others saw that the challenge was much more complex and that an entirely new Islamic culture would have to emerge that met Western competency at every level of human thought and production.
During the modern age, there has been a tremendous overlap of ideas and approaches to modernity within both the Sunni and Shi’i camps of Islam. Both Sunnis and Shi’is have produced their own constitutionalists, modernists, reformers, and even rigid “fundamentalists.” Islam in the Modern Age will look at the phenomenon of Islamic thought and action from both Sunni and Shi’i perspectives. It will compare how both approaches often converge and sometimes differ in their assessment of the challenges of the age. Above all, the series will emphasize that the urgent concern for “modernity” is centuries-old in the Muslim world. It is not a discourse that began suddenly after the tragedy of 9/11. Over recent centuries, Muslim responses to the challenge of the modern age have taken on a variety of forms, some more apt and sophisticated than others.
