ISLAM AND MODERNITY
By
Marlin Jeschke
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Goshen College, Goshen, IN
Islam was once the established religion of a proud empire straddling chunks
of three continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Its earliest conquests were explicitly
in the name of Islam, although booty was also always a motive. Raiding for booty
or plunder was a practice of pre-Islamic Meccan Bedouin culture that continued
after the rise of Islam in spite of Islamic law against theft and the basic
Islamic claim that the revelations through Mohammed had introduced a new age
of enlightenment to replace the pre-Islamic age of "Jahiliya," which
means the age of ignorance, or the age of barbarism. Plunder has been an ingredient,
of course, in just about all conquests in human history and has often included
the favoring or even imposition of the conqueror’s religion (in modern
times read colonial power). In Islam the idea that conquest means religious
conquest is implied in the terms used to distinguish territory under Islamic
rule from territory not (yet) under Islamic rule. Territory under Islam is called
dar al-Islam, land of Islam, or land of submission (sometimes colored by the
translation "land of peace"), and that not (yet) under Islam is called
dar al-Harb (land of war).
But if Islam was once the established religion of a proud empire, it suffered
humiliating reverses in the past two centuries, the 1800s and 1900s. Big pieces
of the Islamic world were conquered by colonial powers of the so-called Christian
West, and the shoe was now on the other foot. The reversal gave Muslims a taste
of what it feels like to be conquered and plundered. Of course, few peoples
of the world resign themselves to indefinite subjugation, and Islamic countries
are no exception. Therefore Islamic societies have examined what the cause of
their loss of power is and what they can do to regain it. They have come up
with one practical and two ideological answers.
The practical answer is to avail themselves of the sciences and technologies
of the West, as they did in inheriting Byzantine and Persian civilization and
culture over a millennium ago. The ideological answers have been modernism and
fundamentalism.
The modernist movement was not widespread, being centered chiefly in Egypt.
It was first articulated by a man called Afghani (1839-1897), but its most notable
exponent was Mohammed Abduh (1849-1905). Abduh eventually became head of the
Azhar, Islam's "Gregorian" University in Cairo, and grand Mufti of
Egypt (that is, supreme jurist). In this latter connection he handed down some
“fatwas,” or decisions/rulings on the application of Shari’a,
Islamic law.
The most important and most central proposal of the modernists was to reopen
the "gates of ijtihad," that is, to open the door to fresh interpretation
of Islamic law, if not of the Islamic faith itself. For centuries Islamic scholars
had held that Islamic law was not open to further interpretation, that the final
word had been said. But modernists believed that developments in world history
required some possibly far-reaching reinterpretation of Islamic thought and
practice if Islam was to cope with modern global challenges.
For better or worse modernist thinking did not prevail, at first, at least.
It was overtaken by the fundamentalist movement, which seems to have started
with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1930s. It was suppressed by Nasser,
by Sadat, and is still held on a short leash by Mubarak. Whether because of
Egyptian efforts at its suppression or in spite of them it has spread widely
since. The basic tenet of fundamentalism is the demand for a return to pure
Islam, if not the original Islam, the Islam of the "Rashidun," or
first four rightly guided Caliphs Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali before the
admittedly worldly and venal Ummayyad dynasty of Damascus (661-750) took over.
The late Fazlur Rahman, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Chicago,
in his book Islam and Modernity has pointed out what a return to pristine
Islam would really mean, the kind of egalitarianism and sharing and care for
the poor practiced by Abu Bakr and Omar, as contrasted with the class structure
of, for example, Saudi society today. However, Islamic fundamentalism doesn't
really assume a return to primitive Islam but a return to the Islam of the many
centuries after the time of Mohammed and the first caliphs, the era of a fully
developed Shari’a, that is, a return to the age when Islam was a world
empire, thanks to Arab Bedouins having taken over the culture and civilization,
the sciences and arts, the technology and political infrastructure of the Persian
and Byzantine empires.
It is not clear just how a fundamentalist return to a pristine Islam would return
Islam to its former glory as a world empire. Christianity too has had its proponents
of a return to primitive Christianity, but these too have not been very helpful.
History moves inexorably in only one direction, and a faith that will not just
survive but adequately serve its adherents today and tomorrow cannot merely
cling to a golden past or try to return to it but must reinterpret its faith
to meet new historical situations. While a faith heritage or tradition is important,
its adherents must continually work out the meaning and application of that
faith for an ever new present.
Muslims today, usually some of those who have lived in Western democratic societies
for a time, often want democracy for their home countries, although usually
freedom of religion is left out of the discussion. Outside of a few predominantly
Islamic nations such as Turkey, very few are democratic today. Many Muslims
don't want democracy. They would prefer a society with state-imposed Shari’a.
It should be clear that for some Muslim countries to accept democracy means
more than some military regime scheduling popular elections. It requires a new
mentality among enough people in the populace to make it work. Primarily that
means shifting from reliance upon external coercion to shaping ethical character
by persuasion. That in turn requires voluntarism, and with it freedom of religion,
including freedom to convert from Islam to another faith, something theoretically
punishable by death according to traditional Islamic law. It also means renouncing
the whole doctrine and practice of the “dhimmi” status of non-Muslims.
While many Muslims may not want democracy, which is not surprising, since they've
never experienced it, they do want many of the fruits democratic societies have
produced, especially modern science. The question is whether these are separable
packages. Yes, one can buy modern cars and computers and even hospitals, as
many Islamic societies have done. But one cannot buy the ethos that produces
them. That requires buying into the mentality that undergirds democracy, which
is a much more complicated and extensive and perhaps painful process that will
demand the opposite of fundamentalist preservation of historic Islam or return
to an early age of Islam. It will require a radical reinterpretation of Islam,
a willingness to move forward into new truth and a willingness to surrender
the traditionalism of the past.
People of the democratic West do well to remember that it took Christianity
well over a millennium to finally even begin to develop democratic societies.
With Constantine (306-337) the West entered upon hundreds of years of autocratic
rule by lords and kings and emperors before the democratic implications
of Christianity even began to emerge. And this pre-democratic Christianity
included all too much state-imposed religion. The Christian West then went
through its painful experience of the Enlightenment, an experience many
conservative Christians still have reservations about. Yet the Enlightenment
too was itself a product or child of Christianity and, whatever excesses
it produced in the way of skepticism and secularism, it forced serious
Christians to move forward into new understandings of the faith, even while
it did not erase but encouraged the most basic truths of Christianity about
shaping human beliefs by persuasion and shaping human consciences by instruction,
even encouraging radical conversion to the truth. In the enlightenment
this principle usually went under the label of “reason.” The "Christian"
democratic West is well advised to review the root causes of its origin
and success and not assume it can survive indefinitely without seeing to
its foundations.
The subject of church and state, religion and politics, establishment of religion
or freedom of religion is a complex subject, as evidenced by the amount of discussion
and debate it has received in American society. And yet many Americans miss
some central issues. They assume democracy and with it freedom of speech and
freedom of religion are self-evidently desirable and achievable goals without
asking where democracy came from and what its prerequisites are. Democracy is
a product of the modern Christian West, and it works only if there are enough
people in a given society who have internalized ethical values. Behind it, as
I said, is a commitment to achieve a good society by persuasion.
Already in the Hebrew Scriptures prophets and psalmists recognized the importance
of teaching, instruction, as the essential principle of the rule of God. No
amount of external coercion can in the end produce a good person and a good
society. This insight is sharpened up in the teaching of Jesus and the rest
of the New Testament, which explains Christianity’s summons to conversion,
a call to people to make an explicit decision to choose the way of Jesus Christ,
which does not imply an acceptance of all the trappings of Western Christianity,
but a thoroughgoing acceptance of what Jesus taught about love, servanthood,
compassion, goodwill, above all even the rejection of violence and the acceptance
of suffering servanthood and love of the enemy. What this adds up to is the
conviction that a good person and a good society are ultimately produced only
by people's commitment to those values Jesus taught. Now, many people in Western
democracies have forgotten this and assume democracy simply means selfish assertion
of freedoms and rights. But enough people (so far, at least, it seems) have
preserved enough of the old internalized values to still make democracy work.
If and when there is enough breakdown of voluntary commitment to ethical life
democracy will break down.
These are some of the central ideological challenges facing us all in the modern
world in which roughly one billion Muslims and nearly two billion Christians
(some of them only nominal Christians) feel threatened by each other. Islam
began and achieved a great civilization by borrowing much of Judaism and Byzantine
Christianity. May it yet borrow from the best of democratic society. And we
may pray even more that Christianity might recover the genius of its faith and
not go along with the totally immoral policy of Israel toward the Palestinians
and the U. S. policy of economic and military imperialism toward the Islamic
world. That is the underlying cause, too often forgotten, of Islam’s fear
and hate of the West.
February 18, 2003
HTML editing by Lon Sherer, lonhs@goshen.edu
Archived: 3/21/05
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