Islam's Predicament with Modernity

Religious Reform and Cultural Change

Bassam Tibi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134013401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Islam's Predicament with Modernity presents an in-depth cultural and political analysis of the issue of political Islam as a potential source of tensions and conflict, and how this might be peacefully resolved.

Looking at the issue of modernity from an Islamic point of view, the author examines the role of culture and religion in Muslim society under conditions of globalisation, and analyses issues such as law, knowledge and human rights. He engages a number of significant studies on political Islam and draws on detailed case studies, rejecting the approaches of both Orientalists and apologists and calling instead for a genuine Islamic pluralism that accepts the equality of others. Situating modernity as a Western product at the crux of his argument, he argues that a separation of religion and politics is required, which presents a challenge to the Islamic worldview.

This critical analysis of value conflicts, tensions and change in the Islamic world will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of international relations, social theory, political science, religion, Islamic studies and Middle Eastern studies.

Chapter 1
The predicament: the exposure to cultural modernity, and the need for an accommodation

Religious reform and cultural change in Islamic civilization

Continuing the themes of the Introduction, where the course was outlined, in this chapter I address the major subject matter of the book. The chapter acquaints the reader with Islam’s predicament, applying the approach of “developing cultures,” adopted from the Culture Matters Research Project/ CMRP.¹ The starting point is the historical reality of the Islamic civilization’s exposure to cultural modernity in the context of European expansion and the globalization that this has triggered. In fact, modern science and technology provided the tools that enabled this expansion to occur successfully. Since then, Islam has been not only in crisis, but also in conflict with itself. In pondering the European expansion, which was facilitated by the achievements of modernity, Hegel in his Rechtsphilosophie/Philosophy of Law noted that civil society in Europe is driven, by its own dynamic, to expand beyond its boundaries and reach out to the entire world.²

The process at issue is general in its coverage of the entire globe, triggered by European expansion. This process has affected all other civilizations, above all that of Islam. This last fact is true for the simple reason that Islamic civilization also has a claim to universality. The Islamic project of globalization long predates the Western one. The global rise of the West since the sixteenth century, particularly within the framework of a “military revolution”³ during the years 1500–1800, is perceived to have occurred at the expense of Islam. Add to that, that European expansion also succeeded in encompassing the Islamic world. The Muslims, who were conquerors, now became the conquered. For them, this is hard to swallow. Earlier, from the seventh century through the seventeenth century, Islamic civilization had prevailed and dominated in important areas of the world. However, it failed to stretch its model of globalization⁴ to cover the entire world, as did European civilization later on. Due to its techno-scientific accomplishments, based on the Industrial Revolution, Western civilization was able to conquer the entire world and to envelop it in its civilizational project. This process has created lasting pain for people of the Islamic civilization. The politicization of the related cultural-religious tensions has led to conflict which is articulated today as a defensive-cultural response that legitimates political and violent action.

These givens are the starting point for dealing with the change in contemporary Islamic societies in the context of post-bipolar politics, and this is what underlies the phenomenon of Islam’s predicament with modernity, which predates post-bipolarity. Today, the Islamic people contest the outcome of this development and are staking a claim to reverse it. However, in this contest Islamic civilization lacks the tools needed to deliver what it claims. The result is an international conflict arising from the tensions related to Islam’s predicament with modernity.

That having been said, there is nothing more remote from my mind, as a scholar of Muslim faith, than to engage in Huntington’s “clash” rhetoric. When I identify a conflict and deal with it, I determine first that it is a conflict and not a clash, and look for peaceful solutions. In this undertaking I neither essentialize nor polarize. Unlike a clash, conflict can be solved. In the search for a way out, this book proposes religious reform and cultural change in the Islamic world. This is viewed as the solution to the crisis and is the frame of reference determining all the thinking of the present book.

Introduction

The focus of this chapter is the exposure of the civilization of Islam to cultural modernity and the predicament emerging therefrom – not on modernity itself. Nevertheless, the reference to modernity needs to be spelled out so as to make the issue clear. Here I will confine myself to distinguishing between two dimensions of the same modernity, the one cultural and the other institutional. In his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas outlines what cultural modernity is, namely the “principle of subjectivity/Subjektivitätsprinzip,” as based on the major European historical events of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.⁵ The other dimension of modernity is related to power and it is this institutional modernity, analyzed by Anthony Giddens,⁶ that Muslims know best. However, the two dimensions are related to one another, similarly to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which includes not only enlightenment, but also a dark side that it has.⁷

Non-Westerners, whom Europeans deny to have any history,⁸ have been the victims of a European expansion⁹ facilitated by institutional modernity. Napoleon pronounced the principles of the French Revolution to the Muslim people on his conquest of Cairo in 1798, but they felt only the power of his army’s guns. Later, Muslim rulers thought that importing a European army would adjust the imbalance of power.¹⁰ This real history is the background to the Muslims’ confusion and their equation of cultural modernity with institutional modernity, as addressed in the Introduction. This will be discussed in more detail in this chapter. The conflict based on the exposure of the Islamic people to Europe and to Western civilization is anything but a “clash of civilizations.”¹¹ Institutional modernity is also a modernity of power and of hegemony. However, exposure to cultural modernity is a different issue. It was exposure to a 36 The predicament worldview that helped Europe to advance – a worldview that is human centered and no longer God centered. To state this is not to deny religion, but just to restrict it to faith. Secularization¹² should not be equated with atheism, as is done today by most Islamists and Salafists. In contrast, I refer to it with the Weberian meaning that is also employed by Habermas. It simply means the “Entzauberung/disenchantment” of the world. This rationality was not alien to Islam when it had a highly developed civilization, as this book will argue. One of the pillars of European cultural modernity is the Renaissance. Those who study history without a Eurocentric bias are aware of the fact that Western civilization’s Renaissance owes a great deal, culturally, to Islam. The Renaissance – and earlier the Hellenization of Islam – were bridges in the civilizational encounters between Islam and Europe. So why cannot cultural modernity be such a bridge in the twenty-first century?

In the first part of this book I will set all postmodern talk about “multiple modernities” on one side and focus instead on three issue areas of modernity that greatly affect Islam. After this introductory chapter I deal, in separate chapters, first with reason-based knowledge, second with law and legislative constitutionalism, and third with individual human rights. I am aware that this selection is not exhaustive. However, these are major issue areas of modernity. The predicament of Islam with cultural modernity predates the post-bipolar politics of civilizational conflict as well as the culture-based tensions that it generates and that lead to conflict. Nonetheless, post-bipolarity is the new context that gives the conflict a new shape. This chapter argues that religious reform and cultural change would open an avenue for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Before reaching this level of analysis, one needs first to deal with the predicament itself, which is the task of this chapter

The starting point is the historical fact of the Islamic civilization’s exposure to European expansion. This process has been related to a structural change in society, economy, and politics. This change in the Islamic world was determined by external powers and by the global standards that they established. Since decolonization, schools of thought based on Eurocentric evolutionism and the similarly minded modernization theory¹³ have suggested that change in values and attitudes in the Islamic world will automatically follow the path of social and economic change. In reality, however, religion and Islamic values, norms, and worldviews persisted and did not change in the way that modernization theorists anticipated. In this chapter the idea of cultural change is connected with changes in religion itself, addressed in terms of religious reform. Without denying the existence of “essentialism” in Western scholarship (and among Muslims themselves), it can be said that this very notion, which implies that culture is essential and not changeable, has been degraded into an invective. The notion of essentialism is often employed in a meaningless manner to discredit those who do not subscribe to postmodern cultural relativism. Similarly to Edward Said’s originally legitimate critique of Orientalism, which was then derailed to an Orientalism in reverse,¹⁴ the cultural-anthropological criticism of Western essentialism has become stranded in a self-made impasse. Setting these unfruitful debates on one side, this book presents the idea that, alongside economically and politically developing societies, there are also developing cultures. Islam’s predicament with cultural modernity expresses either a reluctance to change or an inappropriate pattern of change, such as the movement from shari’a to shari’atization. This change is detrimental to the people of Islamic civilization.

Why recourse to this topic as an opening? It is, of course, because in European thinking on Islam one finds the stereotype of a homo Islamicus, based on an essentialized preconception of people of the Islamic civilization. They are viewed as humans who act in accord with cultural patterns that do not change. Against this essentializing European prejudice, it can be argued that Islam has always been in flux. However, religious reform based on rethinking Islam is a different issue, more than a mere change. Not only are there the stereotypes of Western Orientalism, but there are also Muslims who essentialize Islam by putting it above time and space and thus dismiss any notion of change, not to mention reform. In contrast to both, this book argues for change. It seems to me, as a scholar of Muslim background, to be more promising to focus on the ways in which Muslims themselves respond to and view processes of change – understood with the meaning outlined above – rather than to spend time in Western debates on Orientalism and essentialism. I prefer not to respond to the discrediting of my work by those who accuse me of “self-Orientalization” and of “essentializing Islam.” Attentive readers will easily discover that such reproaches do not apply and that they can never hold water.

In fact, the claim of “one unchangeable Islam above time and space” comes also from the Muslim Salafists, who conceive of a primordial Islam in these terms. A balanced Muslim critical reasoning must deal not only with the distortions of Orientalism, but also with the Islamic obstacle to change that is so detrimental to the people of the Islamic civilization. This is a much more promising endeavor than the boring debates of European or American students of Islam obsessed with their “Orientalism”¹⁵ or an “Orientalism in reverse” (see note 14). One expects analysis, but instead gets biased opinion pieces. This straight talk is necessary in order to outline the agenda of this book, and also to defend it and its ideas against the possibility of being discredited.

Stated in plain language, Islam is – just as much as the people who adhere to the faith and its cultural system – always in flux, and thus subject to change. There are many Muslims who do not accept this idea. Some prudent Muslims concede that believers may change, but they continue to believe that Islam itself is above change because it is – as a final revelation – supposed to be perfect. This essentialized religion of Islam is precluded from change, and also from reform. In contrast to this view, the present book relates the concept of cultural change to religion and infers the need for religious reform that will allow Muslims to rethink existing concepts that they consider sacred. This is necessary for the cultural accommodation of social and political change. Muslims need to engage in a religious reform that goes far beyond the admitted reinterpretation of the holy texts in order to come to terms with the current issues. In a situation of crisis there is no escape from a rethinking of Islam that seriously addresses its predicament with cultural modernity. To engage in such an undertaking is neither heresy nor Orientalism; rather, it is an effort at cultural innovation for the benefit of Muslims and their civilization. To take up a position in the tradition of “defenders of reason” in Islam is a great service to this civilization.

As noted earlier, participation in the Culture Matters Research Project/ CMRP at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (see note 1) facilitated new insights into cultural change, which were applied to the study of Islamic civilization. It was recognized that value change is imperative in order to overcome a state of underdevelopment. Included here is religious reform, itself a key issue in the social transformation of society, as a means to smoothing the way to cultural change. The adoption of this approach in the present book reflects neither “culturalism” nor susceptibility to “Orientalism.” In arguing that in no other civilization does “culture matter” for social change to the extent that it does in the Islamic world, I present an argument against essentialism – regardless of its source – as well as against all kinds of Orientalist bias.

One cannot repeat enough: courageous Muslims who dare to engage in a rethinking of their culture and of religion and to put their worldview in line with existing realities are neither involving themselves in cultural treason nor committing heresy – not mention the ridiculous accusation of “self-Orientalization.” This insight runs counter to established wisdom. To question the religious claim to immutability is nothing less than to contribute to facilitating a process of change and to overcoming Salafist essentialism. Their inherited worldview prevents Muslims from accepting cultural and value change – which is occurring anyway and despite any beliefs to the contrary. Muslims socialized in this Islamic worldview¹⁶ are confronted throughout their life with ongoing political and social change in Islamic societies. Those among them who recognize the need for cultural change and religious reform are familiar with the cultural obstacles standing in the way of development, as well as with the sanctions against thinking Muslims that are imposed by Salafists and Islamists.

The contemporary experience of democratization teaches that political change cannot successfully be introduced from outside while ignoring the insight that culture matters and that it can only be changed by the people concerned. In stating this, I am not ignoring the fact that the needed change matters as much to non-Muslims as it does to Muslims and their societies. As will be shown in Chapter 5, the Western as well as the non-Western environments of the Islamic world (e.g. Asia) alike are affected by conflicts ignited by political Islam. Democratization is a precondition for accepting pluralism and the vision of democratic peace proposed for all on a global basis. This perspective is challenged by the shari’atization of Islam and by the pressure of Islamists for an Islamic state, presented as “al-hall/ the solution” for the entire world of Islam. As will be shown in Chapter 3, this Islamist vision not only puts Muslims into conflict with constitutionalism in their own countries, it also prevents them from entering into democratic peace. It follows that cultural change in Islamic civilization matters to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, as it provides peaceful solutions to international conflict.

The preliminary assumption of this chapter, and which underpins most of the arguments in the present book, is that cultural value change is the avenue to a better future for Muslims and that it can be established by them alone, through religious reforms. The first requirement for embracing the idea of cultural value change is to overcome Islamic essentialism. This implies a willingness to rethink the belief in the immutability of Islamic thought. Of course, the Qur’an is directly revealed by Allah, but a historicization of Islam is possible, as well as an abandoning of all the burdens created by man in the name of God. The bottom line is this: real Islam has always been a product of history and humans are involved in creating it. Real Islam is the product of Muslims themselves. The reality is neither a reflection of divine scripture nor a deviation from what they think is right. It follows that Islam is always that which Muslims make of it and that historical, man-made Islam is not divine, despite all the efforts of the ulema to invoke God in it. In short, Islam changes with the course of development, in spite of whatever Muslim believers may think to the contrary. This reality of change stands in conflict with the a-historical Muslim Salafist worldview. After years of research in Morocco and Egypt, John Waterbury coined the term “behavioral lag” in order to describe the tensions arising from the inconsistency between what Muslims really do and what they think they are doing.¹⁷ Cultural change and religious reform could help to overcome this behavioral lag, make Muslims accept human creativity and put their behavior and attitudes in line with each other. The values that underpin the inherited worldview of Muslim believers have to be reshaped in the course of cultural change and religious reform so as to establish the missing consonance with existing realities.

These introductory remarks on Islam and cultural change must also deal with the perception of “Islam under siege”¹⁸ that determines contemporary Islamic public opinion and leads to an obsession with the West and “crusaders” in order to establish the imagery of an enemy. The European expansion addressed above was ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: cultural tensions, modernity, globalization, and conflict
• 1 The predicament: the exposure to cultural modernity, and the need for an accommodation. Religious reform and cultural change in Islamic civilization
• 2 Issue areas of the predicament I: modernity and knowledge. Torn between reason and Islamization
• 3 Issue areas of the predicament II: cultural modernity and law. The contemporary reinvention of shari’a for the shari’atization of Islam
• 4 Issue areas of the predicament III: Islam, the principle of subjectivity, and individual human rights
• 5 Islam’s predicament as a source of conflict. Cultural-religious tensions and identity politics
• 6 Cultural change and religious reform I: the challenge of secularization in the shadow of de-secularization
• 7 Cultural change and religious reform II: pluralism of religions vs. Islamic supremacism
• 8 Authenticity and cultural legacy: a plea for the revival of the heritage of Islamic rationalism: falsafa/rational philosophy vs. fiqh-orthodoxy
• 9 Case studies I: the failed cultural transformation in Egypt. A model for the Islamic world?
• 10 Case studies II: the Gulf beyond the age of oil. The envisioned cultural project for the future
• 11 Conclusions and future prospects: cultural modernity and the Islamic dream of semi-modernity
• Notes
• Bibliography