Modernity in Islamic Tradition

The Concept of 'Society' in the Journal al-Manar (Cairo, 1898–1940)

Florian Zemmin

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110544862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

What does it mean to be modern? This study regards the concept of 'society' as foundational to modern self-understanding. Identifying Arabic conceptualizations of society in the journal al-Manar, the mouthpiece of Islamic reformism, the author shows how modernity was articulated from within an Islamic discursive tradition. The fact that the classical term umma was a principal term used to conceptualize modern society suggests the convergence of discursive traditions in modernity, rather than a mere diffusion of European concepts.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Modernity, Islam, and Society – The Argument for a Heuristic Eurocentrism

Islam and modernity. This prominent pair of terms often appears in questions such as “Are Islam and modernity compatible?” or “Is an Islamic modernity possible?” Islam here tends to be associated with tradition, whereas modernity is associated with certain concrete norms and values, which allegedly emanate from Europe or the West, or are even considered exclusive to it. Rather than positing Islamic tradition against modernity, this study discerns modernity in Islamic tradition by showing how the fundamental background understanding of modernity – signified by the concept of ‘society’ – was articulated from within the Islamic discursive tradition – namely, in the journal al-Manar, the mouthpiece of Islamic reformism. The fact that in al-Manar the classical term umma was a principal term used to conceptualize modern society supports a model of convergence of discursive traditions in modernity, over against one of diffusion of European concepts.

1 Hegemonic Modernity and Its Others

What, then, does it mean to be modern? At no point has there been a unanimously accepted answer to this question, which will recur in different elaborations throughout this study. Nevertheless, some four decades ago, two aspects figured prominently in most replies: being modern was associated with being secular and being Western(ized). Modernization was thus widely regarded as following the trajectory of the modern West, a key feature of which was secularization in the sense of the declining relevance of religion.1 This understanding informs, for example, David Lerner’s 1958 book, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East.2 While this was not the first work referring to the idea of modernization in its title,3 it was certainly an influential one, marking the heyday of modernization theories. An assumed binary between modern, secular, Western societies and traditional, religious, non-Western – not least Islamic – societies continues to inform some academic research.4 However, it has come under serious pressure in different regards, three of which I want to recall here, leading up to my own research question: (1) modernity did not originate in Europe or the West5 and gradually diffuse to other regions; (2) secularization is not to be understood as a continuous decline of religion in modernity; and (3) the secular is not a neutral category but is itself normative, as are concepts crucial to the modern self-understanding, such as ‘religion’ and ‘society.’

(1) The concept of multiple modernities, chiefly associated with the name of the late Shmuel Eisenstadt,6 is probably the most prominent – but ultimately unsatisfactory – attempt at correcting the understanding of a singular modernity, originating in Europe and leading to the same outcome everywhere.7 While this approach accounts for different trajectories or “paths” of modernization, it still regards Europe as the origin of modernity, which was later appropriated differently by other “civilizations.” The problematic assumption of different, rather self-contained civilizations is also operative in other recent attempts at rethinking modernity in a way that also accounts for non-Western experiences.8 ‘The West,’ as with any civilization, is not a given unit but a historically contingent construction. The alleged contrast to an imagined Other, notably Islam, has played a significant role in consolidating Western self-understanding.9

In addition to attempts at non-Eurocentric or non-Western-centric10 contributions, there have also been decidedly anti-Eurocentric contributions to the debate, which claim that central features of modernity – such as rational bureaucracy or capitalism – first evolved in other regions of the world.11 More convincing is a polycentric understanding of modernity as advanced by a variety of research programs that can be grouped under the broad heading of “global” or “entangled history.” Moreover, these approaches stress local, regional, or global connections over civilizational or national differences.12 Indeed, modernity – which I take to be a certain self-understanding, crucial for which is the idea of human autonomy and mastery, in tension with social contingency –13 only evolved in the “imperial encounter”14 between Europeans and non-Europeans.

In addition to direct contact in the colonies, since the middle of the nineteenth century at the latest, there were significant global communicative networks,15 even though the notion of a “global public sphere”16 might exaggerate the degree of integration of this discourse. Moreover, in hindsight, we can discern commonalities between different elaborations of modern issues or problématiques, even though these had been articulated independently from each other. In any case, the European elaboration – or rather, one of several elaborations contested in Europe itself – of the modern self-understanding as “the commitment of modernity to autonomy and mastery”17 became hegemonic.

This hegemonic European self-understanding18 was significantly elaborated in the discipline of sociology, the major self-interpreting instance of modern European societies.19 In 1977, Eckart Pankoke pointed to the importance of early modern discoveries of the “new world” and “natural peoples” for the evolution of the “sociological imagination” – namely, for questioning one’s own societal order and for formulating universal social laws.20 A collection of essays by Timothy Mitchell substantiates the importance of colonialism, especially the colonial encounter in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt,21 for the evolution of the social sciences. In this process, Egyptian intellectuals drew on both European ideas and local discourses to develop their own conceptions of social sciences, as Omnia El Shakry has shown in a work building on Mitchell.22 One may assume that the early modern process of discovery already induced similar questions among those people being discovered, to adopt Pankoke’s premises. Since modernity proper only evolved in the colonial encounter, it seems clear that both colonizers and colonized people developed their understandings of modernity in and through that encounter.

(2) For modern European self-understanding – which is our focus for now – the narrative of secularization became crucial,23 but in recent decades, it has lost its former status as a basically unquestioned paradigm. José Casanova authored what is probably the most influential deconstruction of secularization.24 In his 1994 book Public Religions in the Modern World, Casanova distinguished three, often interwoven aspects of the paradigm: privatization of religion, decline of religious belief and practice, and differentiation of religion from other social spheres.25 He argued that only the last aspect, social differentiation, could be maintained as a structural trend of modernity. The continuing relevance of religion in and for European societies has also now become widely acknowledged. Jürgen Habermas, the eminent secular26 theoretician of the modern public sphere, expresses this acknowledgment27 by characterizing these societies as “post-secular.”28 Casanova, in turn, taking non-European societies into account as well, and in reaction to a critique by Talal Asad,29 now also questions the universality of social differentiation as the core of modernity.30

As happens when a previously seemingly self-evident paradigm becomes questionable, some have even been calling for the wholesale abandonment of ‘secularization.’31 While these critical considerations motivate a reconceptualization rather than an abandonment of ‘secularization,’ the former standard sociological narrative and model concerning the relation between religion and society in modernity has forfeited much of its hegemonic standing. However, the basic categorical distinction between religion and society remains central to sociology and beyond, whether addressing European or non-European contexts.

(3) A major ongoing challenge for any analysis of non-European modern contexts consists of operative categories and concepts, insofar as these have largely been developed in, on, and for European history and societies. This challenge, which becomes ever more obvious as “the hegemony of the Western center of the world system wanes, and with it that of metropolitan social theory,”32 has already been extensively addressed concerning the category of religion and the concept of ‘religion,’33 the normative claim of which is rather obvious. It is true in general that “[c]ategories are not simply containers of thought: they have an effect on the contents.”34 The power mechanisms at work in designating certain beliefs or practices as ‘religion’ and thus assigning them to the category of religion should be clear, not least in the legal and political consequences this entails.

Arguably less visible – but equally powerful and part of the same operation of constructing religion – is the construction of a secular realm, which is not a neutral sphere either, but is rather equally loaded with normative claims.35 Post-colonial critics are joined by some European Christian theologians36 in challenging claims to the neutrality and universality of the secular. Secular theoreticians have come to partly acknowledge the critique of a secular bias in social and political theory.37 If this bias affected the understanding of European societies, this seems even more true for non-European societies. To overcome this bias concerning Islamic contexts, some have raised the need for particular theoretical approaches. Calls for a sociology of Islam are a case in point, even though the exact approaches that fall under this heading differ greatly: some adhere to the idea of Islam as the Other of secular Western modernity,38 while others aim at overcoming this contrast.39 A similar distinction could be made among calls for an Islamic sociology, voiced by Muslim scholars.40 In any case, particularism offers no convincing remedy for the secular bias and false universalism of European social theory, as such particularism is not only “paralyzing,”41 but also mistaken, in view of the factual integration of the modern world.

The hegemony of European categories of knowledge and order is crucial for this factual integration – and whether one deplores this or not, we cannot write power out of history. I somehow picture Aziz al-Azmeh shrugging his shoulders when he states: “I take it as an accomplished fact that modern history is characterized by the globalization of the Western order.”42 Indeed, “one of the greatest changes in the intellectual history of the non-Western world was the grand reclassification of ideas into categories adopted from the West during the nineteenth century.”43 By now it has become almost impossible to make sense of non-European contexts without resorting to categories that are most markedly elaborated in European thought.44 (I wish to reiterate here that these European categories themselves did not plainly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Modernity, Islam, and Society – The Argument for a Heuristic Eurocentrism
• Part A Assumptions: ‘Society’ and the Secular in European Modernity
• Chapter 2 ‘Society’ in European Modernity
• Chapter 3 A Secular Age as a Heuristic Tool
• Part B Expectations: Egyptian Modernity, al-Manar, and Arabic Concepts
• Chapter 4 Modernity in Egypt: Nation, Society, Secularism, and the Press
• Chapter 5 Al-Manar: The Mouthpiece of Islamic Reformism
• Chapter 6 The Arabic Saddle Period and Arabic Terms for ‘Society’
• Part C Findings: ‘Society’ in al-Manar
• Chapter 7 Al-Hayʾa al-Ijtimāʿiyya in al-Manar: Offering Umma as an Alternative
• Chapter 8 Mujtamaʿ in al-Manar: Avoiding the Established Meaning of ‘Society’
• Chapter 9 Rafiq al-ʿAzm: Islamic Reformist, Secular Historian, and Sociological Thinker
• Chapter 10 Social Association Reified: Ijtimāʿ, Ijtimāʿī, and Umma in Articles by Rashid Rida
• Chapter 11 Conclusion: Society, The Immanent Frame, and Modernity – Concepts, Spins, and Genealogies
• Bibliography
• Appendix: Tables of Search Terms
• Index