Reform and Modernity in Islam

The Philosophical, Cultural and Political Discourses Among Muslim Reformers

Safdar Ahmed

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781848857353
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857733733
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The debate over Islam and modernity tends to be approached from a Eurocentric perspective that presents Western norms as a template for progress - against which Islamic societies can be measured. This misses the historical development of Muslim reformist thought that actively engages with the world around it and seeks to reconfigure Islam within the diverse conditions of modernity. Safdar Ahmed paints a complex and nuanced picture that goes beyond the idea that Muslim reformers have either reproduced or reacted against Western ideas. Rather, Ahmed argues, they have reconstructed and appropriated these ideas, and so the thread of Western influence runs through modern Islamic thought on nationalism and sovereignty, femininity and gender. Ahmed uncovers new historiographical perspectives by critically examining the work of prominent intellectuals, such as Muhammad Abduh, Qasim Amin and Abdul A'la Maududi.

CHAPTER 1

ISLAMIC MODERNISM AND THE REIFICATION OF RELIGION

Introduction

In the modern world, the categories of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are often conceived as opposing one another. However, this dichotomy is not eternal, and is far more usefully placed in its social, political and historical contexts. For instance, the flourishing of scientific reason in the early modern period, far from undermining religious beliefs, in fact gave rise to notions of faith which were founded upon rational knowledge. Furthermore, as Colin Russell points out, the supposed opposition between science and religion did not arise from within the natural sciences, but was the construction of nineteenth-century historiographers, such as John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918), whose criticisms were directed more against the intellectual hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church than against religion per se.¹ Whilst the ‘conflict thesis’ (referring to the perceived conflict between science and religion) permeated the history of science for a century and came to influence Whig notions of historical progress, notable Christian theologians, scientists and Deists continued to argue for the rational ‘proof’ of God’s existence on the premise that science and faith were in fact compatible.²

This notion of a conflict between religion and science has also been projected, somewhat anachronistically, onto the history of science in the Muslim world. In 1916 Ignaz Goldziher, in an article titled ‘The attitude of orthodox Islam towards the “ancient sciences”’, posited a tradition of opposition amongst early Muslim scholars towards the ‘foreign sciences’ of Greek, Persian and Indian intellectual provenance.³ This was expanded upon by A. J. Arberry’s thesis that Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s eleventh-century treatise, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, dealt a fatal blow to Aristotle’s theory of causality within the rational sciences.⁴ However, there are reasonable grounds to argue that Arberry misconstrued al-Ghazali’s philosophy. Because the Aristotelian theory of secondary causes seemed to posit a lack of primacy on God’s part over the natural world, al-Ghazali promoted the view that all phenomena must be attributed, instead, to God’s direct will and immanence.⁵ Yet al-Ghazali’s occasionalism – which asserted that the laws of causality are a product not of the natural world but of our knowledge of it – furnished no conclusive evidence for why religious dogma should snuff out rational inquiry. Moreover, the historical record shows no diminution of philosophical and scientific activity after the time of al-Ghazali, who is credited with legitimising methodological uses of logic and dialectical argument in his theological and philosophical writings.⁶

Since the time of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, which spanned the middle of the eighth to the tenth centuries, science was valued within the context of Islamic culture and not against it.⁷ This was ensured, in part, through the disciplinary independence afforded to theology and science, so that neither was able to take over the other’s theoretical domain.⁸ Whilst theologians and natural philosophers disagreed about certain subjects (such as the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world), the distinction between science and theology nonetheless fostered significant areas of complementarity. As the modernist reformer Shibli Nu‘mani (1857–1914) observed, for classical Muslim theologians the reflection upon God’s signs (ayat) in the world pointed to the evidence of nature within a theological framework.⁹ Such signs were proof of the perfection and comprehensiveness of creation just as they evoked nature’s (and God’s) beneficence in a moral sense, through the mercy of rain which allows the harvesting of crops and so forth. The purpose of reflecting upon God’s signs in nature, then, was not simply to enhance scientific knowledge of the natural world but to strengthen the presence of belief through contemplation. This could not be said, however, of Muslim attitudes in the late nineteenth century, in which the relationship between science and religion had acquired a tone of mutual irreconcilability.

It is the thesis of this chapter that the conflict which arises between religion and science for Muslim modernist reformers was deeply informed by the epistemic conditions of European imperialism.¹⁰ Because science and reason played a significant role in the instrumentalisation of colonial power, and were not the value-neutral fields which liberal imperialists had touted them to be, modernist reformers sought to sift through and identify the best parts of European knowledge, which they then compared to the tenets and values of Islam as they understood it. Thus, modernist reformers could prove that Islam was a friend to contemporary thought whilst simultaneously protecting Islam from modernity’s most harmful elements.

Furthermore, I will argue that modernist reformers were significantly influenced by the reification of religion and religious systems amongst European and Orientalist scholars in the late nineteenth century. For instance, the modernist argument that Islam is compatible with reason often deferred to the way Romantic philologists and modern historians then defined religious cultures, by supposing that Islam must conform to the template of its ideal and unsullied scriptural origins. This was influenced by a shift in the Western notion of ‘religion’ during the nineteenth century: from a collection of subjective acts and beliefs which were bound up in a particular liturgical or ritual tradition to a fixed (ahistorical) system of doctrines and ideas.¹¹ My focus upon this will encompass the work of three seminal figures of the late nineteenth century: the political activist and reformer, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani; his disciple and successor in the project for theological reform in Egypt, Muhammad ‘Abduh; and the founder of the Aligarh movement in northern India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan. But first, I will begin by explaining what the study of religion owed to Orientalist notions of language and race.

Philology and the Study of Religion

For historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the discipline of philology – which traced the origin and development of languages and thus oversaw the translation and comparative historical analysis of religious texts – paved the way for the modern study of religious systems.¹² By assuming a transparency of meaning between a religious text and the particular racial or national culture which produced it, Romantic theories of language simplified the way modern scholars of religion approached their subject.¹³ This was influenced by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who proposed that a language acts to mould and structure the character and nature of the people who employ it and so forms the best source for uncovering that people’s cultural history.¹⁴ Language or speech, according to Herder, represented the Volkstimme or inner expression of the outward form of a nation or people. Employing this premise, European philologists of the ancient languages of the Middle East and Asia saw in their object of study a historical repository of the national cultures from which such languages arose. J. D. Michaelis summed up this approach to the study of ancient texts when he pronounced language to be ‘a kind of archive in which human discoveries are protected against the most harmful accidents, archives that flames cannot destroy and that cannot perish unless an entire nation is ruined’.¹⁵

Whereas previously the philological study of Middle Eastern languages had been motivated by the desire to uncover the sacred Edenic tongue in which God first spoke to Adam, scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took up the alternative view that a language’s origins denote the earliest attempts of primitive humans to describe the thoughts or feelings embedded in certain things and their concepts.¹⁶ However, this desire to historicise language as the product of secular history (and not of divine origin) threatened to denude such scholarship of a higher mission. To make of philology an entirely scientific enterprise – divested of theological references – in which language is grounded in the living speech of a particular human community is to say that languages cannot be judged for better or worse. The view that all languages are historically constructed risked undermining the then popular notion that language (given force in art and literature) may fulfil a civilisation’s higher mission or calling. For his part, Herder resisted the implications of this secular scientific view by claiming that the evolution of languages – which is also the development of human thought – contained an inner unity, harmony and coherence expressive of a transcendent, immaterial power. For Herder, this higher, providential purpose blocked the move to falsely equate or relativise the production of languages and cultures.

In the early nineteenth century, a comparable notion of the history of languages was attributed by the French philologist and historian, Ernst Renan (1823–1892), to the differences between the Semitic and Aryan races. For Renan, William Jones’ (1736–1794) acclaimed discovery of the Indo-European family of languages – which revealed Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Pahlavi’s common linguistic origins – confirmed the formation of a European identity distinguished by its scientific and rational temperament. In Renan’s view, the Aryan and Semite bore very different characteristics. The former was associated with the intellectual dynamism and vitality of the European races, whilst the latter was associated with the cultural senescence and fatalism of the ‘Orient’. What sustained this approach to the study of ancient languages for Renan is the notion that different cultures can be pinned down and described according to their essential characteristics. Crucial, also, to this pinning down is the notion that Europe’s discovery of modern science and ‘reason’, as the legacy of ancient Greece peculiar to the Aryan or European genius, validated the conquest and tutelage of other, less advanced nations.¹⁷

Furthermore, the European identity’s attachment to science and reason had implications for the way these were received and negotiated by colonised peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gyan Prakash has shown how, in British India for instance, science’s claim to universality was simultaneously undermined by its contextual role in the instrumentalisation of British power.¹⁸ If liberal theories touted science’s potential to uplift and improve the condition of people everywhere, they also enabled the colonial state to better govern, objectify, order and control those of a less advanced race. Because of this double role, indigenous reformers had to negotiate science’s worth at a general, epistemological level and in relation to matters specific to their political, social and cultural circumstances. On the whole, such reformers restaged the reception of science as an opportunity for self-improvement on the premise that knowledge was value-free and that the benefits of its acquisition formed the true lesson that should be taken from colonial rule. Because modern knowledge was crucial to governmental power, and Europe’s global supremacy was only guaranteed by its superiority in the fields of science, military technology, medicine and engineering, they rightly concluded that their own political weakness could not be remedied without the wholehearted adoption of the modern sciences. However, the dual role of colonial knowledge, to appear universal whilst undermining the position of indigenous non-Europeans, remained of profound consequence in the latter’s reception of it.

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and the Modern Salafiyyah

In the effort to reform Islam in light of modern science and the authority of reason, the influence of the Iranian-born activist and religious orator Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was substantial.¹⁹ Born in As‘adabad in Iran in 1839, al-Afghani was schooled in the intellectual and philosophical discourses of Iranian Shi‘ism, which placed the study of fiqh (jurisprudence) and rhetoric alongside that of philosophy and mysticism. During a sometimes tumultuous career as a political activist and public intellectual, al-Afghani travelled through the Muslim polities of Central and South Asia, Iran and the former Ottoman Empire, where he involved himself in local struggles for social reform and agitated against the political hegemony of the European powers. In 1855–56 he travelled to India, where the harsh treatment meted out to Indian Muslims by British authorities radicalised him politically, instilling a deep resentment of European imperialism. In Egypt during the late 1870s, al-Afghani denounced French and British influence in the region and was particularly scathing towards the government of the Khedive Ismail, whose maladministration had gravely indebted Egypt to European banks and brought the country to economic near-ruin. A charismatic orator, he attracted a circle of admirers who included the distinguished Christian writer, Adib Ishaq, and the future Egyptian nationalist leader, Sa‘d Zaghlul. Of those inspired by al-Afghani’s call for religious reform, his closest associate and disciple became the most significant reformer and educationalist in the Arab Middle East around the turn of the century, Muhammad ‘Abduh. A point of entry into al-Afghani’s ideology is his public speeches and debate with the abovementioned French philologist and historian, Ernst Renan.

During the nineteenth century, no Western scholar did as much as Renan to establish and contrast the opposing characteristics and essences of the Indo-European and Semitic races. For Renan, as we have seen, the Aryan racial family was characterised by a spirit which was at once energetic, dynamic and rational, whereas the Semitic tribes had changed little over thousands of years. Reflecting the common nineteenth-century slippage between the language and race of a particular group, the Aryan and the Semite were to be distinguished by the function, structure and efficacy of their respective l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Islam, Postcolonialism and Modernity
• 1. Islamic Modernism and the Reification of Religion
• 2. Literary Romanticism and Islamic Modernity: The Case of Urdu Poetry
• 3. Education and the Status of Women
• 4. Muhammad Iqbal, Islam and Modern Nationalism
• 5. The Theory of Divine Sovereignty
• 6. Maududi and the Gendering of Muslim Identity
• 7. Progressive Islam: The Hermeneutical Turn
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright