How was it that the Islamic world was being defeated by non-Islamic forces everywhere and in such an irreversible fashion? Logically one of three attitudes could be taken:
Something had gone wrong with the world, as God Himself had mentioned in His Book concerning the end of the world and the Blessed Prophet had described in his traditions. In such a case, the eclipse of Islam was itself a proof of the validity of the Islamic message which, however, also foretold the imminent appearance of the Mahdi and the final eschatological events leading to the end of the world.
Muslims had ceased to follow Islam properly and should return to the practice of their religion in its pure form and with full vigour so as to defeat the non-Islamic forces and escape the punishment they were receiving from the hands of God for their negligence of their religion. Such a reaction resulted mostly in the Wahhabi and neo-Wahhabi movements associated with the Deobandi school in India, the followers of Muhammad ‘Abduh and the Salafiyyah in Egypt and Syria, the Muhammadiyyah movement in Indonesia, etc., but was also connected with the much less studied inner revivals within Sufi orders or the establishment of new ones, such as the Darqawiyyah and Tijaniyyah in Morocco and West Africa, the Sanusiyyah in Libya, the Yashrutiyyah in the Arab Near East, the Ni’matallahiyyah in Persia, the Chishtiyyah and Qadiriyyah in India and many others.
The Islamic message had to be changed, modified, adapted or reformed to suit modern conditions and to be able so to adapt itself to the modern world as to be able to overcome Western domination. Out of this attitude grew all the different types of modernism influenced by the French Revolution and the rationalism of such men as Descartes and Voltaire, in some quarters, Locke and Hume and later Spencer and Bergson, in others. So-called Arab liberalism, as well as modernistic movements in Turkey, Persia and the Indian subcontinent, were also results of this third possible reaction to the subjugation of the Islamic world by the West.
Traditional Islam in the Modern World
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 1990
KEGAN PAUL INTERNATIONAL, London & New York
SPECTRUM OF CHANGE
Two recurring questions run under the surface of modern discussions of sunna and define the modern Muslim crisis of religious authority.
- The first is “How does God speak?”
- and the second “Who speaks for God?”
Most of this study has been concerned with issues related to the first question – questions about revelation, prophecy, and how God’s will is to be known. But it is the second question that gives discussions of sunna their special urgency. Moreover, the two questions are intimately connected. Views about the nature of revelation and the nature of prophecy serve to justify particular ideas about who has the right to interpret revelation, i.e., who speaks for God. Those who challenge classical ideas about Prophetic authority as well as those who defend the classical theory of sunna struggle for the right to represent the authority of the Prophet in contemporary society.
Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought
Daniel Brown, 1999
Cambridge University Press
ATERWORD
We cannot be religious in the same way as our ancestors in the premodern conservative world, when the myths and rituals of faith helped people to accept limitations that were essential to agrarian civilization. We are now oriented to the future, and those of us who have been shaped by the rationalism of the modern world cannot easily understand the old forms of spirituality. We are not unlike Newton, one of the first people in the Western world to be wholly imbued by the scientific spirit, who found it impossible to understand mythology. However, hard we try to embrace conventional religion, we have a natural tendency to see truth as factual, historical, and empirical. Many have become convinced that if faith is to be taken seriously, its myths must be shown to be historical and capable of working practically with all the efficiency that modernity expects. An increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe, which has experienced such tragedy during the twentieth century, have rejected religion. For those who see reason as providing the sole path to truth, this is a principled and honest position. As scientists would be the first to insist, rational logos cannot address questions of ultimate meaning that lie beyond the reach of empirical inquiry. Confronted with the genocidal horrors of our century, reason has nothing to say.
Modernity has been beneficial, benevolent, and humane, but it has often, especially in its early stages, felt the need to be cruel. This has been especially true in the developing world, which experienced modern Western culture as invasive, imperialistic, and alien. In the Muslim countries we have considered, the modernization process was very different and difficult. In the West, it had been characterized by in independence and innovation; in Egypt and Iran, it was accompanied by dependence and imitation, as the Muslim reformers and ideologues were acutely aware. This would alter the tenor of modernity in these countries. If you bake a cake using the wrong ingredients (dried eggs instead of fresh, rice instead of flour) and with incorrect equipment, the end result will not conform to the ideal in the cookbook; it could be delicious, if different, but it could be very nasty indeed. It might be better to use techniques and ingredients that are ready to hand to create a closer approximation to the norm, using local expertise and culinary skill. Islamists such as Afghani, Abdu, Shariati, and Khomeini wanted to use Muslim ingredients to bake their own distinctive and modern cake.
Because it was so embattled, this campaign to re-sacralize society became aggressive and distorted. It lacked the compassion which all faiths have insisted is essential to the religious life and to any experience of the numinous. Instead, it preached an ideology of exclusion, hatred, and even violence. But the fundamentalists did not have a monopoly on anger. Their movements had often evolved in a dialectical relationship with an aggressive secularism which showed scant respect for religion and its adherents. Secularists and fundamentalists sometimes seem trapped in an escalating spiral of hostility and recrimination. If fundamentalists must evolve a more compassionate assessment of their enemies in order to be true to their religious traditions, secularists must also be more faithful to the benevolence, tolerance and, and respect for humanity which characterizes modern culture as its best, and address themselves more empathetically to the fears, anxieties and needs which so many of their fundamentalist neighbours experience but which no society can safely ignore.
The Battle for God
Karen Armstrong, 2001
HarperCollins Publishers, Great Britain