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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

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Tag Archives: Reformation

What Islamic Enlightenment?

15 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on What Islamic Enlightenment?

Tags

Abdulaziz, Abdulmecid I, Abdulrahman al-Jabarti, Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, al Ghazali, al Qa'ida, Christopher de Bellaigue, Egypt, Enlightenment, Europe, ibn Taymiyya, Industrial Revolution, Iran, ISIS, Islam, Jacques Pierre Brissot, Middle East, Mirza Taki Khan Farahani, Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Ali Pasha, Reformation, Renaissance, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Taliban, Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, terrorism, The Islamic Enlightenment, Thirty Years' War, Turkey, Westphalia

Islamic EnlightenmentDe Bellaigue, Christopher. The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. 432 pp.

The end of the Cold War did not usher in a thousand years of peace; nor did it see the end of History. Instead, even as the victorious Western alliance was popping champagne, a new menace was taking shape in the Islamic world. Terrorism was certainly not a new phenomenon, but the global reach and sophistication of what emerged in the closing decade of the second millennium was unsurpassed. Samuel Huntington famously – controversially – called it a clash of civilisations. Whether he was right or not, the Age of Terrorism has come to be deeply linked to Islam. It is this perception that Christopher de Bellaigue hopes to dispel. His latest book, The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, is meant to be a riposte against Western historians, politicians, and commentators who repeatedly demand that Islam join the 21st century, that it should “subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.” To those who clamour for an Islamic Enlightenment, Reformation, and Renaissance, to those insisting that the religion of Muhammad develop a sense of humour, de Bellaigue’s response is that it already has, albeit with a particular cultural touch.

Westerners have not generally come to the East with open minds and in their inability to see past a European universalism, de Bellaigue contends, have missed the fact that not all Muslims are primitive, regressive terrorists. In fact, the Islamic world has not shown any more hostility towards modernity than Christendom did a couple of centuries earlier. The author dates the clash between European modernity and Islam in 1798 with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army on the shores of Egypt. De Bellaigue astutely observes that Western ideas were initially absorbed with greater success when they were perceived to be universal than later, after World War I, when they were seen as the business end of a hostile ideology.

Islamic Enlightenment locates the foci of modernisation in Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran, where numerous figures, nationalists, litterateurs, monarchists, as well as the ulema, engaged with Western science, technology, and political science to adapt them to the needs of Islamically-minded societies. However, many of the modernisers were inspired not by the trinkets and gimmicks of European innovation but by the achievements of classical Islamic civilisation. De Bellaigue narrates the tales of modernisers of all shades. Some were intrinsically hostile to Western methods yet awed by them such as Abdulrahman al-Jabarti; others infused the “genius of Islam” in the universal knowledge the West possessed such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi. Some of the reformers were optimistic of Western intentions in the Muslim world such as Muhammad Abduh, while others felt forced into reforms such as the Ottoman sultans Abdulmecid I and Abdulaziz. There were, of course, a few who saw modernity as a means to power and pursued Western knowledge with a purely secular interest such as Muhammad Ali Pasha. Regardless, the author notes, a liberalising, modernising tendency had emerged strongly in the Middle East.

This pushback against Islamophobia is laudable yet eventually flawed in its conception. Fundamentally, Islamic Enlightenment tries to pack into one term what in Europe properly describes at least four zeitgeists – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult to imagine, at least in Europe, an Enlightenment that was not preceded by the Reformation and the Renaissance. It was the rediscovery of the classical world and an emphasis on humanism based on reason that caused the first crack in the totalising edifice of the Christian faith. Renaissance intellectuals did not necessarily reject religion but there was, nonetheless, a subtle shift in the way they approach it. The Reformation continued this trend in two important ways – first, and more obvious, is the theological schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, and second, the savagery and horrendous toll of the Thirty Years’ War – between a third and half of the population of Europe – finally broke the power of the Church in temporal matters after the peace at Westphalia in 1648.

These two short yet turbulent epochs paved the way for the Enlightenment. Made receptive to a gradual shift from faith to reason, autocracy to democracy, European society broadly supported the principles of the Enlightenment even if not the pace of some of its most forceful advocates. The Counter-Enlightenment remained a German nationalistic rebellion against French supremacy in the arts rather than a full-blooded critique of the Enlightenment itself. Various aspects of Enlightenment thinking – in the arts, political reform, economic reorganisation, religious reconceptualisation – were realised over the next century and half in step with the Industrial Revolution.

De Bellaigue’s brief history of 19th century reform movements in the Middle East – to which he devotes half the book – describes abortive attempts at modernisation that underscores this point further. Middle Eastern – Islamic? – attempts to replicate Europe’s material successes failed precisely because they focused purely on the material aspects of the European experience without adequately contemplating on the socio-cultural reformations that had taken place since the late 14th century that had brought Europe to a place whence the Enlightenment was possible. ‘Enlightenment with an Islamic flavour’ deviates sufficiently from the European experience that it cannot be herded under the same umbrella.

As de Bellaigue narrates, most Muslim modernisers were enthralled by Western science and technology but retained their faith in the supremacy of Islam. Even secular, power-hungry rulers and administrators were loathe to go to war against the ulema in the name of Western science or progress for fear that they would destabilise their kingdoms and lose their thrones, or worse, their lives. This was not an altogether unfounded fear, as Mirza Taki Khan Farahani found out in a bathhouse in Kashan.

Reforms with largely material goals in mind can hardly be termed an Enlightenment. If technology were the sole arbiter of progress, some of today’s most visious terrorist groups such as the Taliban, al Qa’ida, and ISIS could be said to be progressive. All the major terrorist groups in the 21st century have access to highly sophisticated weaponry and knowledge of explosives and tactics to challenge most national armies, an equation that Middle Eastern rulers of two centuries ago would have yearned for. The pitfall of such progress is visible – although the armies of Muslim states reduced the technological gap between themselves and their European counterparts over the 19th century, there was a backlash against cooperation with Europe after World War I that returned the socio-political situation almost to where it had been a hundred years earlier.

It is also difficult to understand how de Bellaigue considers the fervour of the 19th century as an Enlightenment when many of the most influential actors, be they pashas, clerics, or men of science, continued to cast a sheep’s eye on Islam. Nor was this the Islam of the 10th century Mu’tazilites, a relatively open faith not allergic to external knowledge or inquiry. By the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, it was well past the era of Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali or Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya and the closing of the Muslim mind. This Islam, intrinsically regressive as Shiraz Maher argues in his excellent Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea, looked to the era of its prophet and his companions as the most perfect era in human history and was, thus, fundamentally antithetical to reason. This is not to say that such a society cannot change, but there is certainly a big question mark on whether such a society is capable of an Enlightenment.

Finally, the European Age of Imperialism was not an epoch of liberalism in the Middle East. None of the bold reformers of Egypt, Turkey, or Iran were democrats in the spirit of Jacques Pierre Brissot. In fact, all of de Bellaigue’s examples were despots whose liberal tendencies ended outside the throne room. The question for the author becomes whether it is possible for autocrats to usher in an Enlightenment. Unintentionally, Islamic Enlightenment serves as a warning to Western politicians who believe that they can play midwife to liberal democracy in the Middle East: even when such an endeavour had local support, it was not quite liberal and eventually failed.

All said and done, de Bellaigue is not wrong in his larger point. There is a tendency to view Islamic societies as intrinsically defective and prone to violence. This is no more true for them than it is for Christian societies, especially in the past, even the recent past. A little nuance beyond the sterile dichotomies an attention-deficit media churns out is required in reading the politics of the Middle East. However, nuance cannot be an excuse to whitewash all sorts of regressive social customs and political beliefs. No one sane thinks all Muslims are terrorists but there is a gradation of radicalisation in the Muslim world from terrorists to those who, for example, think blasphemy and apostasy should be punishable by death, to a far more tolerant and humanist sample. Although our attention is held mostly by one extreme end of the spectrum, it is only prudent to consider whether problems also lie further along the spectrum. Furthermore, while a more pleasant distant past holds out hope, it is only natural that it is the stormy present that educates our policies and beliefs.

It is tragic that those who are convinced of de Bellaigue’s broader message probably do not need his book as much and are already familiar with the research of scholars like Majid Fakhry, Lenn Goodman, Marshall Hodgson, and Ira Lapidus. Those who are not convinced, however, will likely not be persuaded by his book or even read it.

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Riflessioni: Modernity And Its Parochialism

14 Wed May 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia, Theory & Philosophy

≈ 8 Comments

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Ancient Greece, Church, classical modernity, dharma, early modernity, Enlightenment, Europe, freedom of religion, Hinduism, homo socialis, India, Industrial Revolution, ISIS, Jainism, Kızıl Avlu, late modernity, materialism, nation, post-modernity, proselytism, Ptolemy I, Reformation, religion, Renaissance, Rome, secularism, Serapis, Shaivite, Shintoism, Sikhism, state, Vaishnavite

One of the fundamental questions many scholars of 19th and 20th century Europe and Empire ponder about is if the nature of modernity might have been different without the ascent of European imperialism. Not just the structure but even the vocabulary of modernity compromises the scope of inquiry by privileging and normatising forms of experiential knowledge peculiar to the European history. Measured against a European norm, other regions of the globe often appear to be lacking, incomplete, or failed, further propagating the idea of “first in the West, then the Rest.”

In Europe, modernity has meant a transition from a period of feudalism, “divine right of kings,” and the central role of religion in public life to an era of capitalism, the nation-state, and rationality. In essence, it has meant the spread of doubt made easy by improvements in communication; first came the printing press and the birth of newspapers, then the telegraph, and finally the internet. The sureties of religion were steadily eroded via the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Age of Physics. The authority of the Church in royal succession, law, inter-state relations, education, and of course, spirituality, was challenged by old ideas resurfacing during the Renaissance and new ideas on the administration of the faith itself during the Reformation. An investigative spirit, combined with material advancement that could advance curiosity and scepticism, moved society out of the grasp of the Church and its traditions.

Despite its claims to universalism, the recession of the sacred in public life is a historical particularity of medieval Europe. Unlike Europe, large parts of the Orient escaped domination by exclusivist, monotheistic cults. In Japan, Shintoism held sway and India saw the flowering of dharmic faiths like Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism despite invasions and aggressive missionary activity from foreign lands. Though, from a modern perspective, Asian non-exclusive belief systems did have their own grotesque social problems, they did not claim a monopoly on interpretation of the world and the battles between theology and science were largely avoided; for example, Ramanujan’s belief in astrology or CV Raman’s fear of the occult powers of a solar eclipse did not interfere in their practice of the rational sciences.

The lack of a central authority in dharmic religions gave an institutional guarantee against widespread zealotry. As a result, an official profession of faith by a state did not give rise to inter-state strife; in India, the notion of advaitins going to war against dvaitins, or Shaivites against Vaishnavites, over theological differences would seem absurd.

The parochialism of modernity is not necessarily a function of geography but of time; Asia has a few examples of societies that did not need secularisation to modernise but examples exist closer to home too; this is not a tale of East vs. West.  The Ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire exhibited a similar pluralism of faith and tolerance to doubt as Shintoism or the dharmic faiths of India did. The ruins of several Roman temples to the gods of their conquered subjects stand testimony around the Mediterranean. The Kızıl Avlu in Bergama, for example, was built by Emperor Hadrian in the early 2nd century in honour of the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis. The very creation of Serapis in the 3rd century BCE by Ptolemy I also speaks to the relative religious harmony in ancient Europe.

The link between modernity and secularism is, outside a defined bubble of time and space, tenuous at best. Yet the vehemence with which secularism is peddled in societies it is alien to leads one to wonder whether the formal process and the content have been conflated with Europe standing in as the universal. Secularism was a solution to Europe’s problem with missionary zeal and the lack of freedom of inquiry; outside these parameters, its usefulness as a feature of modernity is questionable.

One defence of secularism might be to cite the social problems in religious societies, particularly the subjugation of women and the control over sexual functions and orientation. In a theocratic state, who will lend voice to the subaltern? Strictly speaking, this is not a problem of secularism but of orthodox customs that have accreted in communities over time. Such dilemma exist even in a liberal state that allows freedom of religion; for example, would a secular, liberal state remain neutral and allow girls that have attained puberty to be married off as per religious customs or would it insist that a “modern morality” prohibits marriage before attaining adulthood?

These problems cannot be escaped by professing faith in a legal abstraction like secularism. What is necessary is an ability to reflect upon custom critically and maintain, modify, or abandon them. This is not easy in systems that are based upon revelation but more open systems of inquiry are not affronted at the mention of reform. As Adi Shankaracharya argues, if experience differs from shruti, then the shruti must be discarded. In fact, Hinduism views dharma as a function of kaala, desha and paristhiti – this is the true content of secularism and not the legalistic, contractual understanding citizens have with the modern state.

Unfortunately, the Raj seeded the idea of a consolidated Hinduism akin to the Abrahamic faiths. The rationalisation and ordering of knowledge – another modern phenomenon – could not grasp the plurality of Indic religions and customs within an Abrahamic template. Yet the projected similarity has falsified many analyses of religion and politics in society when comparing Europe with other societies.

One might argue that a principle that does not fit with India’s past may be well suited to its present reality – the country today harbours not just Indic faiths but Abrahamic ones too. However, India remains a nation-state with an undisputedly Indic identity. To acknowledge this would only be as sectarian as Christmas being a national holiday in several Western states – secular or otherwise, Europe and the western hemisphere have strong Judaeo-Christian roots that cannot be denied any more than India’s links to its past.

To argue that rejecting secularism would transform India into a Hindu theocracy again makes the mistake of grafting a concept foreign to the Indian experience onto its landscape. The decentralised nature of the religion, not to mention the diversity of the faith itself, makes it virtually impossible to develop a strong and centralised theocracy. Furthermore, the role of Hindu priests was never as overarching as that of a Pope or Caliph; even though Hinduism put the priestly class at the top of the social order, actual political and financial power rested with other groups.

Even when implemented with textbook perfection, secularism remains an unwise idea for several Asian societies. In a secular state, the relationship between faiths that practice proselytism and those that do not would be the same as that of a fox on the jury at a goose’s trial. Both sides assert the same right of religious freedom albeit expressed in a manner antithetical to the other and any position the state takes will advantage one over the other.

The question is if a non-secular – in the formal sense – modernity can give us meaning and a humane existence without losing freedom or truth. Can modernity escape becoming, as David Kolb describes it in The Critique of Pure Modernity, a dilemma of rootless freedom versus oppressive tradition? Is there place for tradition and rational inquiry in the same pantheon? Ramanujan and Raman certainly thought so.


This post appeared on FirstPost on May 27, 2014.

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