Islamic Reform and the Construction of Modern Muslim Subjectivities

Abstract

Like in Europe, Muslims also responded to modernity with a broad variety of attitudes including traditionalist rejections and secularist affirmations of modern ideas and institutions. In the second part of the nineteenth century, Islamic reformers tried to reconcile modern culture with Islamic traditions between these extreme poles. This apologetic Islamic reform movement created a historically specific and still enormously influential type of an Islamic modernity. In our analysis, nineteenth-century Islamic reformers laid the discursive foundations for subsequent types of social imaginarles according to which the authenticity of collective and individual modern Muslim identities has been constituted in close reference to Islamic traditions. Comparable to what Prasenjit Duara called the “East Asian modern,” this reform movement constructed an “Islamic modern” in building on a characteristic “circulation of practices and signifiers evoking historical authenticity in the region” (Duara 2004, 3). Contrary to the East Asian modern, however, this Islamic modern has a strong religious connotation.1 During the twentieth century, then, Muslim intellectuals and the broader public increasingly discussed different and mutually contested ideas about an Islamic modern. The Islamic reform movement bestowed modern communications about politics, education, science, or the economy with authenticity by drawing them into the system of religious communication.