Abstract
How to be authentically modern? This was the pervasive question behind the ideological elaborations of numerous religious and nationalist movements toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many of them attempted to find the answer in an imaginary past. This article claims that Islamist movements are not an exception, but rather an affirmation of this rule. The orientation towards a “golden age” of Islam and its allegedly authentic Islamic way of life has been a crucial feature of Islamist thought across all national, sectarian and ideological divides. The article traces this invocation of the past historically back to the construction of specifically Islamic forms of modernity by representatives of Islamic modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Interpreting their modernist thought in the context of more global nineteenth-century concepts and narratives, the article argues from a comparative perspective that Islamic modernism laid the foundations for the ways in which Islamist thinkers have constructed both individual and collective forms of Muslim identities.
Highlights
Islamic Modernism and German ConservatismIn his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, published 1918), Thomas Mann (1875–1955), the German novelist who was awarded the Nobel prize in literature (1929), expressed the worldview of Germany’s conservative intellectual bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century
In sharply distinguishing between culture and civilization, the worldview of these German intellectuals was organized around the dichotomy between German culture and Western civilization
From a perspective of “romantic aestheticism”, Mann proclaimed the defense of German culture against modernity that he identified in the combination of political democracy with mass society (Mann 2017)
Summary
In his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, published 1918), Thomas Mann (1875–1955), the German novelist who was awarded the Nobel prize in literature (1929), expressed the worldview of Germany’s conservative intellectual bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century. In the thought of both German conservatives and Islamists, it was the “West” often serving as a core metaphor for the inauthentic opposition to their own modern projects In this juxtaposing of an authentic past with an inauthentic present the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) identified the emergence of historical consciousness, the process of becoming critical toward oneself In romanticist nationalism and religious revivalism we find the idea of an inborn authenticity, which their protagonists discover in a Golden Age. It is my contention that in the re-imagination of early Islamic history during the nineteenth century we can observe the rise of historical consciousness in modern Muslim thought. The worldview of Islamic modernists was molded by generic concepts such as authenticity, contingency and social actorhood that characterized the world historical context of the late nineteenth century
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