Modernity and Islamic Religious Consciousness

Abstract

According to Jurgen Habermas, religious consciousness (in the West) has been undergoing a process of modernization since the Reformation and Enlightenment. This modernization has been taking place in response to challenges which include encounters with a plurality of religions and other worldviews, the emergence of modern science, and the spread of positive law and secular morality. These challenges have motivated efforts to re-conceive the relation between secular and religious knowledge, as well as efforts to relate religion to other worldviews, and to uncover human and universal aspects implicit in religion (Habermas 2006: 13–14). Given that Arab/Muslim societies have been undergoing modernization for more than a century and half, partly as a result of their colonial experience and subsequent integration in a Western-dominated world economy, and partly as a result of internally driven efforts at reform, the question naturally arises as to whether religious consciousness in these societies has also been undergoing modernization.1 This question has been answered many times, even if the answer has not always been the same. Thus fundamentalist movements, with their radical old-fashioned ideas about society have been called ‘anti-modern’ (Ayubi 1991: 231), but their forms of mobilization and motivations have sometimes been viewed as ‘modern’ (Habermas 1996: 271; Azmeh 1993: 85). Modernity has also been attributed to ‘modern’ Islamic thinkers such as Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Qasim Amin and Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq at the beginning of the 20th century. It continues to be attributed to many more thinkers and Islamic modes of thought at present. Discussions of religion and modernity in the West and in Arab/Muslim countries reveal many differences in the nature, purpose and scope of the discussion. This is only to be expected, for in the West such discussions are framed in the context of a relatively long tradition of secularism, whereas in Islamic countries the issue of secularism is far from resolved. Then there are also differences in religion: Christianity differs from Islam in its history, doctrine and, consequently, the inflections that it was able to take – the role that it eventually came to accept in the political life of modern Western societies.2 Finally, there is the fact of modernity itself, original in the West but at best a recent export to, or a violent imposition on much of the Muslim world.3