The long march from Lahore to Khartoum: beyond the ‘Muslim reformation’

Abstract

If one were to search for the defining characteristic of the modern Islamist movement, one would most probably find it in its acceptance (and, in some sense, its embodiment) of man's estrangement from God. Since Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), widely regarded as the forerunner of modern Islamic activism, the concerns of modern Islamic revival movements appear to have become decidedly this-worldly. Past religious movements did not see material prosperity and success as a goal, and they often arose to oppose an order which was decadent precisely because it was prosperous. Modern Islamists, by contrast, are keen to argue that Islam guarantees the worldly success and prosperity of the umma, and is the only way to save it from its present condition of impoverishment and ignominy. The bulk of the arguments and writings of modern Islamic activists and thinkers are directed to people who do not believe in Islam or even religion as such. Apologetics, of course, belongs to this category, and there has been a lot of it in modern Muslim writings. But even post-apologetics discourse is decidedly this-worldly in its themes, thus implicitly accepting that we live in a world which understands only this kind of language, and that it is pointless to attempt to teach it a new one. Islam has to be justified in the language of the times. When, following the recent victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in the Algerian local elections (June 1990), an overzealous imam told a Friday prayer congregation that the ISF promised voters nothing in this world, but could only indicate the way to spiritual salvation and rewards in the hereafter, the more 'moderate' and sober leaders of the movement were quick to distance themselves from such assertions. There is a sense in which Islam itself did set the stage for the 'post-religious' era we are living in today. Is it not, after all, a central pillar of the Islamic faith that Muhammad was the last of all prophets and that, after him, God will never directly address humanity again until the end of time? Man need never again, therefore, hearken in anticipation of that message from above; in a word, man is now on his own. The progressive abandonment of religion by large sections of thinking humanity indirectly accepts (and 'confirms') this prophesy. Most people would be very surprised if a new prophet emerged in our time, and such a hapless figure is likely to be very lonely indeed. The postHegelian conceptions about the 'end of history' and the supremacy of reason are much more in tune with this idea about the end of prophesy than with Judaic and Christian messianic beliefs, which are still awaiting Heaven's last word.