The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Westernization

Since the mid-19th century, Muslim political philosophers and social reformers have understood and debated Westernization in the context of colonial encounters. In various ways, they have pondered how to distinguish the experience of colonialism from modernity and Westernization. Many associated modernity, either in promoting or rejecting it, with Westernization, while others have emphasized the conceptual and practical distinctions between the two.

One of the early proponents of modernity as Westernization was the Indian Muslim educator and social reformer Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98). In 1875, he founded the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College with a mission to promote modern education brought to India by the British. He believed that Muslim Indians would eventually benefit from British Imperial rule and that, in the final instance, Westernization would bring modernity and prosperity to his fellow Muslims.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) left the most enduring legacy among those who regarded Westernization as an inevitable consequence of modernity. He advanced the most comprehensive project, known as Kemalism, for the modernization of Turkish society. He believed that nation building in Turkey required Westernization both in governance (i.e., secular republicanism) and in its foundational worldview, in science and the Enlightenment rationalism.

Those who remain skeptical of Westernization today have their intellectual roots in the Salafi movement of the mid-19th century. Despite their shared nostalgia for the departed earthly glory of pristine Islam, Salafists diverge radically on how to realize the revitalization of Islam under the condition of modernity. Those who espoused a literal reading of the Qur’an and the hadith, increasingly gravitated toward a Wahhabi puritanism and a total rejection of modernity as a Western conspiracy against Islam. Others who followed the teachings of Afghani (1838–97) believed that the Islamic Renaissance of the Middle Ages afforded the West the essential principles of the Enlightenment. By emphasizing the Islamic roots of modernity, Afghani put forward a critique of the traditionalist ‘ulama’, who regarded Westernization as the inevitable consequence of modernity and thereby condemned any attempt to rearticulate Islamic scriptures within the contemporary context. Concurrently, he chastised those who promoted modernity without emphasizing its Islamic distinctions. He particularly ridiculed Sir Ahmed Khan, whom the British championed as the intellectual force behind the modernization of India. Afghani thus argued that modernity was a Western project neither in its origin nor in its global implications. He believed that benefiting from Western science and technology must bring Muslims closer to, rather than alienate them from, their cultural identity. This assertion became a recurring theme in the Islamic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.

While rejecting Westernization, Afghani’s disciple Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, followed Afghani’s anticolonial assertion of the congruity of Islam with modernity. Through a return to the wellsprings of Islam, Banna considered the mission of the Brotherhood to be enabling Muslims to restore their religion’s power and stand firm against what he called “intrusive tendencies” such as secular liberalism and Marxism. However, after World War II, with the rise of postcolonial nationalisms and the establishment of the state of Israel, the Brotherhood and other Islamic movements gradually adopted a culturally protectionist ideology based on puritan renditions of Islam.

The South Asian Muslim scholar and political leader Mawdudi (1903–79) and the Egyptian teacher and political activist Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) for the first time theorized Westernization as a comprehensive ideology of jāhiliyya (pagan ignorance). Rather than a reference to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula, they interpreted jāhiliyya as an omnihistorical state of being, now manifested in the West, that threatens Muslims’ way of life. By characterizing Westernization as the expression of jāhiliyya, Mawdudi and Qutb situated Islam in a mutually exclusive relationship with the West. In contrast to Mawdudi, Qutb developed the critique of jāhiliyya into a revolutionary program against the ideological and political dominance of the West. He chastised the advocates of Westernization for their indiscriminate recognition of its unbounded rationalism, which he held responsible for depleting modern life of any ethical norms and spiritual values.

Whereas the concept of jāhiliyya gave rise to an Islamic critique of Westernization, the notion of gharbzādagī (Weststruckness, or plagued by the West), coined originally by an Iranian philosopher, Ahmad Fardid (1909–94), made this critique more readily available to a wider community, both Muslim and secular. Fardid traced the ontological roots of gharbzādagī to ancient Greece. He defined, in an ahistorical fashion, all of world history as the struggle between idolatrous impurity (tāghut) and the sanctity of the divine. From the moment human beings strove to place themselves in the position of God, they became alienated from themselves. The desire to act like God, Fardid opined, belongs solely to Western civilization. Godlike Westerners have spread their idolatrous ideas around the world, either in the form of ancient Greece’s polytheism or modern humanism. Either way, Fardid insisted, the result was the same: the incessant Weststruckness of the world by blood and iron or words and ideas. It was another Iranian social critic and writer, Jalal Al-i Ahmad (1923–69), who transformed Weststruckness into a postcolonial critique. In order to address the particular predicament of colonialism and dependency, Al-i Ahmad historicized gharbzādagī rather than underscoring the essential differences between the East and the West. He considered Weststruckness to be a disease that infected the soul and the body of colonized people. Echoing a sentiment that was shared by many postcolonial revolutionaries such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Al-i Ahmad believed that Weststruckness had turned the colonized into strangers in their own land.

Ali Shari‘ati (1933–77) and other key ideologues of the Iranian revolution further appropriated this revolutionary reinterpretation. Accordingly, Shari‘ati considered the West to be neither an indivisible totality nor a degenerate essence beyond redemption. Rather, he developed a universal conception of Weststruckness as a plague that has infected all humanity, regardless of geographic locations or religious affiliations. For Shari‘ati and Al-i Ahmad, gharbzādagī induced alienation both through the instrumental rationality of capitalism and by the violence of colonialism. They negated the imposition of Western modernity while they promoted a critical reengagement with, rather than an apologetic view of, Islam and Muslim traditions. They called Westernization the appropriation of Western social norms and institutions divorced from the historical consciousness and cultural particularities of Muslim societies.