IN AUGUST 1797, the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte initiated a military expedition to take control of Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, in order to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain’s access to India. The subsequent campaign, although ultimately unsuccessful, would have a powerful impact on the Ottoman Empire in general and the Arab world in particular. Among other things, the invasion demonstrated the military, technological, and organizational superiority of the western European powers over the Middle East. The encounter between Europe and Islam, long a complex one, would in the ensuing centuries create a set of profound social, intellectual, and religious changes in the region. Not only did Napoleon’s invasion open the region up to Western technology, but it also introduced numerous ideas, such as liberalism and nationalism. Some scholars argue that Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt marks the beginning of the modern Middle East.
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Islam’s encounter with the West is highly charged and complex and so demands nuance in its description. A complex dialectic is at work here: modernity becomes a force or set of forces against which Muslim identities are formed and manipulated. Once formed, however, these manifold Muslims identities become invested in shaping the modern world to their own perceptions of what Islam should be. Within these many formulations, Islam serves an interpretive strategy to explain or account for the rise of modernity and to counter an increasingly unfriendly and powerful European bloc. So even the most extreme rejection of the modern world paradoxically needs selected elements of modernity to define its rejection and, in the process, its vision of Islam.
The categorical mistake in this complicated dialectic is to assume that there was or has been a monolithic Islamic response to modernity. A host of books on “modern Islam” that seek to portray a “clash of civilizations” or of a religion that is incapable of adapting to the modern world has made this mistake.
2 There are almost as many different Muslim responses to modernity as there are Muslims. There is, however, a tendency among many scholars and theologians (both Muslim and non-Muslim) to try and sort through these myriad constructions and choose, depending on the perspective to be argued, a particular version of Islam that appears to be most “authentic.” This choice is often made for various political reasons, usually either to discredit Islam by implying that all Muslims are angry and violent or to show that Islam is compatible with modernity because certain groups are. Such interpretative frameworks make various parts stand for the whole in the service of some larger ideological agenda.
Many take events such as the attacks on September 11, 2001, as a filter to examine the entire history of Islam. Some commentators or pundits say that events in the historical record such as the violence of the sectarian Kharijites or Muhammad’s purported assassination of a Jewish tribe in Medina demonstrate that Islam was violent or anti-Semitic from the beginning. Yet others take various hadith reports to construct a proto-democratic, proto-feminist, or proto-humanist Muhammad. Once again, however, we are left with the rhetoric of authenticity,
3 the attempt to impose a normative Muslim identity on a complex web of historical and mythological projections. The “real” Islam as defined by each group is singled out from all the sources and interpretations and made to fit effortlessly with the needs, political or otherwise, with those doing the interpreting.
But if the chapters in this book have shown anything, it is that there is no such thing as a monolithic Islam or a singular Muslim identity. On the contrary, terms such as “real Islam” and “real Muslims” are highly charged and, as such, highly contested. Various actors and various groups have constantly been caught up in the struggle to make their version of Islam normative or authentic, and so, by extension, they define the Islams of their competitors as innovations, misinterpretations, or bastardizations.
It is imperative that we be self-reflective regarding the language and categories we employ as we wade through these various contestations and try to be mindful of the ideological skirmishes that occur around the fault lines of identity. This chapter shows just how many of the issues raised in the previous chapters—questions about sources, ideology, and legitimacy—remain. The previous chapters, in other words, present not just the stuff of history, but the prime ingredients in the ongoing construction of Muslim identities and the debates to which such constructions inevitably give rise.
Modernity is a difficult concept to define owing largely to its ability to cover under its broad canopy any number of social, economic, political, and intellectual forces. As a movement, modernity tends to coincide with the rise of capitalism, secularization, and the emergence of postindustrial life—as well as with all the consequences to which these changes gave rise. The sociologist Anthony Giddens, for example, writes,
At its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial civilization. Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past.
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Modernity has forced Islam—indeed, as it has forced all religions—to intersect, both willingly and unwillingly, the traditional with the modern, the religious with the scientific, and the particular with the universal. The modern era has witnessed the rise of various types of social, political, and authority structures that religious practitioners frequently perceive as pernicious to “true” religious belief. The quest for authenticity—how to create the idyll of Muhammad’s Medina, for example—accordingly becomes a major force at work in the modern period. How, so the question goes, can we return to the way the religion was perceived to be practiced in the past? The answers to this question—from adapting to the modern period to completely rejecting it—are as manifold as those seeking the answer. The only mistake that can be made here is to assume either that there is only one response to this question or that one response is more valid or authentic than others.
Colonialism and Orientalism have been instrumental in modern constructions of Islam. Colonialism, driven largely by economic considerations, can be defined as the process of building and maintaining colonies and plantations in one territory by elites living elsewhere, referred to as the “metropole” (e.g., London, Paris). Once the new territory was defeated militarily, the metropole often sought to impose new governments and, not infrequently, new social structures and economies on the colonies with the aim of “civilizing” them and helping them enter the modern world and its mercantile economy.
Much of European colonialism occurred in areas whose main inhabitants happened to be Muslim (e.g., Middle East, South Asia). Islam accordingly became the religion that European colonialists associated with backwardness and rigidity when it came to adapting to modernity. Behind this assessment, of course, lingered medieval polemics between Europe and Islam, perhaps the only major civilization that constantly threatened European interests in the premodern world.
A case study of colonialism can be seen in the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I (1914–1918).
5 The huge conglomeration of territories and peoples that the sultan of the Ottoman Empire had ruled continuously from the thirteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth was now divided into several new nation-states by the victorious European powers. The League of Nations dismantled the Ottoman Empire and under the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) gave England and France the power to govern different parts of it. France was to have a mandate over the newly formed nation-states of Syria and Lebanon, and England was to possess mandates over Jordan and Palestine. These new countries, although staples of twentieth-century conflict, had never existed in the premodern world, and they for all intents and purposes became European colonies under the political, social, cultural, and linguistic control of the superpowers of the day.
Orientalism is often seen as the handmaiden of colonialism, the intellectual and artistic activity that manufactured “the Orient” for Western consumption. The term was given prominence by Edward Said (1935–2003) in his highly influential work
Orientalism, published in 1978. For him, intellectual production (e.g., literature, operas) and imperial control reinforce each other because the former provides the latter’s legitimization and dehumanization. For Said, Orientalism exists before there is colonialism. He defines Orientalism in the following terms: “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution of dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”
6For Said, the entire Western apparatus used to understand the East—from the discipline of Arabic and Islamic studies in academia to literature to opera—was and still is complicit in attempts to control the Orient and thus heavily invested in the colonial enterprise. Although some scholars have tried to temper the overgeneralizations of Said’s critique,
7 the fact remains that scholarship about Islam is often tied to broader geopolitical forces, whether vitriolic or apologetical.
Before we can create and analyze a typology of Muslim responses to modernity, we might find it useful to distinguish between what Bruce Lincoln calls “maximalist” and “minimalist” understandings of religion.
8 These two understandings concern the role that religion plays or is perceived to play in society. It is a distinction that by no means is confined to Islam; rather, it can easily be applied to all religions in the modern world. Lincoln locates this distinction in the Enlightenment, a period that witnessed, among other things, the desire to curtail the influence of religion in the public sphere—a process or set of processes that led to the foundation of the modern nation-state.
9 Out of this worldview there emerged the idea that religion should play a “minimalist” role in society, confined largely—as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) would have it—to the realms of aesthetics and ethics.
The curtailment of the function and place of religion in society necessarily led to the rise of individuals, groups, and movements highly critical of the perceived immortality, sexual depravity, and moral laxity that emerges when religion is marginalized. Such groups sought a “maximalist” role for religion in society, seeking to reintroduce it whenever and wherever they could and—depending on the group—by any means at their disposal.
A reproduction of Lincoln’s chart emphasizing the differences between these two worldviews is helpful:
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Maximalist
Religion = the central domain of culture, deeply involved in ethical and aesthetic practices constitutive of the community.
Cultural preferences constituted largely as morality and stabilized by religion.
Religious authority secures coherent, ongoing order.
Minimalist system experienced as powerful and intrusive, a serious temptation for would-be elites and a dangerous threat to all.
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Minimalist
Economy = the central domain of culture; religion restricted to private sphere and metaphysical concerns.
Cultural preferences constituted largely as fashion and opened to market fluctuations.
Capitalist dynamism effects rapid expansion of wealth and power.
Maximalist system experienced in two ways: a quaint, seductive diversion for some, and a resentful atavism, capable of reactionary counterattacks. 10 |
This distinction is useful on several levels. First, it shows that the dichotomy can be usefully applied to all religions (including those in contemporary America), not just Islam, which can thus no longer be singled out as the “problem” religion. Second, it should force us to be cautious of applying simplistic phrases such as “clash of civilizations” because it reveals that the real clashes go on not between religions, but between various incarnations (whether in the Muslim world, in Israel, in America) of maximalists and minimalists. Third, the conflicts—perhaps we might even define them as “cultural wars”—are a distinct hallmark of modernity, where maximalists perceive the space for religion as ever shrinking owing to the pernicious forces of secularization.
“Islam in the modern world” is truly a vague rubric. Rather than envisage an Islamic take on the modern world, it might make more sense to imagine Islam as an interpretive strategy that can be used in the service of numerous local and global agendas. In many ways, Islamic ideologies represent Islamic interpretations of global ideologies (e.g., a nationalist movement, a social movement, and increasingly an ethnic movement). This section seeks to show some of the manifold ways that Islam was imagined over the course of the twentieth century and presents numerous case studies of these various interpretations in detail.
The degradation of Islamic societies into objects of European colonialism after the end of the nineteenth century led to various responses, most of which sought to redefine Islam in light of European charges of “backwardness.” By the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, roughly 80 percent of Muslims were ruled by at least eleven different colonial powers (from Great Britain and France to China). In response, many of these colonial subjects increasingly began to conceive of Islam in the service of nationalism. From the Syrian Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) to the Turk Mehmet Ziya Gokalp (1876–1924), Muslim intellectuals constructed Islam as forming the basis of various nationalist causes. It is worth noting that these individuals were not interested in creating an “Islamic republic” as conceived of today, but in using Islam as the realization of a system of government based on state institutions and political ethics. In places and movements as diverse as the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Nasserism in Egypt, Muhammad could easily be celebrated as the founder of a socialist movement, someone whose goals in the seventh century c.e. were not unlike the goals pursued by twentieth-century nationalist reformers.
These various modern movements increasingly used an early Islamic context—even when such a context went against their own ideals—to attract and unify diverse groups in newly created states. Various national movements—in Algeria, in Egypt, increasingly in Palestine and elsewhere—tended to be portrayed mythically as Islamic expressions or to present Islam as the so-called ideology of Third World liberation, the voice of the dispossessed in colonies seeking their independence from Europe.
Within such contexts, some began to conceive of Islam as a transnational force, something to give the “Islamic public” or umma—nationally and regionally fragmented—a unified entity. Such efforts were no doubt aided by humanist causes (e.g., the plight of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis) and oil wealth in places such as Saudi Arabia. The latter, for example, created the Muslim World League of Mecca in 1972 with an eye toward Islamic unity.
The 1970s also witnessed the rise of Islam as the perfection of all ideological thought.
11 This new interpretation conceived of Islam as superior to all Western ideologies, the best of which, it was claimed, were already preexistent within Islam. Islam, in other words, now held the solution to the West’s secular malaise and, because of this, was actually superior to the West. This view led to the formation of a distinct Islamic political language that could be employed to justify and legitimate “Islamic states” and “Islamic revolutions.” Not coincidentally, the Iranian Revolution occurred in the year 1979 (see the section “Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini”).
Islam now was perceived as the ideology to liberate the deprived in places as diverse as Iran, North Africa, and Indonesia and to guarantee a new transnational Islamic identity or consciousness. Islam also became the ideology to critique and offer alternatives to various governments perceived to be either “un-Islamic” or not Islamic enough. The use of this ideology could be witnessed in various attempts to topple governments (e.g., in Saudi Arabia in 1979) and to go to war with other Islamic countries (e.g., Iran–Iraq War).
The years 1979 to 1989 increasingly witnessed the fragmentation of Islamic voices and the rise of new interpretations of Islam. As Reinhard Schulze points out, Islam “was no longer considered as an objective, social state of affairs, but as a hermeneutic process of interpretations.”
12 This fragmentation led in some quarters, especially among French-inflected intellectuals in North Africa, to a liberal Islam that sought to reject polygamy and jihad in favor of what they perceived to be more modern—and thus more “Islamic”—norms. In other quarters, it meant that Islam became a symbol worth fighting for. Hamas and other Islamic groups that sought wide appeal among Muslims whether at home or abroad gave the Israeli–Palestinian conflict an Islamic veneer, so much so that even the secular, Marxist Palestine Liberation Organization had to adopt Islamic themes and symbols for its voice to be heard.
The past few decades—with the Gulf War, the U.S.–Iraq War, the various wars in Afghanistan, and so on—have increasingly made various subgroups more militant against what they perceive to be the West’s excesses and its neocolonialism. These diverse groups, collectively forming what is referred to as the “Islamic jihad movement,” is perhaps best—or, at least, famously—symbolized by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network (see
chapter 12). In many of these groups, local causes or worldviews have often intersected with the global vision of a jihad movement.
Lincoln’s division between minimalist and maximalist approaches to the place of religion in society suggests a convenient way to establish a taxonomy of Muslim encounters with modernity. Such a taxonomy, although by no means accurately mirroring the complexity of Islamic voices on the ground, should provide a convenient context to begin the process of sorting through at least some of these competing voices heard from Islam. Most important, it should also avoid the common assumption that all Muslims, whether synchronically or diachronically, speak with one voice or that they all react in the same manner to external or internal stimuli.
For sake of convenience, I divide these voices into the following types:
fundamentalism,
modernism, and
nationalism.
13 They are certainly meant as ideal types or various theoretical markers, between which reside more complex, variegated, and realistic formations. Individuals, let alone groups, can rarely be placed neatly into watertight categories. Such categories likewise admit of neither nuance nor change. What constitutes a modernist version of Islam today may not be the same as what constituted such a movement fifty or even ten years ago. Moreover, these categories masquerade a stability that often does not exist in reality, especially as groups change, modify, and reconfigure with others dependent on larger political and social contexts.
Common to most of these types, however, is the notion that some monolithic or essentialist Islam is in need of reform. Where they differ, not surprisingly, is in the kind of reform required or in the means and end of the reform process. In this regard, all these types look to the past, albeit a past that is constructed and romanticized based on all that is perceived to be wrong with the present. From the present, there is the desire to create a Muslim identity that coincides with this ideal past variously configured. These Muslim identities are not simply inherited or ascribed but actively cobbled together from the shards of memory and desire. In this respect, modern Muslim identity formations are no different from premodern ones: both are predicated on various constructions of who Muhammad was or should be, what the Quran is or should be, and the ideals imagined to be embodied in the nascent Muslim polity.
This section offers a description of each type of Muslim encounter with modernity and provides examples of individual voices that are constitutive of yet also show the diversity within each type.
“Islamic fundamentalism” is an omnibus term used to describe any number of religious ideologies that advocate a return to the so-called fundamentals of Islam (e.g., the Quran and the Sunna). It is also a potentially misleading term because it often includes under its large canopy individuals and groups with radically different agendas: some are intolerant of outsiders, whereas others are more pluralistic; some are democratic, others authoritarian; some are pacifist, others violent. To label all these groups as “fundamentalist” is accordingly problematic. A cognate term used to describe Muslim fundamentalism is
“Islamism” (“Islamist” in the adjective form). The latter term possesses a greater political valence than does “fundamentalism” and accordingly implies a greater activity in the political arena in order to bring about an Islamic state.
Muslim fundamentalists hold that the perceived current political and military weakness of Muslims stems from the fact that many have strayed away from the fundamentals of Islam and have instead become influenced by secularism, often defined synonymously with the “West” or the United States. The only way to overcome this current malaise, according to this view, is to “return” to Islam—that is, to the fundamentalists’ particular reading of Islam—by implementing the sharia to govern all aspects of life.
Several scholars have questioned the utility of employing the word “fundamentalist”—a term originally used by certain American Protestants in the early twentieth century to describe their struggle against modernism and their desire to return to the “fundamentals” of their tradition.
14 Protestant fundamentalists stressed biblical inerrancy, individual salvation, and the redemptive qualities of Jesus—all of which are far removed from Islam. Moreover, whereas these Protestant fundamentalists used the term “fundamentalist” to refer to themselves, Westerners tend to use it strictly to describe Muslims, who do not call themselves by this name.
The crucial difference between early Protestant fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists is that whereas the former tended to shy away from the political stage (although this is certainly not the case today), the latter have a political agenda—to implement Islam into all areas of life. And whereas Protestant fundamentalism had its origins in the reaction against modernity, the origins of Islamic fundamentalism did not.
In this regard, the origins of Islamic fundamentalism are usually attributed to Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), whose life dates should caution against the simple importation of the twentieth-century category “fundamentalism” into Islam. Ibn Taymiyya was highly critical of Sufism and Sufi practice, which he believed had infiltrated all spheres of Islamic life—for example, celebrating Muhammad’s birthday, using music, making pilgrimages to shrines, practicing excessive asceticism, and claiming miracles. (Ibn Taymiyya paradoxically articulated these criticisms even though he was a member of the Qadiri Sufi order.) Working out of the conservative Hanbali legal school, he sought to purge such beliefs and practices from Islam. Anything that could not be justified by appeals to the Quran and Sunna had to be rejected. Ibn Taymiyya also believed that Shi
ʿism was a heretical movement, and he consequently sought to refute it and sanctioned violence against Shi
ʿis.
Islamic militant groups (
chapter 12) usually derive their rhetoric from this ideal type and, in this regard, should be classified as a species under the broader genus “fundamentalist.”
Wahhabis
Inspired by the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, Muhammad Ibn abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) sought to return to the “fundamentals” of the tradition—the Quran, the Sunna, and the Hanbali school’s legal positions. Everything else, in his and his followers’ opinion, was bida (innovation). Based in the Arabian Peninsula, the Wahhabis, as his followers were called, accordingly destroyed many mosques, shrines, and tombs on the peninsula that they believed to be dedicated to the memory of Sufi saints. In 1802, they also attacked and destroyed the Shiʿi Holy City of Karbala. It is also important to note that although others use the name “Wahhabi” to refer to this group, members of the group tend to refer to themselves as “Salafis,” the “pious ancestors” who were the first followers and Companions of Muhammad.
Wahhabism might well have been only a fairly minor movement in a desert backwater were it not for the establishment of a pact between the emerging House of Saud and Ibn abd al-Wahhab, the former pledging to implement the latter’s teachings and enforce them on neighboring towns in return for his political support. The House of Saud sought to seize control of Arabia and its environs and finally did so in 1932 with the establishment of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Because the kingdom never severed its alliance with the Wahhabi religious ideology, this ultraconservative movement became the de facto state religion.
The Wahhabis became a quasi-religious police that continues to enforce morality throughout the kingdom and beyond. Forced attendance at prayer, dress codes, strict separation of the sexes, and restrictions on women driving have been part of this group’s vision of what Islam should be.
As the Saudi family’s prestige increased throughout the Muslim world—largely because of its vast oil wealth (discovered in the 1930s) and control of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam—the Wahhabis’ puritanical vision has exerted a tremendous influence on other Muslim groups. Because of Saudi Arabia’s wealth, it often funds the construction of mosques in other countries, the publication and dissemination of religious literature, and the training of religious leaders throughout the Islamic world. All these acts have meant that Wahhabism has moved far beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia and has influenced other highly conservative reform movements across the modern Muslim world, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb
The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) was a religiopolitical movement based in Egypt. Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), the movement sought to purify Islam of what it perceived to be the West’s corrupting influences. Al-Banna desired to ban all Western ideas from the Egyptian educational curriculum, arguing that primary schools should be part of the mosque infrastructure. He also wanted a ban on political parties and democratic institutions other than the
shura (electoral council of elders), which had been used, for example, to elect Uthman after the death of Muhammad. Al-Banna also rejected as unsound the hadith calling the internal jihad of greater importance than the external one: “Supreme martyrdom is only conferred on those who slay or are slain in the way of God,” he argued. “As death is inevitable and can happen only once, partaking in jihad is profitable in this world and the next.”
15The Muslim Brotherhood sought to replace Egypt’s secularism with its vision of an all-embracing Islam that would govern all aspects of modern Egyptian life. The movement received renewed impetus in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel, perceived to be a hostile Other imposed by imperialist forces on Egypt’s eastern border.
After the attempted assassination of Gamal abd al-Nasser in 1954, the authorities accused the brotherhood of the plot. Nasser then abolished the brotherhood and imprisoned and punished thousands of its members. Although outlawed in theory, the Muslim Brotherhood continues to operate in Egypt through a network of social services in local neighborhoods and villages, and it still runs candidates in elections, albeit as “independents.” Muslim Brotherhoods also now exist in many countries in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. Recent political upheavals in Egypt associated with the so-called Arab Spring have meant that the Muslim Brotherhood there has entered the political mainstream.
Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) is arguably the most important and influential of the fundamentalist thinkers. Like his contemporary Hasan al-Banna, Qutb played an important role in the Muslim Brotherhood, providing an intellectual impetus both to the brotherhood and to those Islamist movements that would come after it in Egypt and elsewhere. Said to have memorized the Quran at the age of ten, Qutb originally seems to have been fond of certain aspects of Western civilization, but he grew increasingly dismayed by it in the aftermath of 1948, the year in which the State of Israel was founded.
16In 1948, he published Al-Adala al-ijtimaʿiyya fiʾl-Islam (Social Justice in Islam), in which he argued that Muslims needed to return to Islam, which, he claimed, provides a complete and total way of life based on equilibrium in the social, economic, political, and legal spheres of life. Any insertion of foreign (i.e., Western) elements into this total way of life was a form of corruption and would ultimately weaken Islam, something that he saw happening in his own day. After publishing the work, Qutb traveled to the United States and described what he saw there:
I saw them there as nervous tension devoured their lives despite all the evidence of wealth, plenty, and gadgets that they have. Their enjoyment is nervous excitement, animal merriment. One gets the image that they are constantly running from ghosts that are pursuing them. They are machines that move with madness, spend, and convulsion that does not cease. Many times I thought as though the people were in a grinding machine that does not stop day or night, morning or evening. It grinds them and they are devoured without a moment’s rest. They have no faith in themselves or in life around them.
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Upon his return to Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He also published his important and massive thirty-volume commentary on the Quran,
Fi zilal al-Quran (
In the Shade of the Quran), in which he articulated further his vision of Islam and Muslim identity as the perfect system representing all aspects of life.
After the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the ensuing Nasser years, the Muslim Brotherhood was made an outlawed political organization, as it was until 2011. Qutb’s critiques of the government ensured that he spent time in prison. In 1964, he wrote his most important and influential work, Maʾalim fi-l-tariq (Milestones).
One of Qutb’s most important aims in
Milestones was the resignification of the term
jahiliyya, which, as noted in
chapter 1, refers to a mythical “age of ignorance” on the Arabian Peninsula prior to the advent or reestablishment of Islam.
18 Qutb transformed this term so that it would refer to all those systems of thought—including what we even tend to think of as “Muslim”—that elevate humans to the status of God. He juxtaposed these systems with his own purified vision of Islam: “Today we are in a similar or darker
jahiliyyah than that contemporaneous to early Islam. All that surrounds us is
jahiliyyah, people visions, beliefs, their habits and customs, their source of knowledge, art, literature, rules and laws, even what we consider as Islamic education, Islamic sources, Islamic philosophy and Islamic thought—all of it is the product to
jahiliyyah.”
19After its publication, Milestones became a manual of Islamic revival. In 1965, Qutb was arrested for plotting to overthrow the state and then executed a year later. He was buried in an unmarked gave, but he continues to be considered an important martyr and a symbol of Islamic revival throughout the Islamic world to this day. Sayyid Qutb’s writings have inspired many other fundamentalist reformers, including the Muslim Brotherhoods outside Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, and his writings played an important role in the intellectual development of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, the founders of al-Qaeda.
Mawlana Abuʾl-Ala Mawdudi
Mawlana Abu
ʾl-Ala Mawdudi (1903–1979) was the founder of the Islamic Association (Jamaat-i-Islami) in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1941 during the closing days of the British Raj. Highly critical of British imperialism, Mawdudi wanted to secure the existence of a Muslim community overwhelmed by the Hindu population on the Indian subcontinent.
As a newspaper journalist and editor, Mawdudi used as his main platform the journal
Tarjuman al-Quran, which was highly critical of the Indian Nationalist Congress’s nationalist aspirations. According to Mawdudi, Islam was steadfastly opposed to nationalism, which often coincided with a secular state, and Muslims were bound together based solely on their religious commitment to God, which took precedence over language, race, or culture. However, he wrote, “the reforms which Islam wants to bring about cannot be carried out merely by sermons. Political power is essential for their achievement…. [T]he struggle for obtaining control over the organs of the state when motivated by the urge to establish the
din [religion] and the Islamic
shariah and to enforce the Islamic injunction is not only permissible but is positively desirable and is such obligatory.”
20Although originally critical of the nationalist aspirations to create a Muslim homeland, Pakistan, after partition occurred in 1947, Mawdudi was forced to flee there, and from there he began to argue that the new state’s constitution should be based solely on Islamic principles. Creating such a constitution would lead to the renaissance of Islam in the modern world by creating a social order that he—like al-Banna and Qutb—imagined to be at work in Muhammad’s time and in the period immediately thereafter. It was only in the ensuing years, so the argument went, that Islam gradually became corrupted as it encountered and absorbed foreign ideas and practices.
The Islamic Association is still a political party in Pakistan, and its goal remains the establishment of a pure Islamic state governed by the sharia as well as opposition to Westernization and its concomitant ideologies capitalism, socialism, and secularism. In recent years, Indian and American politicians have argued that the Islamic Association forms the political wing of more radical militant groups (such as Party of Jihadists [Hizbul Mujahidin]) in Pakistan.
Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini
Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1902–1989)—often referred to as “Ayatollah Khomeini”—was the spiritual head of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. When the shah attempted to nationalize the Shi
ʿi
ulama, a group of clerics led by Khomeini opposed the monarchy’s autocracy and its desire to monitor and control the religious institutions associated with southern Iran. After a series of large-scale demonstrations, Khomeini was arrested and deported to Iraq.
Although Khomeini would eventually become the poster boy in the West for militant and intolerant Islam, he was someone who was interested in Western philosophy, was himself a poet, and—unlike some of the other individuals discussed so far—was firmly entrenched in the classical sources of the tradition. In exile, Khomeini also encountered the works of Islamist thinkers such as Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, who although Sunnis, spoke openly of the conflict between the West and Islam, the forces of secularism, and Muslim fundamentals.
In exile, Khomeini published an innovative tract on the traditional Shi
ʿi concept of
wilayat al-faqih (the legal scholar’s mandate), in which he argued that in the absence of the Imam, qualified religious scholars can assume the right to rule. It was this theory that brought Khomeini to power in 1979 when the shah left Iran.
21 He wrote, for example, that “the acquisition of knowledge and expertise in various sciences—is necessary for making plans for a country and for exercising executive and administrative functions; we too will make use of people with those qualifications. But as for the supervisions and supreme administration of the country, the dispensing of justice and the establishment of equitable relations among the people—these are precisely the subjects that the
faqih [religious scholar] has studied.”
22Khomeini’s supporters used the imagery of the martyrdom of Husayn in the seventh century to symbolize their struggle. The shah became associated with the forces of Yazid, and Khomeini and his followers were associated with the moral and spiritual superiority of the
ahl al-bayt, Muhammad’s family. Khomeini was able to take the historically quietist position of Shi
ʿism, which emerged out of particular historical contexts (see
chapter 5), and turn it into political activism.
Under Khomeini’s rule, sharia was introduced in Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard enforced an Islamic dress code and morality for both men and women. For instance, women were required to cover their hair, and men were not allowed to wear shorts. Alcohol, most Western movies, and the practice of men and women swimming or sunbathing together were banned. The educational curriculum was Islamized at all levels, and any music other than that composed for martial or religious purposes was banned. Khomeini was also responsible for issuing the fatwa calling for the assassination of the British novelist Salman Rushdie for his publication of what many Muslims considered to be the defamatory
Satanic Verses (see
chapter 3).
Although the majority of Iranians welcomed Khomeini with open arms in 1979, the effects of the revolution are anything but clear today. Many Iranians have grown disaffected with the revolution and have called for an end to the theocracy of the Shiʿi ulama. Elections, widely regarded as rigged, have secured the status quo, and there is great unease between the populace and many religious leaders, who control the government and its policies (there are reformist religious scholars, but they tend to be harassed and marginalized).
MODERNISM
If fundamentalists seek a return to the ideals that they perceive to have been at work in the sacred past when Muhammad lived, modernists try to adapt the past and its teachings to the contemporary world. This distinction does not make the claim that modernists are secular or that they reject Islam—this would effectively take them beyond the pale of the religion, although there are certainly many secular Muslims. Where modernists differ from such secularists is in their desire to ground change in the Quran and Sunna, albeit in a much more liberal fashion than the fundamentalists advocate. “Modernist” is the umbrella term that refers to all those Muslims who believe that Islam and modernity are compatible with each other, at least when both are properly configured.
Whereas fundamentalists drew and continue to chart their identity formations against the perceived bedrock of an immutable past to which the present must be made to conform, modernists acknowledge the instability of social formation and try to recast Islamic principles accordingly. Whereas fundamentalists are quick to posit the self-sufficiency of Islam, modernists are not afraid to admit that certain Western ideals are compatible with Islam (this view sometimes leads to the apologetic claim that Western political ideals such as democracy and minority rights are actually Islamic as opposed to European in origin).
Islamic modernism has its roots in the nineteenth century and was most likely connected to the age of colonialism and imperialism. It is, in certain ways, based on the European critique of Islam as backward. The development of the modernist position is tied to the notions that Islam is currently flawed and that its regeneration requires that
certain aspects of it need to be changed. In many ways, this position is based on the modern European distinction between the religious and the secular: modernists tend to see Islam as the basis for religious life that informs more secular political ideals such as democracy, liberalism, and tolerance.
Although modernists do attempt to limit the binding authority of the past, they are quick not to deny its authority. Their goal is not to re-create Muhammad’s polis in the modern period, but to distill the essence of Islam, which can in turn be infused into the present period.
Muhammad Abduh
Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) was born to a poor peasant family in Upper Egypt before going on to study at al-Azhar in Cairo, where he would eventually become its first modernizing rector. He was a student of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1907), a philosopher and religious reformer who advocated Pan-Islamism to resist European colonialism.
23 Like all reformers—fundamentalist, modernist, and nationalist—Abduh perceived the Islam of his contemporaries to be in a state of decay and in need of resurrection.
Seeing the religious sphere in a state of demise and the Western-inspired secular sphere threatening to overturn Islam, Abduh sought to harness them to each other. His rational and rationalist construction of Islam would enable Muslims to thrive in the modern world, he believed, helping a new learned class to select what was necessary from modernity and then show how it can be made to be compatible with Islam.
The way that Abduh sought to make Islam compatible with nineteenth-century rationalism was by opening up the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning), a move that struck many conservatives and traditionalists as highly controversial. In taking this approach, he was highly critical of what he considered to be the old-fashioned notions of fiqh (jurisprudence) and taqlid (imitation), which offered only an overreliance on previous legal reasoning and curtailed present concerns. Muslims, according to him, could not simply rely on medieval interpretations of texts but needed to use reason to keep up with changing times.
Keeping up with the times, of course, did not mean abandoning traditions. Although Abduh preached the compatibility between religion and science, he encouraged believers to look beyond the laws of nature to their source in a creator. He composed a modernist commentary on the Quran—which he regarded, along with the Sunna, as the key to Islamic renaissance in the modern period.
Muhammad Iqbal
Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) was born in Sialkot in the Punjab, where he was educated at the Scotch Mission before going on to study philosophy in Lahore. He subsequently studied in Cambridge, Heidelberg, and Munich, where he completed a doctorate in 1908 with the dissertation “The Development of Metaphysics in Persia.” He returned to Lahore and established a law practice but concentrated primarily on writing poetry and various scholarly works on politics, philosophy, and religion.
Drawing on his studies in Europe and his own perception of the current weakened state of contemporary Indian Muslim society, Iqbal sought to reinvigorate Islam by detaching it from Sufi pantheism and Hindu intellectualism. He argued that one of the main ways to accomplish this task was to establish an Islamic state founded on the principle of absolute equality. He argued apologetically that this democratic principle had existed at the beginnings of Islam but was gradually curtailed during the decades of Islamic expansions. Now, he wrote, “democracy [which] has been the great mission of England in modern times … is one aspect of our own political ideal that is being worked out in it. It is … the spirit of the British Empire that makes it the greatest Muhammadan Empire in the world.”
24Muslim democracy, however, was far from realizable until Muslims developed their potential as Muslims and, as such, became active participants in the betterment of society. Once this happened, Muslim countries around the globe could form their own “League of Nations”: “It seems to me that God is slowly bringing home to us the truth that Islam is neither Nationalism nor Imperialism but a League of Nations which recognize[s] artificial boundaries and racial distinctions of reference only and not for restricting the social horizons of its members.”
25Iqbal, as the president of the India Muslim League, was one of the first in India to argue for the creation of a separate Muslim state. However, he also argued that “a false reverence for past history and its artificial resurrection constitute no remedy for a people’s decay.”
26 Like the fundamentalists, Iqbal thought that the main problem plaguing the modern Muslim world was its departure from Islamic principles, so he desired to find in an imagined past a model for present (and future) regeneration. However, he differed from the fundamentalists in the assertion that the past must be shaped and molded to address contemporary concerns rather than the reverse.
Fazlur Rahman
Fazlur Rahman (1911–1988) was born in the Hazara area of British India (now Pakistan), received a doctorate in Islamic philosophy from the University of Oxford, and went on to teach at, among other places, McGill University in Canada and the University of Chicago. He briefly interrupted his academic career from 1962 to 1968 to become the director of the Islamic Research Institute in Pakistan, which the Pakistani government set up to implement Islam into the nation’s daily dealings. However, owing to conservative criticism, he was forced to leave both the institute and the country.
27Rahman was highly critical of the classical Islamic legal tradition. He argued that much of this tradition had ignored the spirit or moral of the sources in a literal reading of them. He also adopted an historicist position, arguing that it is imperative to examine both historically and critically how the Quran and other sources have been understood and by whom. For Rahman, this process enables us to see what is essential to Islam and what is historically conditioned.
His search, then, like those of the others examined in this chapter, was for a pristine Islam that exists outside the historical, the cultural, or the political. However, the articulations of this nebulous Islam, as should be clear, reveal more about the interpreters’ hermeneutical stance that they do about Islam.
Abdolkarim Soroush
Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) was educated in Iran and England before returning to Tehran after the revolution in 1979. He was thereupon appointed director of the Islamic Culture Group at the Tehran Teacher’s Training College and was a member of Khomeini’s Advisory Council of the Cultural Revolution. The latter organization was responsible for closing Iran’s universities and restricting free speech.
28 Despite his initial support for the revolution, Soroush became increasingly critical of what he considered to be the Shi
ʿi clerics’ authoritarian and fundamentalist nature.
During the 1990s, Soroush became highly critical of the political role played by the Iranian clergy. He wrote, for example, that, “rather than guiding and criticizing the ruler, [the seminaries] offer opinions and issue
fatwas that meet [the rulers’] tastes, or they will close the door to debate concerning various theoretical issues. If in the seminaries, for example, the right to discuss the issue of
vilayat-i faqihi [guardianship of the religious scholars] is not exercised, and opposing and supporting opinions are not freely exchanged, this is an indicator of a problem that must be removed.”
29Soroush also cofounded the magazine Kiyan, in which he published articles in support of religious pluralism, tolerance, and human rights. The religiopolitical authorities clamped down on Kiyan and other magazines in 1998, however, and Soroush became subject to harassment and state censorship, in addition to losing his job. From the year 2000 on, he has resided outside Iran, teaching at various Western universities, such as Harvard and Princeton.
NATIONALISM
A third way to deal with the “Islamic question” in the modern world has been nationalism, which emerged in the twentieth century largely as a reaction to European domination yet paradoxically under the influence of European ideas about nation-states. The central idea in nationalism focuses on how a particular group (e.g., Arabs, Turks, Persians) unified by language and a shared sense of history has been long divided and dominated by outside powers. The various nationalist movements of the twentieth century were often secular—although they certainly incorporated select aspects of the Islamic past—and sought to create a strong nation to check colonialist powers.
Arab nationalism offers a telling example. By the 1950s and 1960s, largely owing to the articulation by the Egyptian leader Gamal abd al-Nasser and by various political parties such as the secular Ba
ʿath (Resurrection or Renaissance) Party found throughout the Arab world, nationalism was very popular in most of the more than twenty independent states of the Arab world. The nationalists believed that the Arab nation had existed as a historical entity for centuries and constellated around the twin notions of Arabic as the language of communication and Islam as the religion and culture in the region.
Even though largely secular, these movements, like every other movement in Islamic history, made appeals to select aspects of the Islamic past—scientific developments, political hegemony, and so on—as the antidote to modern ills. Many of these nationalist movements would often make appeals to Islam when it politically suited them. For instance, Saddam Hussein added the words “Allahu Akhbar” (God is Great) to the Iraqi flag in 1991, presumably as a way to turn the war with the Americans into a religious war and thereby to garner support among other Muslim nations. Not surprisingly, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 provided a catalyst to various Arab nationalist movements. Israel was regarded largely as a colonialist imposition on Arab soil and, as such, an imposition that threatened the greatness of both specific Arab nation-states and the pan-Arabic nation.
Although nationalism still remains a potent political force today, the Arab defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War in June 1967—which Nasser had dubbed the “Battle of Destiny”—and Nasser’s death in 1970 weakened faith in this ideal early on. Moreover, the increasing brutality by which some nationalist leaders have kept in check various opposition movements, rising unemployment and nepotism, and, increasingly, charges that the nationalists are in power because of their willingness to protect American interests in the region have further eroded belief in the ideal. Islamic fundamentalist movements—for example, in Egypt, Iran, Palestine, and Iraq—have attempted to fill the political vacuum left behind by these movements.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1935) was born in Salonika (now Thessaloniki) in what was then the Ottoman Empire. In 1919, he began a nationalist revolution in Anatolia, organizing resistance to the peace settlement imposed on the Ottoman Empire by the victorious Allies. His successful military campaigns led to the liberation of the country and to the establishment of the modern nation-state of Turkey. During his presidency, Atatürk embarked on a program of political, economic, and cultural reforms. An admirer of the European Enlightenment, he transformed the former Ottoman Empire into a modern and secular nation.
His reforms included the emancipation of women; the abolition of all Islamic institutions; the introduction of Western legal codes, dress, and calendar; and the replacement of the Arabic script with a Latin one. Although he did much to dismantle the state’s Islamic infrastructure, he also sponsored Turkish translations of the Quran, which were read publically, as well as a Turkish-language modernist tafsir (interpretation) of the Quran. Many Turks could not read Arabic, so Atatürk was worried that religious affairs would be the domain of the few as opposed to open to all.
Gamal abd al-Nasser
Gamal abd al-Nasser (1918–1970) is generally considered to be one of the most important figures in the twentieth-century Arab world. He led a bloodless coup that toppled the monarchy in Egypt in 1952, thereby heralding a new period of modernization and socialist reform. He introduced numerous modernizing measures in Egypt, which included nationalizing companies; bringing al-Azhar, one of the most distinguished institutions of Sunni legal thought, under state control; and providing housing and health care to all Egyptians.
Nasser’s domestic and foreign policies increasingly clashed with the colonial interests of European powers in the region—Britain and France. In addition, Nasser’s neutrality, his recognition of the Communist People’s Republic of China, and his arms deals with the Soviet bloc also alienated American support for his regime. In 1956, when Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, a company in which the French and British had major shareholdings, these two countries, along with Israel, invaded Egypt and took over the Suez Canal. However, the Eisenhower administration in the United States publically condemned the raid and demanded the withdrawal of the three states from Egyptian territory. This show of support did much to raise Nasser’s political capital both in Egypt and throughout the Arab world.
Nasser is probably best known for his vision of pan-Arabism, a movement that calls for the unification of the peoples and countries of the Arab world from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. It is a concept that is often used interchangeably with Arab nationalism, the idea that Arabs constitute a single nation. The pan-Arabism movement reached its height during the 1960s under the guidance of Nasser, and it was a largely secular and socialist political ideology that opposed Western political involvement in the Middle East. In 1958, Nasser helped form the United Arab Republic, a union between Egypt and Syria, which lasted little more than three years, with Syria seceding from the union in 1961. In April 1963, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq agreed to form a new United Arab Republic, which was to be entirely federal in structure, leaving each member state its identity and institutions. This union was finally abolished in 1971 owing to irreconcilable differences between Syria and Egypt.
30Pan-Arabism was strongly hurt following Israel’s defeat of the Arabs in the Six-Day War. Moreover, many countries’ inability to get along and to generate economic growth contributed to its demise. The Baʿath Party in Syria and Iraq (until the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003) is still in principle committed to the notion of pan-Arabism. In many parts of the Islamic world today, however, the religious notion of Islam as opposed to the secular notion of nationalism seems to be ascendant.
Saddam Hussein
A very competent officer in the Iraqi Baʿath Party, Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) was regarded by U.S. intelligence officials as an important individual in the fight against Communism in the Arab world during the 1960s and 1970s. After the Baʿathists took power in 1968, the party focused on achieving stability in a nation riddled with profound social, ethnic, religious, and economic tensions.
As Iraq’s de facto ruler, Saddam Hussein actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy and the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs. He was greatly aided in achieving his agenda owing to the oil crises of 1973, his nationalization of foreign oil companies in the country, and the dramatic increase in oil prices that followed.
Angering many conservatives, Hussein’s party greatly increased Iraqi women’s freedoms and social mobility, including their entrance into high-level government and industry jobs. He also created a Western-style legal system, making Iraq the only country in the Persian Gulf not ruled according to sharia.
After a long-drawn-out war (1980–1988) with Iran—a war that saw the use of chemical weapons, the death of up to 500,000 soldiers and civilians, but no change in borders—Hussein sought to get the Kuwaitis to forgive his war debt (up to $30 billion), but they refused. He then asked the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to raise the price of oil by cutting production, but it refused, largely owing to Kuwait’s opposition. So on August 2, 1990, Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait, sparking an international crisis. Although the United States had provided assistance to Saddam Hussein in the war with Iran, it now led a coalition that relatively quickly drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait in February 1991. The Gulf War ended on February 28, 1991.
The United States continued to view Hussein as a tyrant who threatened the region’s stability. The sanctions imposed on Iraq during the Gulf War were never lifted afterward, and it was hoped that his political enemies within the country would overthrow him. This position changed, however, following the attacks of September 11, 2001. President George W. Bush spoke of Iraq as a key player in the “axis of evil” (which also included Iran and North Korea). He also announced that he would possibly take action to topple the Iraqi government because of the alleged threat of its “weapons of mass destruction.”
On March 20, 2003, the United States (as part of what it called a “coalition of the willing”) invaded Iraq, and Hussein’s government toppled within a matter of weeks. Hussein was found hiding underground at a farmhouse in his native province of Tikrit, was put on trial in 2006, and, after being found guilty of crimes against humanity, was quickly executed. Since the American-led invasion, the Baʿath Party has been banned in Iraq.
This chapter has tried to clarify the complex relationship that has emerged from Islam’s encounter with modernity. Although this response has been presented as taking three different approaches—fundamentalist, modernist, and nationalist—it is important to be aware that these rubrics are theoretical. What defined fundamentalism at the beginning of the twentieth century and the ways perceived to implement Islamic principles in society, for example, were often much different from what they are in the present. In like manner, it is not out of the question that a nationalist group might align itself with a fundamentalist ideology (e.g., as Hamas has done in Palestine). It is good to be aware of the potential fluidity between these rubrics.
Although the imagined role that Islam is to play in the modern world is common to all these responses to modernity, it is always necessary to remember that Islam has never been a stable factor in all these conversations. It is, on the contrary, a contested and highly politicized factor that is defined differently by the various actors involved—which is why some can say that Islam is compatible with democracy, but others can deny such commensurability. Islam in the modern period is as invested in the formation and maintenance of various Muslim identities as it was in the late antique and medieval periods.
Islam’s encounter with modernity has been tantamount to its encounter with the West. The colonial powers (e.g., Britain, France, America)—their ideas of progress, the nation-state, and so on—have been instrumental in defining the terms of reference that have driven the conversations within Islam. Imperialistic desires, political ideologies, and market forces have contributed to the manifold Muslim identities that have emerged from modernity. Even the idea that Islam is a total and holistic way of life can be read as a direct response to the notion of a separation between church and state that has played such a large role in thinking about religion and its place in society in the contemporary West.
Edward Said argued that the West has always imagined “the Orient” as the opposite of itself and as a way to define itself better. The case, of course, can also be made that Muslim thinkers have also imagined “the West” selectively and for their own purposes of self-definition. Rather than talk about the “clash of civilizations,” as so many want to at the present moment, it might be more productive to pay attention to the polyphonous voices (not voice!) that have emerged from Islam’s encounter with the modern West and vice versa.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Antoun, Richard T. Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Eickelman, Dale F., and James Piscatori. Muslim Politics. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Esposito, John L., ed. Voices of Resurgent Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Esposito, John L., and John O. Voll, eds. Makers of Contemporary Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Gibb, Hamilton A. R. Modern Trends in Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947.
Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Kurzman, Charles, ed. Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Lawrence, Bruce B. Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.
Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Qutb, Sayyid. Maʾalim fi-l-tariq. Cairo: Kanzi, 1964.
——. Milestones. Indianapolis: American Trust, 1990.
Rahman, Fazlur.
Islam in Modernity: The Transformation of the Intellectual Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Schulze, Reinhard. A Modern History of the Islamic World. Translated by Azizeh Azodi. London: Tauris, 2002.
Sivan, Emmanuel. Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics. Enlarged ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.
Soroush, Abdolkarim. Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush. Translated and edited by Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Voll, John O. Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World. 2nd ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994.