4.

3: Islam and contemporary world

Traditional Islam: Studies of Islam in the contemporary world usually concentrate on

various types of modernism or so-called fundamentalism, whereas the majority of
Muslims continue to live in the world of tradition despite all the attacks on the
traditional point of view in modern times. To understand Islam today, it is first of all
important to realize that the histories of different religions do not all follow the same
trajectory. Christianity had the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and
aggiornamento in the Catholic Church in the 1960s. Judaism has also witnessed the
rise of both the Reform and the Conservative schools, at least in the West.
Islam, however, has not undergone, nor is it likely to undergo in any appreciable
degree, the same kinds of transformation either juridical or theologically. Its religious
life and thought remain for the most part within the framework of orthodoxy and
tradition. The modernism and so-called fundamentalism that are evident in certain
sectors of Islamic society and in certain lands have caused traditional Islamic life to
wither, but have been unable to create any significant theological worldview that
could challenge the traditional one. The vast majority of Muslims still practice the
traditional rites described earlier and the rhythm of their lives is punctuated by events
related to Islam as traditionally understood.
Moreover, the traditional Islamic sciences of Quranic commentary, Hadith,
jurisprudence, and the like continue as they have done over the centuries despite the
devastations brought on the traditional Islamic education system in many lands. The
‘ulamā,’ or religious scholars, continue to wield their authority in the realm of religion
and in some lands over political life as well. Likewise, despite being forbidden or
circumscribed in certain areas, the Sufi orders prosper in many parts of the Islamic
world. During the thirteenth/nineteenth century, when certain elements of Islamic
society were emphasizing the importance of modernism, it was primarily the Sufis
who opposed modernism avidly.
Until a few decades ago, however, the various contemporary strands of traditional
Islam—ranging from law to theology, philosophy to art, and literature to Sufism—
continued to be expressed in a traditional manner, which became less and less
comprehensible to those Muslims who were products of Western educational
institutions either within the Islamic world or in the West itself. Western scholarship
almost completely neglected contemporary traditional Islamic modes of thought,
concentrating its studies on the so-called reformers and modernists. In recent decades,
however, the scene has begun to change. Traditional Islam has begun to express itself
not only in the contemporary medium of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and other Islamic
languages—to be more accessible to the modern educated classes—but also in European
languages, especially English and French, which have become the main languages of
intellectual discourse for many Muslims themselves from lands such as Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and North Africa, lands that had experienced a long period of colonial
rule. Western scholars have also begun to pay greater attention to traditional Islam
despite the still prevalent confusion in the West between traditional Islam and what
Westerners have come to call “Islamic fundamentalism.”
To understand Islam fully in the contemporary world, it is first necessary to
comprehend the living nature of traditional Islam, to consider the powerful hold of
the worldview of the Quran on the souls and minds of the vast majority of Muslims,
and to grasp the truth that the vast majority still believe in the immutability of the
Quran as the Word of God, in the reality of the perfect model of the Prophet ‫صلى هللا‬
‫ عليه وسلم‬to be emulated in one’s life, in the validity of the Sharī‘ah, and, for those who
follow the path of inwardness, in the efficacy of the permanent and ever renewed
teachings of the Tarīqah, or Sufism.
Moreover, in many domains, ranging from law to the natural sciences and from
abstract philosophical and theological thought to art and architecture, there is an
attempt throughout the Islamic world to revive and resuscitate the traditional
teachings, to live and think more fully Islamic rather than emulate foreign models.
This deep yearning also manifests itself on the sociopolitical level and relates
traditional Islam in this domain to certain forms of revivalism and so-called
fundamentalism, although traditional Islam never condones the use of foreign
ideological means to bring about such an end or to reduce religion to ideology.
Traditional Islam, while remaining the central religious reality within the Islamic
world, is in fact engaged in a battle not only against modernism, but also against those
forms of revivalism that employ completely non-Islamic categories of thought and
action in the name of Islam and make use of distinctly non-Islamic means to justify
what they consider to be Islamic ends.

Revivalism: The past few years have also witnessed a great upsurge of Islam on the
political plane, which can be seen nearly everywhere in the Islamic world, including in
the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the rise of Islamic activism in Lebanon and among the
Palestinians; the strengthening of revivalist movements in Egypt and Algeria; the
increase of power of Islamic parties in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; the rise and
later defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan; and the ever increasing strength of Islamic
forces even in the outwardly secular state that is Turkey.
Due to a great misunderstanding of these movements in the West, they have usually
been grouped together under the name of “fundamentalism,” a word originally taken
from an American Protestant context and then applied to Islam and other religions.
As far as Islam is concerned, there are many varying types of religious activity, with
very different natures, that unfortunately, are usually clustered together under the
category bearing the now vilified name of “fundamentalism.” There exists in the
Islamic world the widely prevalent desire, shared by the great majority of Muslims, to
preserve their religious and cultural identity, to reapply the Divine Law that was
replaced by European legal codes during the colonial period in many Islamic lands, to
draw the various parts of the Islamic world and the Islamic people (al-ummah) closer
together, and to reassert the intellectual, cultural, and artistic traditions of Islam. These
widely held wishes and the impulse to implement them must not be identified purely
and simply as “fundamentalism.” Rather, most people who share these ideals are
traditional Muslims.
Then there is an older puritanical and often rationalistic reform movement, or rather
set of movements, that seeks to return to a strict application of the Sharī‘ah while
opposing both Western encroachment and the intellectual, artistic, and mystical
traditions of Islam itself in the name of an early puritan Islam considered to have been
lost by later generations. To this category belong the Wahhābī movement, which in
alliance with the Saudi family, finally captured Arabia during the early twentieth
century and which remains dominant in that land today. Such movements as the
Salafiyyah of Syria and Egypt and the Muhammadiyyah of Indonesia are related to
some extent in their perspectives to Wahhābism and need to be mentioned here
although they also differ from Wahhābism in basic ways.

Modernist Tendencies: Nearly every activity in the Islamic world during the past
century and a half that has had a modernizing character has also possessed a religious
implication. These range from the introduction of Western-inspired nationalism to the
adoption of Western technology and the introduction of the Western type of
education into various Islamic countries. It is not possible to deal with such subjects
here, but their religious implications must not be forgotten. Here, only a few words
may be said about modernist tendencies directly related to Islam as a religion.
As early as the thirteenth/nineteenth century, when the impact of European
domination began to be felt in the heartland of the Islamic world, there appeared those
who believed that the survival of Islam depended on its modernization. In the
Ottoman Empire, edicts were passed to modernize the Islamic Law of the land, and
similar measures soon took place in Persia as well as in areas under European colonial
rule. In such a central land as Egypt; a number of thinkers such as Muhammad ‘Abduh
sought to modernize Islamic theology through greater introduction of the use of
reason, while ‘Abduh’s teacher, Jamāl al-Dīn Astrābādī (known as al-Afghānī), fought
against existing traditional Islamic political institutions in an attempt to unify the
Islamic world politically.
In India, the project to modernize Islamic education was begun by Sayyid Ahmad
Khān, and in Persia European political ideas finally led to the Constitutional
Revolution of 1323/1906 and the establishment of the first parliament in the Islamic
world that had the power to pass laws but, at least in principle, with the consent of the
religious authorities, or ‘ulamā’. During the twentieth century the modernist
tendencies continued along lines established in the thirteenth/nineteenth century, but
with many new developments. In Turkey, Zia Gökalp became the intellectual
defender of the secularism proposed by Ataturk when he put an end to the Ottoman
caliphate in 1922. In Muslim India, Muhammad Iqbāl, perhaps the most gifted of the
so-called Islamic reformers of the past century, not only proposed the foundation of
an Islamic homeland leading to the formation of Pakistan but also espoused the cause
of Islamic revival through his moving poetry, written mostly in Persian, but also in
Urdu. His prose works, however, reveal much more than his poetry how deeply he
was influenced by Western philosophy, especially nineteenth-century German
thought.
After World War II, a number of modernists in the Islamic world, particularly in
Persia and the Arab world turned to Marxism. Both Islamic and Arab socialism came
into vogue and continued until the downfall of the Soviet Union. Also, a number of
Muslim scholars who had studied in the West fell under the sway of Western
orientalism and began to criticize traditional Islamic scholarship in the areas of
Quranic commentary, the Hadīth, the Sharī‘ah, and other basic Islamic disciplines.
Movements grew up in such countries as Pakistan to repudiate the authenticity of the
Hadīth and in the Sudan to reinterpret Islam according to only the Meccan period of
revelation. A number of Muslim modernists also sought to criticize traditional Islamic
thought on the basis of structuralism, existentialism, and other prevalent schools of
Western thought, whereas others even attempted to “synthesize” Islam with Marxism.
Although these modern tendencies were once strong and continue to be present
despite their relative eclipse during the past few years, they have not had any
appreciable impact on Islamic religious thought as such and have not brought about
the “protestant” movement within Islam that so many Western scholars had predicted
and wished for. The modernist impact on the Islamic world has come much more
through the introduction of modern modes of everyday living and thinking, which
penetrate the Islamic world through a thousand channels, from modern educational
institutions to films. Modernist tendencies have been confronted during the past few
decades not only by so-called fundamentalism, which often seems to have less
intellectual substance than the thought processes and works of the modernists, but
also by the revival of traditional Islamic thought by those who are as well versed with
the modern world as the modernists themselves. Islam in the contemporary world
presents, therefore, a picture of a powerful living faith with its still living intellectual
and spiritual tradition confronted with challenges of a materially more powerful
secular world, which inhabits not only the land outside its borders but also part of its
own living space.
Various forces are at play in a living Islamic society that is not at all monolithic but
that is still dominated, in all of its schools and tendencies, by the message of revelation
and religion to a far greater degree than is the case in the contemporary West. Islam
today is a living reality faced with multiple problems and challenges, but still deeply
anchored in the Islamic tradition and the truths that have guided its destiny since the
descent of the Quranic revelation more than fourteen centuries ago. At the heart of
this revelation stands the doctrine of the Oneness of God and the necessity for human
beings to bear witness to this Oneness in this earthly life. The vast majority of
Muslims remain fully aware of this truth today, as they have since the dawn of the
religion, and their goal is to struggle to preserve the message revealed to them, to live
according to its tenets, and to fulfill the end for which men and women were created
despite all the obstacles that a powerful world living in the forgetfulness of God has
placed before them today.