30 Islam and Modernity
that this form of consecration of authority fosters superstition. Prophecy, on the
other hand, is to be taken seriously in that it ‘really includes ordinary knowledge’
(Spinoza [1670] 1951: 13). Here we fi nd another clear echo of the approach of
the Islamic philosophers. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Spinoza attempted to
show – echoing the Islamic Mutazila thinkers and philosophers like Ibn Sina –
that scriptures (pace all theologians) are not about any speculative knowledge of
God or his attributes. Prophetic discourse, nourished by imagination, was not
speculative but parabolic and enigmatic, dense of bodily language, and fi nalised
to admonish commoners to right behaviour and the observance of divine law.
In this way the prophets communicated the imperatives of piety and justice to
the masses.
Conclusion
Facilitated by a critical exploration of the ambivalent resources of Western
thought, I have proposed a transculturally open analysis of tradition and moder-
nity’s entwining and intertwining. I have then historically situated the case of
Islam’s entanglement with tradition and modernity, before providing examples
of how the Western modern transformation favoured both Eurocentric views
of modernity and encouraged more open visions, which can fi t a framework of
multiple modernities.
In particular, I have attempted to lighten up the theoretical burden of modern
Western, sociologically reductive views of ‘religion’ as applicable to Islam. On
the other hand, I have emphasised the fact that it was exactly the dynamics of
radicalisation of Western religious movements that has laid the basis, simultane-
ously, for political modernity and for religious and political fundamentalism (or
for what Voegelin called ‘political religions’). In this sense, the fundamentalism
of ‘political religions’ is a genuinely modern – and predominantly Western –
phenomenon (Voegelin 1998: 131–214).
In contrast to the radicalisation, in the Western path, of the antinomy of
innerwordliness and publicness, of culture and power, of the autonomy of the
subject and the sovereignty of the state, I have emphasised instead the more
fl exible capacity of distinction and amalgamation that the discursive traditions
of Islam – enlivening a composite civilisation that Hodgson called ‘Islamdom’ –
have retained at the passage from an epoch of political expansion and cultural
fl orescence, through the era of ecumenical renaissance and early modernity, to
an epoch of subordination and resistance to an encroaching Western colonial
modernity. In particular, the synthesis of Jewish prophecy and Greek science-
cum-philosophy performed by Muslim traditions remains over the long term a
key trait of their outlook and of the potential resources for their further devel-
opment, differentiation and hybridisation with other traditions under modern
conditions.