2 Islamic ‘‘Modernism’’
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Islamic ‘‘modernism’’ 5 refers to a primarily nineteenth-century stream of
thought that took shape in the shadow of the slow decline of the Ottoman
Empire and the expansion of European political and economic power. 6 Such
thought posited a golden age in the earliest generations in Islamic history,
and sought to recuperate those idealized foundations as a bulwark against the
encroachments of Western colonialism. 7 For many Muslim intellectuals living
and working in theWrst half of the nineteenth century, European ascendence
remained ‘‘less of a threat and more of a promise’’ (Sharabi 1970 , 27 ). The
years 1875 – 82 radically altered the geopolitical landscape: by 1877 Russia had
attacked Turkey, Tunisia was occupied by the French four years later, and, by
1882 , Egypt was occupied by the British. Onto the problem of Ottoman
decline were now grafted increasingly urgent questions about the challenge
posed by European power and its (apparently) justiWed claims to represent
the zenith of cultural, scientiWc, and technological achievement (Hourani
1983 , 104 ).
Despite real diVerences between them, modernists such as Egyptian
Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905 ) and his sometime mentor and collaborator
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani [al-Asadabadi] (d. 1897 ) sought to meet this chal-
lenge in part by redeWning its terms, and more speciWcally by portraying
Islam as the ‘‘rational religion,’’ and characterizing science and modernity as
universal rather than Western. al-Afghani and ‘Abduh shared the conviction
that modern rationalist methods and the scientiWc discoveries they produce
are at once objectively true and essential to the strength and survival of the
Islamic community in the face of European ascendance. Yet they witnessed
Wrst hand the ways in which rationalism, science, and philosophy too often
served as the handmaiden of Western arguments supposedly demonstrating
5 Again, I place ‘‘modernism’’ within quotation marks here to signal the ways in which what is
called Islamic modernism is not an uncomplicated embrace of the ideas and processes constitutive of
Western modernism but is itself a hybrid. There are, moreover, diVerent strands of Muslim modernist
thought, perhaps the most signiWcant of which is Shi‘i modernism, which should be distinguished
from Sunni modernism, although it is precisely in their modernist guises that the diVerences between
Sunnism and Shi‘ism signiWcantly diminish (Enayat 1982 , 164 ).
6 The modernist school has also included the more conservative political thought ofAbduh’s
student Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935 ), among others (see Kerr 1966 ; Adams 1968 ; Kedourie 1966 ;
Hourani 1983 ).
7 Such a Golden Age of Islam is generally identiWed as the time from the Prophet Muhammad
through the period of the ‘‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’’ ( 632 – 61 ).
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