(Birgit Schäbler, Erfurt)
Birgit Schäbler, Erfurt:
Ernest Renan, the Muslims and the Islamization of Modernity
Angelika Neuwirth, Berlin:
Scared by History? »The Unthought in Islamic Thought«
Umar Ryad, Utrecht:
Salafism in Egypt in the 1920s–1930s: Between Elitism and Populism
Leif Stenberg, Lund:
History and the Islamization of Science
Abstract:
It has been a „matter of faith“ within European scholarship, especially in the 19th century, the century which has been classified as one that “transformed the world”, that „Islam“ was not and could not be „modern“. It is one of the ironies of history that at a time when scholars in Europe denied Middle Easterners and Islam thus access to what they defined as modernity, those scholars formulated their own answers to the challenges posed by the century in an ongoing debate with Europe. “Europe” here is Western Europe, specifically France, England and Germany, in a “hyperreal” sense (Dipesh Chakrabarty).
While Europe set out to conquer the globe, European societies themselves grappled with the effects which rapid change, acceleration of all walks of life and the colonial expansion, despite all the triumphalism that accompanied it, brought with them. In this situation, scholars were claiming science and “true scholarship” for Europe alone, hailing them as markers of modernity, devaluating “traditional”, i.e. historical forms of knowledge. European scholars especially in what were to become the humanities, Geisteswissenschaften, were absorbed with the „perfection of the human mind“. This noble aim implied a discovery of the “origins” and bases of the Occident and Christianity. In the process of finding and authenticating one’s own self it became important to differentiate Europe, the Occident, from its others, especially its closest neighbour and longstanding rival, the Orient and Islam. History and philology, especially Oriental philologies overlapped in this endeavor. In the process of defining the Occident „scientifically“, the Orient and Islam had to be analyzed equally „scientifically“. It is in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century that the interaction within these spheres of knowledge on the one hand and between Europe and the Muslim East on the other hand engendered processes and developments the effects of which we are still witnessing today.
For in the same time span elites in the Middle East were heavily preoccupied with very similar questions, yet under different auspices. They too were examining their „origins“, in order to find out the reasons why they had lost their ground vis-à-vis Europe. Their soul-searching in the face of European superiority in many cases went along, on the one hand, with accepting 19th century
(negative) European notions about the state of the art of all kinds of knowledge and its traditions in Muslim lands. This devaluation of their own history and traditions led to the essentialization of Islam that we are seeing today. On the other hand, European forms of knowledge were devaluated, too, in the eyes of Muslim modernists who positioned themselves flatly against “Europe” and its history, also in Islamic terms. In this sense modern Islam was formulated in an interaction and entanglement with Europe – as a part of global modernity. This panel seeks to untie some of the strands of this knot.
One important aspect is the immense impact on the valorization of the Qur’an’s authority which was implied in these movements. Rediscovering a sort of Enlightenment thought in the text of the Qur’an the 19th and early 20th century reformers declared the Qur’an a “rationalist text”. Severed from its exegetic tradition accumulated over centuries the Qur’an emerged as the sole authority in matters even of mundane problems. Isolated from the other monotheistic traditions of Judaism and Christianity (ahl al-kitab), the Qur’an appeared as the absolute New – completely remote from its milieu of genesis in late antiquity. Vexed by the thus emerging tendency toward fundamentalism, today’s “newthinkers” try to de-tabooize the historical dimension, “unthought in Islamic thought” (Arkoun).
The arguments of the Muslim modernists of the late 19th century became a fault-line in the 1920s- 1930s, especially after the abolishment of the Caliphate. The early “elitist” (Salafi) ideas were politically radicalized and turned into populist discourses that addressed Muslim sentiments around such issues as atheism, Christian mission, sectarianism, and “moral corruption” in Muslim society. In this respect, what we are seeing today is still a polarization of these strands of thought, which are, however, historically young.
When it comes to contemporary Muslims discussing from an Islamic perspective the need to “islamize science”, they are reluctant to refer to what can be described as the history of ideas of their own discourse. So what is the role and function of history in contemporary discourse, and what are the motivations and justifications of current ideas about the “true” relationship between Islam and modern science?
