Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred

214 Pages·2020·12.288 MB·English

by  Monica Ringer

ISLAMIC
MODERNISM
AND THE
RE-ENCHANTMENT
OF THE SACRED IN
THE AGE OF HISTORY
MONICA M. RINGER
EDINBURGH
University Press
For my parents
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© Monica M. Ringer, 2020
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Historicism, Modernity and Religion 1
1. Locating Islam 44
2. Islam in History, Islamic History 67
3. The Islamic Origins of Modernity 111
4. The Quest for the Historical Prophet 140
Conclusion: God's Intent - The Re-enchantment of the Sacred
in the Age of History 172
Bibliography 187
Index 202
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Edward Tylor, in his seminal anthropological work, Primitive Culture, notes
caustically that 'If in this enquiry we should be obliged to end in the dark,
at any rate we need not begin there.' Inversely, historians are notoriously
suspicious of origin stories. This project is the product of a long engagement
with a series of questions. Can religion be modern? What would modern
religion look like? And the elephant in the room: What is modernity? I begin
and end the book with Max Weber's notion of 'disenchantment' as a way
of emphasising the ways in which these questions matter to us now no less
than they mattered in the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that Weber,
even as he characterised the modern project as one necessitating the embrace
of disenchantment (Entzauberung), literally, the 'de-magicification' of the
world, articulated a vision of disenchanted scholarship as an ethical end in
and of itself. Weber concluded that in the age of disenchantment, we each
must 'find and obey the demon who holds the fibers of his very life'.1 The
project of understanding the role of history in the generation of modernity
has certainly been my demon for as long as I can remember. I find myself at
the end of this project deeply convinced that history, defined by historicist
methodology and epistemology, is the quintessence of modernity.
Amherst College has been a very supportive place for me for the last
seventeen years. I have benefitted from the generous support of the Dean
of the Faculty and the Senior Sabbatical Fellowship, and have been con­
tinually encouraged by the interest and commitment of my students. In
particular, in the fall of 2016,1 offered an advanced history seminar entitled
'An Era of Translation: The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire' to a very
special group of students. Those conversations we held in my office over tea
provided a welcome opportunity to think through some of the theories of
applying translation to modernity that appear in this book.
1 Max Weber, 'The Disenchantment of Modern Life', lecture given in 1917.
[vi]
Acknowledgements [ vii
Most of all, I am grateful for the collegiality and generosity of my fellow
faculty at Amherst, in the Five Colleges, and in the academy more gener­
ally. Heartfelt thanks to friends and colleagues who have commented on
draft chapters of this book, including: Michael Bessey, Andrew Dole, Tayeb
El-Hibri, Yasemin Gencer, Sergey Glebov, Adi Gordon, Margaret Hunt,
Melih Levi, Afshin Marashi and Suleiman Mourad. I have also benefitted
from conversations with Houri Berberian, Houchang Chehabi, Trent Maxey,
Yael Rice, Tariq Jaffer, Amina Steinfels and Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi.
Paul Rockwell and Sanam Nader-Esfahani graciously checked a number
of French translations. My research assistants, Shahruz Ghaemi, Yasmeen
Saeed and Julia Molin, helped enormously. Nicola Ramsey at Edinburgh
University Press has been wonderful, as have Kirsty Woods, Eddie Clark and
the entire production team. Thanks to them, and to the anonymous reviewer
for their careful read.
I enjoyed two stints away from Amherst at crucial moments, which in
some ways marked the beginning and end of this project. In the famously
cold winter term of 2014, I had the honour of teaching a graduate seminar
at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Thank you to my 'home'
department of NELC and especially to A. Holly Shissler, Fred Donner,
Franklin Lewis and Richard Payne who gave me such a warm welcome. I
am forever grateful for the language tutoring of Melih Levi (Turkish) and
Ayge Polat (Ottoman). I have fond memories of the U of C. I remember one
morning, as I was trudging to the campus in arctic temperatures wrapped
in absolutely every piece of winter clothing I owned, a young man sped by
wearing only a sweatshirt. It reminded me of a particularly funny scene at
the very end of A Short Walk in the Hindu-Kush, as Eric Newby and his travel
companion, inadequately outfitted, underprepared and having experienced
incredible deprivations, prepare for the night. As Newby recounts, 'the
ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it'. As they begin
to blow up their air-mattresses, they were belittled for their weakness by
Wilfred Thesiger, the inveterate traveller, dressed only in 'an old tweed
jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-
soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter'.
Several years later, in the fall of 2018, I spent a sabbatical semester as
an Academic Visitor at St Antony's College, Oxford University. My hosts,
Eugene Rogan and Homa Katouzian, saw little of me as I was determined
to complete a first full draft of this manuscript. I will never forget my
daily routine that fall in Oxford: walking from Folly Bridge through Christ
Church Meadows on my way to Jericho Coffee on High Street; watching
the morning bustle against the backdrop of Brasenose College; waiting to
be let in to the Radcliffe Library just before it officially opened at 9:00 am
in order to get my favorite seat; lunching at the Vault and Gardens and, if
I needed a change of scene, spending the afternoon up in the coffee lounge
at Turl Street Kitchens. Oxford was an idyllic writing retreat. I am counting
the days until I return.
viii ] Islamic Modernism
Lastly, thanks to friends and family for your encouragement, and at critical
moments, your patience, as this project consumed me. You know who you
are. My daughter, Soraya, has always counted herself as 'my biggest fan.' I
trust she knows that I am hers as well.
Monica M. Ringer
May 2020
INTRODUCTION:
HISTORICISM, MODERNITY AND RELIGION
The wonderful adaptability of the Islamic precepts for all ages and nations;
their entire concordance with the light of Reason; the absence of all mysteri­
ous doctrines to cast a shade of sentimental ignorance round the primal truths
implanted in the human breast, - all prove that Islam represents the latest devel­
opment of the religious faculties of our being.1
Syed Ameer Ali (1873)
The modern project will not be accomplished until belief in the supernatural,
in whatever form it takes, is destroyed, just as belief in magic and sorcery have
already been. All of that is of the same order.2
Ernest Renan (1848)
Introduction
On Friday, 18 May 1883, the Parisian Journal des debats politiques et litteraires
published an article by 'Cheik Gemmal Eddine' (Sheikh Jamal al-Din) who,
the editors noted by way of introduction, 'has come to Paris to learn our lan­
guage in order to study sciences and European civilization'.3 In this article,
Jamal al-Din, the peripatetic journalist, intellectual and political activist
famous as 'al-Afghani', proposed a corrective to renown French Orientalist
Ernest Renan's speech presented fifty days earlier at the Sorbonne entitled
1 Ali, Life and Teachings of Mohammad, 187.
2 Renan, L'Avenir de la Science, 766.
3 Journal des debats politiques et litteraires, 18 May 1883, p. 3. Published precisely fifty
days after their publication of Renan's lecture at the Sorbonne entitled 'Islam and
Science'.
[1]
2] Islamic Modernism
'Islam and Science', which was subsequently published in the same journal.4
In it, Renan argued that Islam was a metaphoric 'iron band' crowning the
heads of Muslims that prevented rational and scientific thought and which
therefore accounted for Islamic societies' backwardness vis-a-vis Europe.
Afghani took issue with Renan's characterisation of Islam as uniquely hostile
to science. Instead, he proposed that the same held true for all religions:
Religions, by whatever names they are called, all resemble each other. No agree­
ment and no reconciliation are possible between these religions and philosophy.
Religion imposes on man its faith and its belief, whereas philosophy frees him
of it totally or in part.5
Renan and Afghani, despite important differences, agreed on the same
operating assumption, namely, that religion was in conflict with science
and thus inhibited progress. Their dispute was symptomatic of the larger
debates concerning religion and science that raged throughout the nine­
teenth century - not only in Christian Europe, but also in Islamic societies.
The conflict between religion and science was not, therefore, a specifically
Christian conundrum, but also an Islamic one.
Despite their open criticisms of religion, both Renan and Afghani were
religious modernists, dedicated to the reconciliation of modernity and reli­
gion. Humans, they insisted, were homo religiosus; they could not dispense
with religion. At the same time, modern civilisation required a rupture with
religion as currently understood and practised.
The conflict between religion and science was understood as indicative
of the larger question of generating modernity and progress. As Afghani
confessed in a rhetorical flourish at the end of his article, 'It is permissible to
ask oneself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such a live light on
the world, suddenly became extinguished; why this torch has not been relit
since; and why the Arab world still remains buried in profound darkness.'6
For Afghani and Renan alike, Islam was to blame. At the same time, Afghani
proposed that Islam was also the solution - the means of relighting the torch
of civilisation and progress.
Afghani's 'Response to Renan' was the first, but not the last, of the Muslim
refutations of Renan's increasingly infamous lecture. By the turn of the
4 Ernest Renan (1823-92) was one of the most famous nineteenth-century French
philologists and Orientalists, and held the renowned Chair of Hebrew at
the College de France. In his day he was considered one of France's leading
intellectuals alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert and Stendhal. His renown stretched
from academic and intellectual circles into political and popular circles due both
to the controversies surrounding him, as well as to his widely read, and equally
widely criticised, Vie de Jesus (Life of Jesus), first published in 1863.
5 Journal des debats politiques et UMraires, 18 May 1883, p. 3.
6 Afghani, 'Answer of Jamal ad-Din to Renan', in Keddie, An Islamic Response, 187.
Historicism, Modernity and Religion [3
century, at least four other refutations had been penned by Muslim intel­
lectuals, ranging in order of publication from Ataullah Bayezidof (1883), Ali
Ferruh (1887), Syed Ameer Ali (1901) and Namik Kemal (1908). Scholars well
into the twentieth century continued to write refutations, including Celal
Nuri and Mohamed Abduh.7 As Afghani noted in his article in the Journal des
debats, Renan was 'the great philosopher of our times ... whose name was
renown throughout the entire Occident and had penetrated in the furthest
counties of the Orient'.8
These refutations demonstrate that debates concerning the relationship of
religion and science did not operate in isolation. Islamic modernists were in
conversation with each other, even as they were in conversation with reli­
gious modernists from other religious traditions. In particular, Islamic mod­
ernists engaged in religious reform in an age of European colonialism and
attendant claims of ownership of 'modernity' and 'civilization'. So, whereas
the editors of Journal des debats positioned Afghani as a seeker of 'European
civilization', Islamic modernists articulated their own Islamic genealogy of
modernity, progress and civilisation. Islamic modernism lies not only at the
nexus of the relationship of religion to modernity, but also at the nexus of
European and non-European modernities. Understanding Islamic modern­
ism in the context of other nineteenth-century religious modernisms is the
project of this book.
Modernity as Disenchantment?
Max Weber's famous articulation of modernity as the 'age of disenchant­
ment'9 long reigned as an accurate depiction of the irreligion that presum­
ably lay at the heart of modernity. For Weber, 'disenchantment' was an
inevitable consequence of progress from savagery to modern civilisation.10
Disenchantment entailed both triumph and loss - the breaking of the spell
of magic, the renunciation of illusions, the shining of the light of truth into
the dark corners of ignorance; yet at the same time, the fading of the 'sense
7 For a bibliographical discussion of all the Muslim refutations to Renan's lecture, see
Cundioglu, 'Ernest Renan ve "reddiyeler" baglammda Islam-bilim tartijmalanna
bibliografik birkatke', 1-94.
8 In the original, al-Afghani describes Renan as 'le grand philosophe de notre temps,
1'illustre M. Renan, dont la renomme a rempli tout 1'Occident et penetre dans les
pays plus eloignes de 1'Orient', Journal des debats, 3.
9 Max Weber described modernity as concomitant with the 'progressive
disenchantment of the world' in a lecture given in 1917. Weber, 'The Disenchantment
of Modern Life'.
10 Weber described those people who believed in and practised magic, in other words,
people who gave credence to magic as explanatory, as 'savage'. He opposes this
worldview with modern 'civilized' man who has abandoned magic and embraced
'the truth of science, which alone seizes not upon illusions and shadows but upon
the true being'. See Weber, 'The Disenchantment of Modern Life'.
4] Islamic Modernism
of mystery' and exile from the 'enchanted' world.11 Regardless of one's per­
spective on the (dis)advantages of disenchantment, modernity was under­
stood as necessitating a distancing from, if not open antagonism to, religion.
Otherwise put, the emergence of the modern spelled the end of religion, of
long-cherished religious accounts of the world, of history, and of human­
kind's place in history. Natural law replaced miracles; and an evolutionary,
geological account of the world, with humankind emerging only towards the
very end, replaced older, biblical accounts of Creation. Modernity is closely
associated with the secular, the absence if not downright rejection of religion
as historically explanatory or philosophically meaningful. This understand­
ing of modernity remains influential. Charles Taylor reiterated Weber's
understanding of modernity when he stated:
Everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ances­
tors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an 'enchanted' world and we
do not, or at the least much less so. We might think of this as our having 'lost'
a number of beliefs and the practices that they made possible. Essentially, we
become modern by breaking out of 'superstition' and becoming more scientific
and technological in our stance toward our world.12
This narrative first emerged in the Enlightenment, long perceived as the cru­
cible of modernity and, with it, secularism. As Jonathan Sheehan explains,
'The old consensus saw an Enlightenment forcing religion into the corners
of human experience and destroying the stories it told about nature, society,
and mankind.'13
Now, almost exactly one hundred years after Weber's impassioned plea to
embrace 'disenchantment', scholars acknowledge that the modern has wit­
nessed neither the absence of religion nor the triumph of secularism. Religion
has not exited the stage of history. The study of modernity has faltered in
accounting for the discrepancy between modernity as it has been claimed,
and modernity as it is. Is the persistence of religion evidence of the failure to
become modern - the enduring residue of the pre-modern or anti-modern?
Or have we not defined modernity in ways that can account for the presence
of religion? What is modernity, if not disenchantment?14
The problem of understanding modernity has spilled over into our con­
ception of the Enlightenment - the crucible of modernity - long affirmed
as a project of disenchantment. Was or was not secularism central to the
Enlightenment project of rationalism? If so, then did Enlightenment fail? If
not, then what was the Enlightenment? As David Sorkin argues, we need
11 Taylor, A Secular Age, 2.
12 Taylor, 'Afterward: Apologia pro Libro suo', 302-3.
13 Sheehan, 'Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization', 1065-6.
14 For a discussion of the scholarship on western modernity as 'enchanted', see Saler,
'Modernity and Enchantment', 692-716.