Al-Huda
Foundation, NJ U. S. A
the Message Continues ...
4/98
Newsletter
for
October 2009
Article 1
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Article 2 - Article 3
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Article 5
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Article 6 -
Article 7 -
Article 8 -
Article 9 -
Article 10 - Article 11
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Article 12
ISLAMIC MODERNISM IN SOUTH ASIA: A
REASSESSMENT
By: Daniel
W. Brown
Mount
Holyoke College
South
Hadley, Massachusetts
In the early part of the century
Goldziher contrasted the independence of Muslim
thinkers in the Subcontinent with the relative
conservatism of those of the Middle East,
attributing the difference to the more prolonged
and direct encounter with Europeans. Since then,
the special contribution of South Asian thinkers
to modern Muslim intellectual history has been
widely recognized. Islamic modernism took early
root in the Subcontinent and nowhere else did
the modernist venture find as fertile soil or
flourish with such vigor and variety. In
originality, at least, South Asian modernists
have been unequalled. We are hard pressed to
identify rivals elsewhere in the
Islamic world
for the boldness of Sayyid Amad Khan's
speculations, the sophistication of
Muammad Iqbal's attempt to establish new
foundations for Islamic theology, or the the
radical rethinking of religious authority in the
work of Ghulam Amad Parwez. In the early years
after independence, modernist ideas continued to
flourish, as witnessed by Pakistan's
constitutional debates, and especially by the
vigorous activism of modernists within the
judiciary. Under Ayyub Khan's martial law
regime, modernist policy initiatives, especially
in the area of legal reform, received direct
state support and modernist thinkers and
institutions benefited from state patronage. In
the 1950's and 60's, an analyst of the religious
scene might have seemed justified in predicting
that modernism, although not without rivals,
represented the future of Islam among the
Muslims of South Asia, at least among
intellectuals and in government institutions.
Yet the challenge at the end of the twentieth
century is not to understand how or why
modernism flourished in the Subcontinent, but
rather to explain its dissipation. In reviewing
the development of modernism one is struck by
how few prominent modernist spokespersons are
still active in the Subcontinent, by the absence
of successors to the likes of Fazlur Rahman or
Ghulam Amad Parwez, and by the erosion of
modernist influence in judicial and other
government institutions. This is not to say that
the modernist venture has been unimportant, or
that it has not left significant legacies. But
for all its continuing attractiveness to
scholars, and without belittling its historical
or intellectual importance, there can be little
doubt that, with no major spokespersons, few
institutions and little influence in matters of
state policy, modernism's time is past. My
purpose in this article is to suggest a
framework for reassessing Islamic modernism in
the Subcontinent which may help to account both
for its earlier strength and for its decline. I
will argue that modernism is firmly rooted in an
essentially revivalist impulse, and that the
dissipation of modernism is integrally related
to the success of revivalism. Modernism I will
suggest, can be usefully viewed as a Eurocentric
form of Islamic revivalism. Stripped of its
apologetic tone and Eurocentric orientation,
modernism slipped back into the broader current
of Islamic revivalism from which it had
originally emerged in the mid nineteenth
century.
The genealogy of modernist thought in South
Asia, at least in the phase which Rahman labels
"classical modernism," can be traced to two
independent roots, one originating in Bengal,
with Mawlawi Sayyid Karamat 'Ali of Jawnpur
(1796-1876) and the second with
Sir Sayyid Amad
Khan. Karamat 'Ali, who has often been
confused with his contemporary of the same name,
initiated a distinctly Shi'ite line of modernism
that had its clearest expression in the writings
of Karamat 'Ali's most famous student, Sayyid
Amir 'Ali, and especially in his widely read
apologetic, The Spirit of Islam. Sayyid
Amad Khan's brand of modernism, on the other
hand, grew out of the reformist sufi line of
Shah Wali Allah and his descendants. The two
strains were by no means isolated from one
another, and they exhibit the same general
character, but it was Sayyid Amad Khan who had
the greater influence, and who, in the range of
his concerns and the nature of his program,
becomes the defining case for modernism in the
Subcontinent, and also the key to understanding
the weakness of modernist thought.
Sayyid Amad
Khan's religious thought blended an
essentially revivalistic impulse with an
apologetic emphasis rooted in a deep affinity
for Western culture. Much of his career may be
understood as a double apologetic: On the one
hand he defended Islam, in its pure form, to
Europeans and westernized Muslims, on the other
hand he commended European culture and learning
to his Muslim compatriots. These two major
features of Sayyid Amad Khan's thought -- the
desire to revive and defend the purity of early
Islam, combined with the conviction that such a
pure Islam could be shown to be entirely
compatible with modernity (defined in terms of
dominant western ideas) -- are, I suggest, the
defining features of modernism.
Of the two impulses, revivalistic and
apologetic, the revivalistic is the more basic.
Modernism begins not with a commitment to
adaptation for its own sake, but with a
conviction that Islam, in its pure form, is
relevant to the modern world, and that
adaptation is a means of restoring this purity.
This is clearly evident in the evolution of
Sayyid Amad Khan's thought, for as Troll argues,
re-establishing "the pure and essential Islam of
the origins" was the ultimate motive of all of
his religious thought. He began with the
conviction, which he never abandoned, that
Islam, in its origins, was pure and perfect, and
that his most basic task was to recover this
pure Islam by removing all the superstitions and
innovations of later centuries. His
adaptationism was thus subordinate to an
overriding revivalist purpose.
Sir Sayyid
began his writing career, in fact, with
works that show the revivalist influences which
shaped his early intellectual life. His early
works show a dedication to the pure practice of
the Prophet attributable to the influence on his
family of the reformist Naqshbandi line of
Shaykh Amad Sirhindi. As he grew older he came
more and more under the spell of the Ahl-i
Hadith. The Ahl-i-adith were a grouping of 'ulama'
who, as the name suggests, upheld adith
as the major focus of religious authority for
Muslim belief and practice. Viewed in
retrospect, the Ahl-i-adith seem conservative
and reactionary because of the extreme and
dogmatic literalism in their approach to
adith. But in the nineteenth century their
position was a radical one, for they claimed the
right to bypass thirteen centuries of ijma'
and to come to reinterpret the basic sources,
the Qur'an and sunna, for themselves. For the
Ahl-i-ºadith, the whole classical tradition of
Islamic learning is suspect. Only in the
prophetic sunna, represented by authentic
adith, is the legacy of Muammad preserved in
purity. By insisting that a qualified person
need not rely on authorities, and that texts can
be approached without intermediary, they advance
a democratization of religious knowledge and
seek to wrest control of the interpretive
process away from the specialists. Moreover, by
their emphasis on a return to the Qur'an and the
sunna the Ahl-i Hadith offer a radical critique
of the whole classical tradition.
Sayyid Amad Khan
felt a deep affinity for the spirit of the Ahl-i-ºadith
reformers and he expressed great respect for
them throughout his life. Moreover, even when
his vision of "true" Islam became quite
different from that of the Ahl-i-adith the basic
assumptions underlying his method continued to
reflect the revivalist ethos of the group. He
continued, in particular, to be preoccupied with
the early sources of the tradition and their
reliability. In fact, after he abandoned the
dogmatic attachment to adith which of the
Ahl-i-adith, he had reason to be even more
concerned about questions relating to the
authenticity of early Muslim tradition. This
continuing concern is especially focussed in his
essays on the life of Muhammad, written in
response to the the missionary-orientalist
William Muir's Life of Mohamet. In his
Essays Sayyid Amad Khan combines a cautious
approach to adith with a concern to
defend the historical value of the tradition
literature against Muir's attacks. The result is
an ambivalence toward the early sources which
concedes a good deal to Muir's skepticism, but
at the same time illustrates Sir Sayyid's
continuing preoccupation with uncovering the
pure legacy of early Islam .
In this continuing quest for authenticity, Sir
Sayyid came to be convinced, partly under Muir's
influence, that the Qur'an alone could be fully
trusted to communicate the Prophet's legacy. The
result was an approach to the Qur'an that was in
some respects just as dogmatic as the
Ahl-i-adith attitude toward adith. In an
effort to separate the Qur'an from lesser
sources of authority, and to establish its
uniqueness, Sir
Sayyid abandoned much of the flexibility
which was built into classical treatments of the
Qur'anic text. In particular, he rejected the
classical doctrine of abrogation, which had
given some latitude to the classical discipline
of tafsir. To his mind the doctrine of
abrogation was inconsistent with the perfection
of the Qur'anic text. Thus he replaced the
adith-based scripturalism of the Ahl-i-adith
with a sort of qur'anic scripturalism. The
result was to make the Qur'an bear the full
burden of Islamic theology and legal
interpretation. There were two directions such
scripturalism could go: toward a sort of
qur'anic fundamentalism characterized by a
narrow and literalistic approach to the text --
such was the approach of those who called
themselves the "Ahl-i-Qur'an" -- or towards the
application of a modernist ta'wil.
The latter was the direction of Sayyid Amad
Khan's tafsir. Unshackled from the
restraints of adith-based exegesis, he
was free to interpret the Qur'an in new and
startling ways. Thus the revivalist ethos with
which he started was overshadowed by
increasingly free and rationalistic
interpretations. Nevertheless, consistent with
that revivalist ethos, his religious writings
continued reflect the assumption that the future
of Islam can be best mapped out by looking at
its past. Even when he rejected adith in
favor or reliance solely on the Qur'an, and even
when he interpreted the Qur'an in radical ways,
he continued to look backward for a guide to the
road ahead.
But this backward looking tendency, which is a
common characteristic of much of modern Muslim
thought, was not what made Sayyid Amad Khan a
modernist. On the contrary, modernism's
distinguishing feature is a distinctively
apologetic attitude vis à vis the West.
Modernists were not just convinced that a pure
and pristine Islam could be revived -- they also
became convinced that such an unadulterated
Islam could be shown to be completely compatible
with the modern (read western) world, and they
were intent on showing both westerners and
westernized Muslims that this was so. Modernism
assumes, in other words, an affinity for western
thought and ideas and a desire to reconcile
these with Islam.
For Sayyid Amad
Khan the transition from the revivalism
of his "Wahhabi" phase, as he called it, to a
full-blown modernism began with increasing
contacts with Europeans. From 1837, when he
followed his father into the service of the East
India Company, his contacts with Europeans were
frequent and cordial. His early years with the
Company were spent in Agra, a major center of
missionary activity, and he was there at the
time of the "Mohammedan Controversy" touched off
by the polemics of Carl Pfander (1803-65).
Sayyid Amad became a friend of the missionary-orientalist
William Muir (1819-1905) and at the same time,
as Troll points out, he was exposed to western
scholarly method through the influence of Alois
Sprenger who was then Principal of Delhi
College.
But it was the revolt of 1857 that was decisive
in convincing Sayyid Amad Khan that the future
of the Muslim community in India was
inextricably entwined with the British. He
became, in his political thought, an unwavering
anglophile -- a legacy which has been the great
scandal of Islamic modernism in the
subcontinent. Yet this unabashed attraction to
European culture, repugnant though it was for
nationalists, was the major catalyst for his
modernist program, which aimed at reconciling
"true" Islam with all that was good in European
culture. His object was, first and foremost, to
remove apparent contradictions between Islamic
teachings and "science" -- hence his
oft-repeated thesis that Islam is "in complete
conformity with nature." This thesis became the
chief basis for his rationalist tafsir:
The word of God, the Qur'an, is fully true; but
neither can the work of God, evident to us from
nature, be denied. They cannot conflict. If they
appear to, we must seek to understand the word
of God in light of the work of God.
Sayyid Amad's
affinity for the West thus pulled him
farther and farther in the direction of
adaptation, while at the same time he maintained
a deep concern to get at the authentic sources
of the tradition. It is this blend of concerns,
adaptation and authenticity, flexibility and
deep concern for the tradition, which gives
modernism its characteristic flavor. For the
modernist, western ideas and techniques, indeed,
the very fact of western power, does not lead
away from Islam, but serves as a challenge to
reexamine the sources of the Muslim intellectual
tradition. Indeed, it is this very rootedness in
the tradition, and concern to justify adaptation
through the tradition that is the definitive
characteristic of modernism. The modernist is
thus perched, precariously, between revivalism
and westernization, and because of the
precariousness of this position, modernist
movements have tended to slip in one direction
or the other -- either towards a secular
adaptationism, abandoning any effort to justify
change in Islamic terms, or towards a pure
revivalism, valuing authenticity over
adaptation.
We see both sorts of drift among Sayyid Ahmad's
associates and successors. On the one hand some
of his followers moved toward a much more
explicit secularism. Sayyid Amad Khan's
associate, Chiragh 'Ali, for instance, advocated
a complete separation between religious and
secular spheres of activity by denying that the
Prophet had any involvement at all in the realm
of government. He argued that Muammad "did not
interfere with the civil and political
institutions of the country, except those which
came in direct collision with his spiritual
doctrines and moral reforms." Such an arguments
at least maintains the spirit of modernism, by
implicitly recognizing that any adaptation (even
towards secularism!) must be tested against the
tradition. But the final result of such a
position would be to encourage adaptation for
its own sake, with no restraint from the
tradition. Moreover, at Aligarh, Sayyid Amad
Khan's most enduring institutional legacy, the
spirit of modernism was lost altogether. Rather
than teaching a modernized Islam at the College,
Sayyid Ahmad was forced by the sensitivities of
donors to remove himself from any involvement in
the religious curriculum. Consequently
conservative 'ulama' were brought
in to teach Islamic subjects, and "modern" and
"religious" subjects were kept separate from one
another. Religious studies remained peripheral
to the curriculum with the result that graduates
came away westernized, but with little to help
them reconcile their new knowledge with their
tradition. Ironically, Sayyid Ahmad Khan's most
lasting achievement was an institution which was
to further the gap between Islamic tradition and
the new education, encouraging a slide toward
secularism.
Fazlur Rahman, among this centuries most
important proponents of modernism, has argued
that this same slide toward secularism,
especially in education, diluted the
effectiveness of modernism well into the
twentieth century. Indeed, he identifies
secularism, defined as modernization without
reference to Islam, as the greatest threat to
the modernist venture, blaming the rise of
secularism on "the pressures of a moribund
conservatism and the imbecilities of Islamic
modernism." At the time he wrote, Rahman was
looking back on the 60s, the heyday of state
secularism in the Muslim world. But the
experience of the 70s and 80s has shown that the
other side of the modernist legacy, the tendency
toward a more strident revivalism, has had equal
or greater influence.
This tendency too can be illustrated by the
generation following Sayyid Amad Khan, for there
were those among Sayyid Ahmad Khan's followers
who felt more strongly the pull of the
revivalist side of modernism. The ease with
which the modernist impulse could slip into a
more conservative revivalism, and the
difficulties of defining boundaries between
modernism and revivalism, is especially clear in
the careers of Shibli Nu'mani and Abu al-Kalam
Azad.
Shibli, who came from an undistinguished family
of A'amgarh, represents perhaps more than any
other individual of his time the conflicting
tendencies of apologetic revivalism and
adaptation within Indian Islam. He enjoyed a
first-rate traditional education in the Islamic
sciences, first at the Arabic madrasah in
A'amgarh and later under the tutelage of Muammad
Faruq Chiryak¨ti in Ghazipur, under whom he
studied ºanafi jurisprudence. The latter, along
with another ºanafi scholar, Irshad ºusayn
Rampuri, left a lasting impression on Shibli and
instilled in him the lifelong and passionate
interest in Abu ºanifa which led him to adopt
the laqab, "Nu'mani."
Shibli's first encounter with scholarly methods
outside of the traditional sphere of the
religious scholar probably came during a brief
stay in Lahore where he studied Arabic
literature at the Oriental College. But the more
decisive influence resulted from his association
with Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Aligarh. Shibli took
up the post of assistant professor of Arabic at
Aligarh in 1882, and during his fifteen year
career there he was profoundly influenced both
by Sir Sayyid and by Thomas Arnold, who came to
the school in 1888. It was under the guidance of
these two that Shibli was introduced to Western
scientific thinking and, more importantly, to
the western historiographic methods that set the
foundation for the historical and theological
writings which are his most important legacy.
The tone of Shibli's writing is still
adaptationist -- sufficiently so to make him
suspect in the eyes of the 'ulama'
from whom he hoped to win approval. He aimed, in
fact, at no less than a reformulation of Muslim
theology, and as Detlev Khalid has shown, he
must be considered one of the most important
exponents of the modern revival of Mu'tazilite
thought, exerting significant influence on Amad
Amin. But his method of reformulation was to
remind Muslims of the breadth of their own
intellectual heritage -- to revive a critical
spirit of Islamic scholarship squarely within
the Islamic tradition. According to W. C. Smith,
"His program was not to reform Islam with some
new criterion but to revive it from within, his
ambitious vision including the rehabilitation of
Islamic learning in its entirety, along the
lines of its flowering under the 'Abbasis in
Baghdad." The greater part of his literary
output is a series of biographies of outstanding
Muslims of the past: al-Ma'mun, Abu ºanifa, 'Umar,
al-Ghazali, and Rumi. The culmination of these
efforts was a biography of the Prophet which he
was still working on at the time of his death.
The result, however, was not a true
reformulation, but simply a restatement of
neglected elements of the classical Islamic
tradition. Like Amir 'Ali, he encouraged Muslims
to look to their own past with pride, but he had
none of the former's enchantment with western
liberal values. In any case the apologetic
approach could hardly be expected to aid the
cause of modernism, for such appeals to
tradition can, in the end, only be expected to
strengthen traditionalism. Moreover, with both
Shibli and Amir 'Ali -- in fact in the whole
modern Muslim apologetic tradition -- we see
increasingly strident criticism of the West,
demonstrating how quickly and naturally apology
turns to defiance. Shibli thus points the
direction that modernism was bound to go for
those who did not feel the allure of the West as
Sayyid Amad Khan had. He absorbed from modernism
a critical historiographical method, and was
clearly a product of modernism, but he shed the
westernizing orientation and the rationalist
tendency which marked Sayyid Amad Khan's
approach. Shibli had little sympathy for Sir
Sayyid's brand of rationalism, and was highly
critical of the argument, foundational for Sir
Sayyid, that religion can be judged by the
standard of science. He was, in this respect
akin to the salafi reformers with whom he
fostered ties, although he had a broader
appreciation and more sophisticated
understanding of Islamic history than they.
Rather than seeking to reform Islam by somehow
reconciling Islam with western ideas, he
demonstrated a confidence that Islam, rightly
understood, had all the resources it needed to
reform itself. Thus, in the tone of his work,
Shibli is a true precursor of modern Islamic
revivalism in the Subcontinent. Probably for
this reason his works have had a greater
continuing popularity than those of any other
modernist. Sayyid Amad Khan's religious writings
are almost forgotten, but Shibli's apologetic
works, particularly his biography of the
Prophet, have continued to enjoy wide
circulation.
Abu'l Kalam Azad, a protege of Shibli, further
illustrates the same pattern. Azad is commonly
and rightly identified as a modernist. He is
remembered most clearly in India for his
consistent commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity,
hence his bitter opposition to the partition of
the Subcontent, and also for his religious
universalism. He had an expansive mind, and
despite his abhorrence of the excesses of
Aligarh style westernization, he remained open
to modern currents of thought throughout his
career. Azad's greatest work, his Tarjuman
al-Qur'an, displays a combination of
scholarly breadth and latidudinarian approach
that has made it a benchmark for modernist
tafsir. His greatest concern in this regard
was to allow the Qur'an to speak for itself,
unconstrained either by brittle tradition or by
anachronistic imposition of modern ideas. In
this work in particular, but also in the main
emphases of his career, he pursued the modernist
ideal of a reformed Islam both true to the
tradition and relevant to the modern situation.
But the modern situation in which Azad found
himself was very different from that of Sayyid
Amad Khan, hence his modernism had a very
different flavor. Although he confessed to an
infatuation with Sayyid Amad Khan's writings
during his youth, describing his attachment as a
kind of taqlid, he later completely
repudiated Sayyid Amad Khan's rationalism, and
became an unrelenting opponent of Aligarh, the
Muslim League, and the sort of accommodation to
British rule that these represented. In
intellectual orientation Azad was closer to
Shibli than to Sir Sayyid. Shibli and Azad
shared a classical Islamic education, common
literary interests, strong ties with the Arab
world, and aspirations to leadership of the
Indian 'ulama'. The two became
close friends and Shibli helped to launch Azad's
career in journalism when he invited him to edit
the journal, al-Nadwah in 1904.
Yet Azad was of a different generation from
either Sayyid
Amad Khan or Shibli, and he was content
neither with the obsequious accommodation of the
former nor the passive revivalism of the latter.
Azad and his generation were politicized by the
partition and reunification of Bengal, Gandhi's
South African campaigns, and most of all by the
first World War. The War provided Indian Muslims
both an issue around which to mobilize -- the
apparent British threat to the Ottoman empire
and its Caliph -- and also the hope that an
empire embroiled in war would be more easily
forced out of India. Azad's was a new, more
assertive generation, no longer living in the
shadow of 1857, but invigorated by a resurgent
nationalism.
Azad's thought was influenced not only by this
increasingly politicized Indian environment but
also by his close ties with the Islamic world
outside of India, ties which reached back to his
birth in Mecca, where his family had emigrated
after 1857. His mother was Arab, and he was a
native speaker of Arabic. In 1898, when he was
ten, his family moved back to Calcutta, but his
intellectual affinity for things Arab was never
broken. He continued to be influenced by
intellectual currents in the Arab world, and he
was especially inspired by the writings of 'Abduh
and Ri¥a, and by al-Manar. In Calcutta he
had a traditional Muslim education following the
dars-i-Nizami curriculum, and though he later
discounted its value, this education clearly
laid the foundation for his later religious
thought.
Azad's strong grounding in the classical Islamic
tradition came together with anti-British
politics and repudiation of Aligarh's politics
of accommodation to produce a much more strident
revivalism than we find in earlier modernists.
This was especially the case from 1912, when he
began editing al-Hilal, until 1923 when
his involvement with the Indian National
Congress began to dilute his Islamic rhetoric.
Early in this period, as Douglas has documented,
Azad viewed his vocation in messianic terms. He
expected to become Imam al-Hind, religious
leader of the Indian Muslims, destined to awaken
his compatriots from their slumber and lead them
toward a revival and restoration of true Islam.
In this attitude he foreshadowed the activism,
confidence and assertiveness that would
characterize later revivalist movements. His
schemes for the renewal of the Muslim community,
particularly his attempt to organize a party of
God (Hizb Allah), show a marked resemblance to
the organizational style of and objectives of
the Jama'at-i-Tabligh -- small bands of
dedicated young men were to travel at their own
expense aiming to restore Muslim communities to
the pure practice of the Prophet.
Azad did more than foreshadow the style
of later revivalism, however; he anticipated
many of the specific themes that would be taken
up in later revivalist literature. In fact, the
connections in theme of al-Hilal and the
work of Abu'l 'Ala Mawdudi seem strong enough to
make a strong circumstantial case for Azad's
direct influence on the latter, and at least one
Pakistani historian, S.M. Ikram, identifies
Mawdudi as the true heir to the revivalist side
of Azad's legacy. Among the most important of
the revivalist themes in Azad's thought was his
emphasis on "enjoining the good and forbidding
the evil," which he identified as the
pre-eminent Islamic imperative and the dominant
message of the Qur'an. He thus anticipates the
Islamic totalitarianism that characterizes the
thought of Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb, insisting on
the comprehensiveness of the Qur'an as a guide
for all of life. Similarly, in his treatment of
jihad he differs markedly from earlier modernist
apologetic, emphasizing the necessity of a
physical jihad and describing jihad as a binding
duty. His identification with historical figures
like Ibn ºanbal and Ibn Taymiyya gives further
evidence of the revivalist side of his thought.
Azad should be viewed, along with Shibli, as one
of the major transitional figures between
classical modernism and the modern revivalism
which was both an outgrowth of and a reaction to
modernism. Moreover, as Ikram argues, it is this
revivalist side of Azad's thought that has
wielded the greater influence:
By a strange irony the vision that has caught
the imagination of the people has come out of
the pages of al-Hilal, and the Abu'l
Kalam Azad who has really been effective in the
history of Muslim India is the emotional
revivalistic, pan-Islamic, anti-modern,
anti-intellectual.
As we have seen, much the same could be said of
Shibli.
The examples of Shibli and Azad show the close
affinity of the tendencies normally labelled
modernism and revivalism. As constructs, the two
have been artificially opposed to one another;
in fact they represent not opposing tendencies,
but variations on the same impulse. The same
tendency for modernism and revivalism to merge
into one another could be illustrated with
numerous other examples. The contradictory
tendencies in Iqbal's thought, for instance have
been widely commented on. Similarly, two arch
rivals in Pakistan, the modernist Ghulam Amad
Parwez and the revivalist Mawdudi, can be shown
to be much closer to each other than their
rhetoric will suggest. In their opposition to
the 'ulama', their use of modern
means of communication and organization, and
even in their political vision they are
remarkably alike. Even in their approach to the
sources of the tradition, especially the
adith, Parwez and Mawdudi share an approach
which makes flexibility a primary value. Despite
the rancour evident in their exchanges the two
are responding to the same basic impulse.
Modernism then should be viewed as that part the
more general Islamic revival which has the most
affinity to the West and modernists represent
that part of the spectrum of Muslim revivalism
which has been most sympathetic to Western ideas
and institutions. But if this is so, then it
follows that revivalism should be seen as a sort
of anti-western modernism. Such a view
challenges the common representation of
revivalism as simply a reaction against
modernity. I would submit that revivalism is not
so much anti-modern as it is anti-western.
Revivalists have inherited from modernism a
critical attitude toward the classical
tradition, a commitment to revive Islam in
relevant forms, and a willingness to appropriate
many of the tools of modernity. What they reject
is the perceived "westoxification" of the
modernists. In this way revivalists are able to
convincingly argue that their vision of Islam is
just as relevant to the modern situation as that
of the modernists -- in fact, more so because it
offers real tools to resist western hegemony --
while at the same time holding a greater claim
to authenticity.
That revivalism is a truly modern
response (and not just a reaction against
modernity) should no longer be doubted. As
Ernest Gellner suggests: "A puritan and
scripturalist world religion does not seem
necessarily doomed to erosion by modern
conditions. It may on the contrary be favoured
by them." Gellner's argument might suggest an
explanation for the apparent failure of
modernism with which we began: that is,
revivalism has shown itself to be more "modern"
than modernism. It has done so by effectively
using the tools of modernity -- technology,
means of communication, political organization
-- but more importantly by voicing an ideology
which is in fact more attuned than modernism to
the political and sociological realities of
modern Islamic societies, an ideology which
offers both a convincing diagnosis and an
invigorating cure for the spiritual, economic
and political malaise of Muslim societies.
courtesy: Owais Jafery, Seattle,WA
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