Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Hardcover

Haj, Samira

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804752508 ISBN 13: 9780804752503

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of two Muslim reformers-Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703-1787) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905)-each representative of a distinct trend, chronological as well as philosophical, in modern Islam. Their works are examined primarily through the prism of two conceptual questions: the idea of the modern and the formation of a Muslim subject. Approaching Islam through the works of these two Muslims, she illuminates aspects of Islamic modernity that have been obscured and problematizes assumptions founded on the oppositional dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/sacred, and liberal/fundamentalist. The book explores the notions of the community-society and the subject's location within it to demonstrate how Muslims in different historical contexts responded differently to theological and practical questions. This knowledge will help us better understand the conflicts currently unfolding in parts of the Arab world.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Samira Haj is Professor of History at the City University of New York: The Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island.

Samira Haj is Professor of History at the City University of New York: The Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island.

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RECONFIGURING ISLAMIC TRADITION

Reform, Rationality, and ModernityBy Samira Haj

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5250-3

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................xiAuthor's Note on Transliterations........................................................xiii1. The Islamic Reform Tradition..........................................................12. Rethinking Orthodoxy: Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab......................................303. An Islamic Reconfiguration of Colonial Modernity: Muhammad 'Abduh.....................674. Governable Muslim Subjects............................................................1095. Love and Marriage.....................................................................1536. Conclusion............................................................................188Notes....................................................................................207Bibliography.............................................................................265Index....................................................................................275

Chapter One

The Islamic Reform Tradition

Like a specter haunting the Western mind, Islamic revivalism appears in distorted forms, rarely conceptualized on its own terms. Instead, Islam is framed through a particular reading of the experience of post-Reformation Europe, an uncritical self-understanding of the emergence of Europe an modernity. Western definitions of the "modern," which inform the larger body of scholarship on Islam, presume a necessary qualitative break with the traditional past. The modern is defined in terms of Europe an conceptual and institutional arrangements in which religion has been marginalized from civil society, state, and politics. Accordingly, the modern becomes the site of a progressive emancipatory historical unfolding, whereas tradition, its conceptual opposite, is the locus of tyrannical politics and social stagnation. And the political subject who inhabits this space of the modern is necessarily an autonomous, self-constitutive, and tradition-free individual. These categories do not adequately comprehend Islamic imaginaries or the forms of subjectivities that might possibly emerge in a modern Muslim world. Once the institutions and practices of Western liberal societies are conceptualized as the mea sure of the modern, it is not surprising that across the scholarship on Islamic movements today, Islam is often depicted (either explicitly or implicitly) as a major, if not the principal, contemporary force threatening democracy and individual freedom.

The oppositional construction of modern versus traditional, secular versus religious, humanist versus antihumanist, and rational versus irrational was assumed in early orientalist scholarship. The orientalists characterized their "cultural synthesis" of Islam as traditional and nonrational and hence inimical to modernity. Framing their analysis within the universal humanism and rationality of the post-Enlightenment period, early orientalists presumed that autonomous political subjects alone are capable of exercising reason. Consequently, most orientalists found Muslim reformers, with their claim of a divine origin and their conception of a collective subject, to be romantically defective and backward looking.

The orientalists' conception of Islam as a cultural monolith was critically analyzed in the 1960s by nationalist and Marxist scholars who characterized this body of literature as imperialist, essentialist, and ahistorical. But it was only after the landmark publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that this discourse was seriously challenged, both conceptually and institutionally, within and beyond academia. Drawing on Foucault's concept of power/knowledge and Gramsci's notion of the "organic intellectual," Said explained orientalism as a discourse of power founded on the dichotomization of East and West, one that served a critical function in the articulation and the unfolding of imperial empires, in both the colonial and neo colonial periods.

Under the influence of Orientalism, a new generation of scholars produced a far more complex and historically nuanced body of knowledge on the Middle East. This revisionist literature varied in approach and method. Whereas some sought out political economy, others embraced Marxism and or the "new" social history of the time. There were also those who turned to the postmodernist critiques to contest the cultural essentialism and modernist assumptions favored by orientalist scholarship. Although this highly theoretical and self-consciously critical scholarship represents a refreshing break from the essentialist, ethnocentric, and racist writings of older orientalists, the new discourse on Islam continues to reproduce key aspects of earlier arguments. Although Islam as a whole may not be depicted as backward looking or portrayed as traditional and nonrational, contemporary radical Islamists are drawn that way. A good part of this revisionist scholarship on Islam assesses contemporary Islamic movements as modern only to the extent that they employ modern material and institutional resources; however, the scholarship implies that these movements embrace modern resources only to attain nonmodern ends-that is, to establish theocratic and authoritarian regimes. In searching for aspects or instances of Islamic tradition and practice that are commensurable with modernity, the yardstick of analysis remains the modern West.

The reproduction of central aspects of the older arguments on Islam in this revisionist scholarship is rooted in the discursive framework of Said's landmark book. While striking a powerful blow to the essentialist totalizing methodologies and arguments of orientalist scholarship, Orientalism fell short of a more radical critique of liberal humanism and, in particular, its intrinsic connection with the expansion of Western hegemony worldwide from the eighteenth century on. Rather than viewing orientalist discourse as inherent to the Western humanist tradition, Said considers it a deviation from that tradition's grand narratives and emancipationist politics. Critical of the abuses committed in the name of the Enlightenment, Said nonetheless remains faithful to the secular liberal humanist tradition. Although he draws on the work of Foucault, a trenchant critic of Western humanism, to expose "the deep complicity of orientalist forms of knowledge with institutions of power," Said never follows this critique to its logical conclusion in which the universalist claims of Europe an humanism are fundamentally contested.

This methodological tension can be clearly detected in the revisionist historiography on Islam that followed Said's path. Many of the recent works on contemporary Islam continue to invoke the humanistic, secularist, and anti-traditionalist assumptions of the post- Enlightenment period, in their effort to analyze modern Islamic thought and politics. Fidelity to the tradition of secular progressive humanism and its human liberationist project drew the revisionist scholars, as I will discuss in a later context, to analytical frameworks that tend to assess the modernity of Islam in terms of how closely it conforms to Western cultural and institutional arrangements. The continuing strength of the liberal humanist discourse within scholarship on Islam is especially striking, given the trenchant...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804752508
• ISBN 13: 9780804752503
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande