Islamic Modernism
from 1870
An argument that the tradition's own tools — reason, independent judgement, the purposes of the law — are enough to meet the modern world without abandoning it.
- Active
- from 1870
- Where
- Cairo, Istanbul, Aligarh and Lahore
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Islamic
The claim
The gate of independent reasoning was never validly closed. What is fixed in Islam is small and what is adaptable is large, and the difference can be worked out from the purposes the law was given for.
What it held
Islamic modernism begins from a political fact: by 1870 most Muslims lived under European rule or its economic equivalent, and the tradition had to explain how. The reformers refused both available answers — that Islam was the problem, and that the answer was to return to an imagined seventh century.
Muhammad Abduh's move was to distinguish the fixed from the adaptable, and to argue from maqasid, the purposes of the law: rules exist to protect life, intellect, property, lineage and religion, and a rule that no longer serves its purpose can be reconsidered. That is a jurisprudential argument rather than a concession to Europe.
Muhammad Iqbal is the most philosophically ambitious of them. Trained in Munich on Nietzsche and Bergson, he argued that Islam is dynamic in principle, that the self is a real and developing thing, and that the closure of ijtihad was a historical accident rather than a doctrine. He also wrote most of it as Persian and Urdu poetry.
The movement is contested from both directions, which is what happens to a middle position.
How it argued
Legal reasoning from the purposes of the law, plus engagement with European philosophy on its own terms rather than in translation.
What it was arguing against
The claim that the gate of ijtihad closed in the tenth century; colonial claims that Islam is inherently unable to modernise; and the literalist response to both.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether reformist reading is faithful interpretation or accommodation to power — the standing charge from traditionalists and from Salafis alike, for opposite reasons.
Common misconceptions
That it means secularising Islam. Every major figure argued from within Islamic legal method, and Abduh was Grand Mufti of Egypt. And it is not the ancestor of Salafism, though the two share a founder in al-Afghani and diverged sharply.
How it began
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani's agitation across the Muslim world, and Abduh's more scholarly programme in Cairo, in the decades when European power looked total.
What became of it
Living and contested. It shaped the constitutions and education systems of most Muslim-majority states, and is now argued with from several directions at once.
Lasting influence
The legal codes and universities of the modern Muslim world. Fazlur Rahman's double-movement hermeneutic is its most rigorous later form.
Why it still matters
The question of how a normative tradition changes without ceasing to be itself is not confined to Islam, and this is one of the most sustained attempts to answer it.
Put another way
A building being rewired rather than rebuilt, by people arguing about which walls are load-bearing.
Where to start
Iqbal's Reconstruction, lecture one. It is a philosopher rather than a polemicist speaking.
The surprising bit
Iqbal wrote his philosophy mostly as poetry, in Persian and Urdu, and is read as a national poet by millions who have never opened his lectures.
In their own words
The teaching of the Quran that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation should be permitted to solve its own problems.
I went to the West and saw Islam without Muslims; I returned and saw Muslims without Islam.
Connections
The verdict
The tradition arguing with itself about what in it is permanent, and doing so under conditions that made calm argument nearly impossible.