REFORM and MODERNITY in ISLAM the Philosophical, Cultural and Political Discourses Among Muslim Reformers

Safdar Ahmed is Lecturer and Tutor in the Department of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the University of Sydney, where he also obtained his PhD. AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd i 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd iiii 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM REFORM AND MODERNITY IN ISLAM The Philosophical, Cultural and Political Discourses among Muslim Reformers Safdar Ahmed AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd iiiiii 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2013 Safdar Ahmed The right of Safdar Ahmed to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Modern Religion 26 ISBN 978 1 84885 735 3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset by Newgen Publishers, Chennai Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd iivv 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Islam, Postcolonialism and Modernity 1 1. Islamic Modernism and the Reification of Religion 43 2. Literary Romanticism and Islamic Modernity: The Case of Urdu Poetry 75 3. Education and the Status of Women 100 4. Muhammad Iqbal, Islam and Modern Nationalism 120 5. The Theory of Divine Sovereignty 148 6. Maududi and the Gendering of Muslim Identity 176 7. Progressive Islam: The Hermeneutical Turn 200 Conclusion 224 Notes 229 Bibliography 272 Index 291 AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd v 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The idea for this book began as part of my doctoral research with the Department of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the University of Sydney. I would specially like to thank my supervisor, Ahmad Shboul, for his generosity of spirit and high standards of scholarship. What might have seemed like difficult work was made pleasurable thanks to the many informative and stimulating discussions which enabled me to find my own perspective, and which assisted me at every stage of the writing process. I am grateful to Nijmeh Hajjar, who was my teacher in Arabic at the University of Sydney and to Hashim Durrani, who assisted me in the translation of Urdu texts. I am also deeply indebted to James Piscatori, Ali Mahafzah and Youssef Choueiri who provided thoughtful and considered feedback on the entire manuscript, and to Jim Masselos, who gave valuable support in the production of its se- cond chapter. For their patient editing, which gave greater concision and clarity to the text than I was able to achieve, I thank Emma Wise and Hannah Wilks. I am also grateful to the staff of Fisher Library at the University of Sydney and their inter-loan department. I have been fortunate to teach and learn alongside some very bright students at the University of Sydney, who have also been an important and inspiring sounding board for new ideas. For supporting me in other spheres of life, and for providing important feedback on particular chapters and themes which were then under consideration, I am indebted to a number of cherished friends. AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd vvii 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii These including Briony Denver, Robin Denver, Anton Pulvirenti, Ted McKinlay, Chris Matos, Renata Hoare, Chrissie Ianssen, Arthur Lawrence, Lisa Worthington, Stephen Buckle and Heather and Ellen McIlwain. Special mention must go to Jillian McIlwain for supporting me during times of ill-health. In the requisition of books, I am grateful to my stepmother, Farrukh Ahmed, and those family members in Pakistan who purchased and sent books to Australia. Bilquis Ghani and Omid Tofighian provided me with the sort of friendship that will only grow as the years roll on, and which developed around our support of asylum seekers at Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre. Their companionship has been precious to me. And lastly, this book would have been impossible to write were it not for the encouragement, pa- tience and unconditional love of my family: Anna Broom, Nazeer Ahmed, Iqbal Ahmed and Zehra Ahmed. AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd vviiii 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM AAhmed_Prelims.inddhmed_Prelims.indd vviiiiii 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:152:48:15 PPMM INTRODUCTION ISLAM, POSTCOLONIALISM AND MODERNITY The overarching theme of this book is that there is no singular or transcendental definition of modernity next to which other variant or lesser modernities are compared. This is not to claim that modernity is so diffuse as to bear no meaning or that it connotes different things to different people. Rather, modernity must be placed in its historical setting, which is to release it from the exclusionary Eurocentric paradigms by which it is commonly defined. Whilst modern ideas, movements and ideologies properly begin in Western Europe during the time of the Enlightenment, their historical paths (under the engines of colonialism, global capitalism, nationalism and globalisa- tion) are so fractured and complex as to exceed any particular doctrine, culture or essence. To speak of modernity in historical terms, therefore, is to invoke a cluster of contested philosophical ideas and practices which provide the conditions, or common ground, for the generation of diverse ideologies both in and outside Europe. Yet, too often, when historians, media pundits and policy analysts sit down to interpret modernity in the context of contemporary Islamic thought, a homogeneous, flat and hackneyed conception of the modern world emerges. This is not a consequence of Islam’s own encounter with modernity, but of its being placed in an anterior historical and chronological position to that of the modern West. Islam, we are told, must get through its religious wars, find its Martin Luther and learn AAhmed_Chapters.inddhmed_Chapters.indd 1 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:462:48:46 PPMM 2 REFORM AND MODERNITY IN ISLAM to separate the powers of church and state if we are to see the arrival of such things as democracy, human rights and women’s freedoms in the Muslim world. This claim gets co-opted by secular political discourses in which modernity or a modern ‘way of life’ is opposed to Islamic revivalism – or Muslim culture more generally – in tones reminiscent of the Cold War. At its most distorted, this dichotomy simplistic- ally conflates modernity with all that is rational, forward-looking and civilised, to be defended from an Islam cast as irrational, totalitarian and atavistic. In the reactive and often shallow political commentary of policy analysts, media pundits, journalists and opinion-piece writers, Islam or Islamist movements are placed against a normative definition of secular modernity. Francis Fukuyama, for one, has likened the reactionary or anti-modern character of contemporary Islam to the worst strains of totalitarian thought, using the pejorative term: ‘Islamo-fascism’.1 Likewise, one often hears contemporary Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brothers in Egypt or the Islamic regime in Iran, described as ‘anti-modern’ or ‘un-modern’ for purportedly opposing the tenets of political liberalism: a stance which constitutes them as walking anachronisms, or relics of another time.2 Yet in the use of terms such as ‘Islamic terrorism’, as Alain Badiou points out, ‘the predicate “Islamic” has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word “terrorism”, which is itself devoid of all content’.3 In this sense, ‘terrorism’ (like ‘fundamen- talism’ and ‘fascism’) is conflated with the adjective which precedes it, becoming, in turn, a part (the ‘problem’) of Islam itself. Alas, rhetorical cues such as the ‘war on modernity’ and the ‘threat to the Enlightenment’ cannot accommodate Islamic reformism’s complex and sustained entanglement in the historical and political conditions of modernity. The implication that Islam simply needs to ‘catch up’ with the West involves a one-dimensional image of both Islam and the West which reduces their internal complexities whilst overlooking the histories they share. One cannot understand the contemporary societies of the Muslim Middle East, for instance, without accounting for the communications, differences and interactions which have occurred amongst and between European powers and indigenous peoples since the colonial period. Before I explore the implications of AAhmed_Chapters.inddhmed_Chapters.indd 2 44/30/2013/30/2013 112:48:462:48:46 PPMM INTRODUCTION 3 this (over and above the inaccuracy of attributing to Islam a variation upon the ideology of European fascism), it is important to underscore the different conceptions of modernity to which Muslim societies have been exposed, and from which their own modernity is shaped. Defining Modernity By way of a definition, there are two general though often opposed philosophical conceptions of modernity which chart a wide and tangled path in global history from the eighteenth century onwards. The one I will address first is understood, according to the tenets of Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume, as a project for the liberation of human beings from the self-incurred bonds of irrationality and superstition through the application of reason-centred ideas and institutions.

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