Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity. Tariq Ramadan

order to rush forward to the future in all freedom. In the name of this same freedom, the ideologues of modernism have made of this élan the reference itself, the only reference. It will have as a name: growth, progress, science or technology, but the substratum is the same.

The West is passing today through a crisis which we might render, with Touraine, as “a crisis of modernity”. ⁴ The rationalisation which is elevated to the rank of an infallible doctrine marks its own limits, and man, who was supposed at the beginning to become the master of the game, is outrun by the logic which he set in motion. The forces of attraction combined with efficiency, productivity, growth, investment and consumption have dispossessed man of a part of his humanity. Without references, in search of new values (ethic), he is subjected to the meaning of progress and the march towards the future, more than he decides them.

      From economic crises to political and social crises, from the imbalance of the North-South divide to ecological imbalances, it is nonetheless imperative that man’s gain becomes the subject of his history, that he reinvests in diverse fields of activity in order to fix priorities, limits, meanings; this for lack of being able to determine values.

      It is difficult, as we see, to disassociate the positive and negative aspects of modernity. In its origin, it is a claim of liberty, a call for autonomy of reason in an acceptance of change. The evolution, in course from the seventeenth century through to and mainly in the twentieth century, has provoked excesses and given birth to an ideology. It is this that we have attempted to identify, so that the ground is cleared for a more precise usage of terms, and in order to avoid indulging in a hotchpotch. Hotchpotch, for example, would consist in confusing the process of modernisation with its recent excessive rendering, and thus justifying, in the process, all the rejections. In the same fashion, by reinserting the process of access to modernity in its European history, it is possible for us to avoid inoperative comparisons, and so especially, avoid confusing modernity with occidentalism. This because to accept the principles of liberty, autonomy of reason or the primacy of the individual is something, but it is something else to identify these solely with Western history which has seen their accession to the social field being done after a conflict whose extent and consequences on mentalities is still unappreciated. The West has given us a particular form of modernity, it partakes of its history and points of reference. Another civilisation can, from within, fix and determine the stakes in a different fashion. This is the case of Islam at the end of this twentieth century.

       Notes

1 We know nowadays how much the Middle Ages were, on the contrary, rich and burgeoning with ideas that have, for many, influenced the form that the Renaissance later took.

2 Dominique Wolton, La dernière utopie, Flammarion, 1993, p.71.

3 Alain Touraine, Critique de la modernité, Fayard, 1992, pp. 25 and 30.

4 Ibid., title of Part II of his book.

       Part One

       At the Shores of TranscendenceBetween God and Man

       At the Shores of Transcendence

In our Introduction we identified that for the women and men of the West, Islam seems to be resistant to any idea of modernity. We read such notions in the first pages of certain American, English and French magazines when they address the rise of Islamism in titles such as Islam or Modernity, and Islam or Democracy. ¹ That is when the formulations are not more exclusivist or sentencing. The backdrop that is drawn is the expression of a kind of face to face between Islam and the West. A face to face whereby the latter is attributed a positive quality, representing the principle of openness and respect for humanist and democratic values. Inversely, Islam seems as negatively marked by archaism and tradition, of being locked up in old dogmatic categories, the denunciation of women, a barbarous penal code (rendered as Sharī‘a), and the denial of the freedom of peoples. At the threshold of the third millennium of the Christian era, the terms of the alternative are clear.

When one looks at the state of Muslim societies, it is impossible to annul by a stroke of the pen the critiques made against us. They are well-founded when they evidence certain astonishing reflections and behaviours which we justify in the name of Islam. Among these are the privilege of Kings and Presidents, expedient justice, the illiteracy of women along with a variety of discriminations, each one more painful than the other, the narrow traditionalism of some ‘ulamā’ who decide and resolve questions away from any human reality in an absoluteness which only God knows. The facts are there, one must acknowledge and take account of them. However, one must ask whether the debate on Islam has been launched on clear and sound methodological bases. To consider and take into account only the shocking daily events, or more broadly, the state of Muslim societies in order to conclude, in a definite fashion, that Islam cannot respond to contemporary problems is both erroneous and reductionist. It limits Islamic Studies (Islamology) to the social sciences; it also makes the specialists of the latter the specialists of contemporary Islam. ² More clearly, this is tantamount to making an in-depth study of the fundamentals of Islam (of which we often know nothing, but which we speak about without having anything of substance to say) which then allows us to measure whether there really exists an incompatibility between Islam and the acceptance of the principles of modernity as they are actualised in the West. Such study, nevertheless, is the means to understand the wealth and abundance of ideas which mobilise people today in Muslim societies. This in order to bring about a society which can live with its time, on economic, political, social and cultural levels, without denying or betraying its points of reference.

I. The Qur’ān and the Sunna ³

The Qur’ān is, for Muslims, the Word of God revealed in stages to the Prophet Muḥammad (peace be upon him) during the 23 years of his mission through the intermediary of the Angel Gabriel. ⁴ In this sense, therefore, the Qur’ān represents for them an absolute word that gives and takes meaning beyond the events and contingencies of history. It is, for the believers of Islam, the last message to mankind revealed by God, Who had in the past sent innumerable Prophets and Messengers, among whom were Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. The Qur’ānic text is, before anything else, a reminder ⁵ to mankind so that they revert back to original faith in God and so that they assume an acceptable moral behaviour. More than a third of the Qur’ān is composed of the expression of “tawḥīd”: faith in the unicity of the Creator Who does not beget nor has He begotten. We also find mentioned in the Qur’ān the histories of other Prophets whose narrations convey the fact of the unique essence of the different messages and their continuity. All these passages give rise to the spirituality which should accompany the believer: their absolute dimension is logical and legitimate in itself. A number of verses in the Qur’ān speak of Creation, the universe and other verses insist on the modes of relation that men should undertake between themselves or towards nature. In fact, the Revelation deals with all spheres of human activity: of the economic order, the social project, and of political representation. It is this specificity which may, if not understood in the context of the Qur’ānic strategy for change, cause some problem. The Word of God is absolute and definitive, its application to given situations is governed by built-in rules and a mechanism that ensures the harmony, the application between the objectives and principles behind