APOLOGETIC MODERNITY PART I

Abstract

What is the conceptual status of modernity in the Muslim world? Scholars describe Muslim attempts at appropriating this European idea as being either derivative or incomplete, with a few calling for multiple modernities to allow modern Islam some autonomy. Such approaches are critical of the apologetic way in which Muslims have grappled with the idea of modernity, the purity and autonomy of the concept of which is apparently compromised by its derivative and incomplete appropriation. None have attended to the conceptual status of this apologetic itself, though it is certainly the most important element in Muslim debates on the modern. This essay considers the adoption of modernity as an idea among Muslim intellectuals in nineteenth-century India, a place in which some of the earliest and most influential debates on Islam’s modernity occurred. It argues that Muslim apologetics created a modernity whose rejection of purity and autonomy permitted it a distinctive conceptual form.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Muslims have been deeply concerned with the idea of modernity and its place in Islamic thought. In the Muslim world the term modernity itself was taken from languages like English, French or German and translated into some version of two Arabic roots describing the contemporary and the novel, for instance the abstract nouns contemporaneousness (asriyyat) and novelty (jadidiyyat), both nineteenth-century neologisms. These words still retain the memory of their translation, so that Muslim debates on the modern continue to occur within narrative spaces bounded by markers like East and West, Islam and Christianity.

Was this language of modernity wholly or partially foreign? Was it a sign of Christian or European dominance? Was there anything neutral, universal or Islamic about the modern? It was questions of these kinds that characterized Muslim debates on modernity, with markers like the East and West or Islam and Christianity, which in European thought tended to define the boundaries of the modern in a peripheral and merely descriptive way, becoming conceptually central in the Muslim world and historically grounded in imperialism. As a result Muslim debates over modernity generally took the form of defining a relationship, whether of acceptance, rejection or compromise, between East and West, Islam and Christianity. The dictated character of this debate, however, made the emergence of a systematic modernism in control of its own terms of argument impossible, for Muslims were neither able to participate in European discussions about their modernity, nor to be acknowledged in them, even if these discussions formed the basis of their own sense of the modern. That is to say, the modernist debate among Muslims continued to revolve around historical oppositions that could not enter into any real, let alone systematic, relationship, so that relations between East and West, Muslim and Christian, were thought of in partial and fragmentary ways, like attempts to enter into conversation with someone speaking a different language. The closeness of its thinking to European thought, together with its inability to engage with and integrate the latter intellectually, made Muslim modernism essentially apologetic. And it is the partial and unsystematic nature of this apologetic modernity that I want to explore in the context of colonial India, if only to find in it something more than intellectual and political limitation. After all, the very weakness, incompleteness or derivative nature of Muslim apologetic needs to be explained in light of the manifest intelligence of its practitioners. Moreover, Islamic modernism provides the intellectual and political foundations for Muslim movements even today, which continue to rely upon its apologetic and unsystematic ways.

Scholars of modern Islam have all noticed its apologetic character but have spent little time attending to it. Most dismiss this tradition as being a sign merely of Islam's incomplete modernity and a product of the West's overwhelming might. Whether or not these scholars think Islam will survive the shock of this ever-renewed encounter with some sort of Euro-American modernity, they are united in seeing Muslim apologetic in negative terms as a lack and an absence whose positive alternative is naturally provided by the West. This is true even when the scholar concerned is a critic of European or American modernity who bemoans the passing of Islam's traditional world.¹ Indeed such sympathetic scholars despise Muslim modernism even more for sacrificing what they see as a glorious history to the requirements of an industrial age. But sometimes these scholars move beyond the sorry tale of Islam's incomplete modernity, and, sometimes inadvertently, provide its apologetic with the rudiments of ontology. A good example is the following sentence from Fazlur Rahman's book Islam and Modernity:

[Islamic] modernism could afford to be partial and unsystematic and could even afford to be slow—for at the theoretical level it was mostly a “defense of Islam” and hence chose to respond to those problems that the western critics had raised, while at the practical level the urgency for a speedy and systematic reform was often difficult to feel owing to the absence of ultimate and concrete responsibilities for problem solving.²

Rahman, himself a celebrated exponent of Islamic modernism, traces its origins to the period of European dominance in the nineteenth century and to the emergence throughout the Muslim world of efforts at grappling with the fact of Europe's intellectual and political hegemony. It is in this context, Rahman thinks, that these efforts coalesced in a movement he calls Islamic modernism, which he defines in terms of its partialities and unsystematic character: a movement consisting on the one hand in a defense of Muslim beliefs and practices against European criticism, and on the other in an attack on these same beliefs and practices in the terms of European criticism.

Rahman traces the origins of this interest in modernity to the questions that Europeans began to ask about Islam in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What, for instance, was the allegiance of Muslims to the Caliph residing in Constantinople? This was the earliest form of a Western concern with pan-Islamic loyalty. Under what conditions was jihad against Christian rulers incumbent upon Muslims? This was the earliest form of a Western concern with war as an Islamic obligation. As Rahman shows, such questions, which served to differentiate East from West, Islam from Christianity, were also taken up by nineteenth-century Muslim writers, who repudiated European theories about pan-Islamic or jihad politics and tried to reform Islam itself away from such injunctions in the name of modernity. But their sense of modernity was cobbled together out of disparate European ideals like civility, rationality and the like, without any attempt to develop a coherent theory of the modern. For Muslim ideas of Islam's modernity were neither independent nor systematic, but plotted according to European concerns, themselves partial in every sense of the word.

Instead of following a well-trodden path in bemoaning the derivative or incomplete character of this modernity, one that did not control the terms of its own debate, Rahman describes its apparent weakness as a luxury. In the period of colonial dominance, he claims, attempts to modernize Islam in the way of, say, reforming its canon law could afford to be partial and unsystematic because Muslims could not control or change the society in which they lived. Their interest in pan-Islamic or jihad politics was largely theoretical, so were their attempts remake Muslim societies in modern terms. If their dependence on European categories of modernity made Muslim modernists partial, in Rahman's formulation, their inability to put into effect a project for Islam's modernization made them unsystematic as well. Taken together, both these factors added up to a sense and practice of Muslim modernity that I am arguing was fundamentally apologetic in nature. But it is precisely this apologetic modernism, dismissed by others as mere weakness, which Fazlur Rahman describes as a luxury, holding that the circumstances of European domination afforded Muslims the opportunity to become modern partially, unsystematically and even slowly.

I shall return to what exactly the luxury of this apologetic might consist of, but I want to suggest here that the fragmentary nature of such thought also allowed its practitioners to be modern in curious and not-quite-European ways. In what follows I want to argue two points. In the first place I want to suggest that the very “weakness”, or what Rahman calls its luxurious character, allowed Muslims to think of modernity in intellectual rather than political terms, and that this in itself gave the advocates of modernity some degree of autonomy. Thus while the British in India, for example, thought that pan-Islamic loyalty or jihad posed questions that were as much political as anything else, Muslim modernists were able to regard them as essentially theoretical because they pertained to the workings of a world over which they exercised no political control. For modernist politics were fragmented, made up in equal measure of remnants from the precolonial past (like dealing with religious institutions but no longer civil ones) and cast-offs from the colonial present (like being appointed to minor administrative positions but having no say in the imperial order).

The second point I want to make is that this apologetic modernism was produced in the name of Islam as a new historical entity, designating a moral community transcending the particularity of royal, clerical or mystical authority. We know that it was only during the nineteenth century that the word Islam, of rare occurrence in the Quran and premodern Muslim texts in general, came to be used as a category of identity embracing all Muslim practices.³ Before this it had been used mostly to relate theological categories, such as obedience (islam) and faith (iman), to categories of Muslim identity such as religion (din), sect (firqa), school (mazhab) and mystical order (tariqa), to say nothing of the more or less profane identifications of royal authority. There was no idea of Islam as a totality of beliefs and actions that not only transcended the remit of specific authorities like those of clerics, mystics and kings, but could also become its own authority as an independent historical actor designating a new kind of moral community.

One might even say that “Islam” and the question of its modernity were born at the same time, insofar as this Islam emerges in modernist debates as a historical agent and authority in its own right, constituting the totality of Muslim beliefs and practices as a community with its own volition, ethos or spirit.⁴ But for Islam to have a spirit it needed to possess a body as well, and this was provided by its culture (tahzib) or civilization (tamaddun), within which all prior forms of Muslim identification were made to disappear. The cultural body of Islam, in other words, produced the spirit that governed it, whether this was conceived in the name of Montesquieu, Hegel or Feuerbach. While I shall not be dealing with the question of Islam's spirit in this essay, I do want to point out that in addition to spiriting Muslim authority away, it constituted a radically new locution. It would not have been possible to talk about the spirit of Islam before the nineteenth century, because Islam itself had not yet come to exist as a singular culture or civilization, the sum total of Muslim beliefs and practices.

By claiming that their weakness allowed for an intellectual rather than political approach to the question of modernity, I do not mean to say that Muslim modernists in colonial India had no community-building agenda, only that the lack of political responsibility permitted them a thoughtful reflection upon the notion of authority. And this was done in the universalistic terms of Islam as a new category of identification that ended up displacing particular authorities altogether. I want to claim that this reflection upon authority in the name of a new Islam went beyond the purely instrumental concerns of these modernists to constitute a specific way of thinking, one that has outlived them and that survives to this day.