Intellectual Transformations and Elusive Reconciliation

This chapter sketches the course and ambiguities of modern intellectual transformations related to issue of religion and secularism. It takes up perceptions of historical backwardness, and various apologetic strategies in which Muslim Reform attempted to navigate the relations between scripture, tradition and the cognitive and political realities and desiderata of the day, and the relation between Muslim jurisprudence and the requirements of positive law. It discusses the adoption and adaptation of positivism and Darwinism, and the conflicts between secular and religious intellectuals over issues at once cognitive and political. It offers an analysis about the relationship between various currents of thought, and the changing realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter analyses the impasses of apologetic modernism.

Secularism at the Turn of the Millennium in the Context of its Adversaries

This chapter continues some themes started in the previous chapter and examines the attrition of secularism socially, politically and culturally, towards the end of the millennium. It discusses the turn taken by erstwhile left-wing and nationalist members of the intelligentsia, to pander to what was considered to be popular sentiment, and their acceptance of claims to represent society made by Islamist forces, now coming into their own. This period saw an increased prominence of sentimentalist, identitarian attachment to the Muslim past, and a common insistence on the exceptional character of Islam, often in hostile or at least disparaging contradistinction to previous claims to universalism. The chapter discusses the attrition of the state’s secular credentials, and its patronage of conservative forms of religiosity, first against the Left, later as a form of social control.

Sites of Secularism in the Twentieth Century

This chapter deal primarily with the period following the first world war, and starts with a discussion of the relationship between overall changes in the Mashreq and the Maghreb. It then focuses on a number of crucial common areas. The one is women’s rights with regard to legal capacity, inheritance, dress, education and visibility. The other concerns civil legislation and the drawing up of civil codes. Controversies on both issues and attempts at pushing back by the religious institutions are discussed. The relative marginalisation of religious culture, cognitive challenges to religion, and the religious assault on the the cognitive and social goods of modernity, are addressed in detail. The incubation and early deployment of fundamentalism in politics and culture are analysed in relation to objective transformations in place.

The Nationalist Era and the Future Besieged

This chapter examines the flowering of explicitly secular culture in the period of independent Arab national states, especially after the Second World War. This was generally critical of religious heritage. It sometimes took decidedly anti-religious turns, and was on occasion libertine, and often deployed religious symbols in profane contexts. The political and ideological templates of political and social thought and criticism in this period, and the issue of women’s emancipation, are discussed in these contexts. All these issues occasioned increasingly concerted polemical and other attacks from religious organisms and parties, now better organised and funded than hitherto. Most of this had been made possible by secularising states which, in moves more firmly to institutionalise religious institutions. The weakening of central Arab states after the war of 1967, and oil wealth, together ushered in a period which made it possible for religious institutions and religious cultures, hitherto marginal, to commence a process of reassertion and a move from the margins to the centre. Muslim reformism tended to take a conservative turn to protect its flank, and Reformism properly speaking was pushed increasingly into marginal positions.

The Reformist State and the Universalist Orientation

This chapter sketches state-reformist initiatives in the late Ottoman empire, considered as systemic transformations in a global context of modern state forms with associated forms of social engineering and state intervention in culture and law-making. It proposes that the consequence of these changes and transformations were secularising, intended as well as unintended. The chapter discusses the beginnings of educational and cognitive transformation, the rise of a new class and type of senior bureaucrats, the emergence of a modern intelligentsia, the appearance and spread of new forms of dress. Also discussed are counter-vailing, conservative reactions, both by religious institutions, resistant to reform and the attrition of authority, and conservative milieu more broadly. The issue of women’s education, dress and public visibility emerges as a site of contestation.

Religion and the World in Historical Perspective

This chapter problematises common assumptions about East/West and Islam/West divisions relating to religion, society and the state. It examines the concrete positions and functions of religion and religious institutions in public life in the historical practices and political thinking of Byzantine, medieval and early modern European, Abbasid and Ottoman societies. It devotes a special study to the historical realities of Muslim jurisprudence. This chapter proposes to treat secularism as a complex and objective political, social and cultural dynamic allied to global processes of modernisation, rather than a checklist of stable features which can be judged exist or to be absent in any given society. It proposes that the common idea that some societies are by nature receptive to secularism while others are not, is irrelevant to the issues that arise in concrete studies of secularism, and that secularism is never complete or unalloyed.

Introduction

The Arabs entered modernity with the entry of the modern world – soldiers, merchants, diplomats, and capitalism – into Arab lands. Modern history removed Arabs from the cultural and civilisational continuity that they came to think had persisted for centuries, and impelled them to changes and breakthroughs in all domains of society, culture, and political structures. These changes traversed these domains and sectors, provoking new developments unevenly, articulated by a structural connection between the Arabs and world history with its centre first in Europe, and then the Atlantic, and finally in the Atlantic and East Asia, with a dispersed geographical centre uniting the world into the single temporal unit of today’s advanced capitalism....