Reform Within Islam

When the western influence or civilization came to impinge upon the Muslimworld in the late eighteenth century, a profound process of transformation beganin Muslim thought. There had been so many encounters between the West andthe East, or in other words, between Islam and Christianity over centuries in variousways and on different levels. However, this was a novel phenomenon, withoutantecedents, resulting from "the technical age" and accordingly from a stateof comparative superiority among nations placing them inexorably in an objectivehierarchy in terms of their use of the possibilities of this age. (The term"technical age" is used here as defined by Marshall G.S. Hodgson in TheVenture of Islam as a universal human development, contrary to the term "modemage," which implies western superiority.) Having lost the sense of absolutesuperiority provided by their faith, Muslims had come to feel themselves morevulnerable to the Western challenge than ever. Quite naturally this led Muslimthinkers to question their thought, religion, and civilization in comparison withthose of the West Few if any thinkers, like the architect of the Majalla, AhmedCevdet Pa????a. the foremost intellectual figure in modem times, in whom theauthentic 'alim tradition was embodied, remained bound to the idio-sources andpossibilities of Islamic thought in coping with the Western challenge to the bitterend. The bulk of the Muslim intelligentsia and 'ulama, far from possessing astaunch, implicit faith in the self-sufficiency of Islamic legacy, as AhmedCevdet Pa§a has, felt themselves as bound to compromise with western thoughtin some way or other. Then a new way of thinking on the part of Muslimthinkers "Islamic modernism" came into being.Seen in this light, Islamic modernism marks a decisive rupture in the historyof Islamic thought in that it represents an attempt at renewal from outside, asopposed to the ihya or tajdid tradition codified by the Prophet himself, which ...