Turi Munthe on Islam v Modernity

Why Islam v Modernity?

Islam and Modernity are two of the most contested academic and political concepts around. No serious thinkers today talk about a single ‘Islam’, speaking instead in terms of multiple ‘Islams’. And the same goes for definitions of ‘modernity’. Scholars would throw the debate out immediately on those grounds, but I think the problem remains. Precisely because the debate is so contested, it has been hijacked by the hyper-simplistic fringes: on the one side the essentialist Right that sees Islam as retrograde, barbaric, medieval, monolithic, and on the other the bomb-dropping lunatics of the extreme Islamic periphery who actively pitch the debate in those oppositional terms: Islam against Modernity.

I’m fascinated by the question of how Islam exists in the modern world. Academically this has been a lively space for many years now, moving through many different schools of thought. The Orientalist idea of Islam as something different from modernity was widely accepted until the 1960s and 70s when we see a shift, with the work of Edward Said and others, away from this sense of the Arab as ‘the other’ and away from old-fashioned paternalistic ways of looking at the East and the Arab. The last decade has been particularly dramatic, of course, with Islam being cast, post 9/11, as the Manichean opposite of everything that the West stands for and with the discussion becoming highly polemical and politicised. And now we are moving on from this and entering a new, really interesting, stage, as some really great modernist Islamic thinkers begin to reframe the terms of the debate.

Tell me about your first book, Olivier Roy’s Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Umma.

I think this is one of the best starting points to try to figure out what happened to Islam, or these multiple Islams if you like, over the past century. Olivier Roy is a heavyweight French academic with huge PhD teams feeding into his work. He tries to explain how Islam’s position has shifted over the last 100 years. Roy describes a world in which Islam was highly local and highly social, fulfilling all the traditional roles of religion, from rites of passage and healing to feeding aspirations and breeding community. What he describes is a space in which there are multitude of Islams profoundly tied into the social fabric in which they work. He gives wonderful sociological examples from the Marabout in Morocco with his version of Moroccan Islam with ultra-local customs, adapted to the people, language, terrain and political circumstances, through to Imams in Indonesia with their highly localised, ingrained and sensitive versions of community Islam, passing through Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Central Asia and so on.

Roy then charts the gradual politicisation of Islam into more regional movements, impacted by greater communication methods, through to more political versions in the 1930s-50s, and then on to the phenomenon of Saudi-funded Wahhabi Islam. This Wahhabism was anathema and culturally alien to other parts of the Islamic world but with huge amounts of funding and politicisation of these ideas, Roy explains how what emerged was a new kind of religion as political ideology as opposed to culturally specific social religion. He does a fantastic job of showing the way Islam shifted from a social use to an ideological position over a period of 100 years.

And we see more about this politicisation of Islam in your next book, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.

Gilles Kepel is another brilliant French academic who again demonstrates the excellent sociological work of the French in this area. The idea behind this book was to explain where and how the ideas of Jihad originated. Kepel deals with a shorter sweep of history than Roy but gives an excellent overview of the movements that created political Islam. He is particularly interesting from late 1970s onwards when the Iranian revolution brought its own version of Shiite political Islam into public consciousness and accelerated other political Islamic movements elsewhere. Increasingly, since the 1950s, middle-class Arabs, from Egypt and Syria to the Gulf and North Africa, had sought a return to a more conservative form of Islam in which religion would play a more important role in society. In the 1980s and 90s, a breakaway fringe of hardcore ideological political Islamists, stirred up by the Iranian revolution, became much more activist, opting for violence in certain cases. But, in reality, this ended up alienating vast numbers of social political Islamists with their desire for a return to traditional values. Kepel actually suggests that the 9/11 attack on the twin towers can be seen almost as the end of the true ‘political’ movement in Islam.

For me, Roy and Kepel are so useful precisely because they talk sociology and history rather than religion or values.

Tell us about The New Voices of Islam. What has happened to Islamic thought in the aftermath of 9/11?

It’s hard to talk about this without generalising but I think we see Islam becoming more popular and social and less political. There’s also been a great deal of really sophisticated new thinking about how Islam fits in the post-9/11 world. The New Voices of Islam by Mehran Kamrava is a useful anthology of the new-reform Muslim thinkers who have extremely interesting and open ideas about where Islam is moving. Many are also active theologians trying to push Islam in certain directions. From Mohammed Arkoun, the Algerian living in France, to AbdelKarim Soroush, the Iranian theologian, to Leila Ahmed and Amina Wadud who do fascinating theological work on place of women in Islam, this book is a window on to the enormous amount of muted but highly sophisticated theological exegesis taking place, often in non-Muslim majority countries where it is sometimes easier for radical Islamic thinkers to work undisturbed.