Abstract
The term “Conclusion” would be inappropriate for this set of reflections relating to Islamic Reformism. However, two strong ideas deserve to be highlighted at the end of a critical history of the “Reformation” in Islam as these pages have tried to sketch (We have deliberately limited our investigation to the Sunni Muslim world, because Shi’ism, another great tradition of Islam, has important peculiarities that call for separate analysis).
First, the dominant image of Islamic fundamentalism as a continuation of tradition, as the original and incarnate message of Islam from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to Hassan al-Banna, or as the awakening of the Muslim nation, is an unfounded picture from the point of view of an archeology of modern Islamic thought. It is simply a belated projection to give historical and political legitimacy to more generally Muslim fundamentalism and more particularly to a “re-shaped” Islamism that emerged in the 1980s and that is advancing today in the Muslim World and in Muslim circles in the West by proposing it as a protective bulwark against a more radical current known as jihadism.
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Notes
- 1.
We have deliberately limited our investigation to the Sunni Muslim world, because Shi’ism, another great tradition of Islam, has important peculiarities that call for separate analysis.
- 2.
On the part of the Semitic peoples in the history of civilization (1862), Complete Works of Ernest Renan, t. II, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1948, pp. 332–333. “Islamism and science,” in Complete works, t. I, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1947, p. 957. By Islamism, the author meant the Muslim religion.
- 3.
Idem, pp. 957–958.
- 4.
September 11, 2001 seems to represent today a pivotal date. A large section of the intelligentsia seems to have swapped scholarship and long-term vision for the role of “watchdog,” according to Paul Nizan’s formula. The so-called “Clash of Civilizations” theory is now enjoying great success, both in the West and in the Muslim world: it seems that two worlds that had coexisted in pain for centuries now want to make a final cut. Islamophobia is no longer, in the West, the prerogative of the extreme right-wing or the primary anti-Western of fundamentalist Muslim circles. The latter often take the pretext of simple facts (a sentence in a conference, a caricature published in a newspaper, etc.) to ignite and to convince them of a new crusade against Islam. It must be admitted that they find more and more echoes among Muslims, even the most moderate ones. More than ever, an Islam-refuge and identity prevails and threatens, in Muslim societies, the fragile advances that were made in favor of reforms. In the West, Renan’s lecture was put back into circulation, ignoring its context, as if the opposition to Islam allowed for a return to macabre racial theories (we say it without complexes, since the entirety of this lecture and al-Afghani’s reply have been translated into Arabic by us). Islamophobic blasts have been sold to more than a million copies. Under the pen of scholars and research directors, we can now read titles as boorish as: “The long war of Islam and Christianity: 622–2007.” And this, not to mention the development, in recent years, of a “charlatan Islamology” that confirms the defeat of scientific thought and the leveling of publications on Islam; a “specialization in Islam” often becomes the shortest route to profitable nonsense and media celebrity.
- 5.
See al-Afghani’s reply to Renan, published in the appendix in Refutation of Materialists, translation by A.-M. Goichon. Paris, Geuthner, 1942. Renan wrote a note on the answer, see Complete Works, vol. I, pp. 960–965. It reads in part: “The disagreement between the Liberals on these different points is not very profound, since, whether or not they are favorable to Islam, all come to the same practical conclusion: to spread education among the Muslims.” We have translated into Arabic Renan’s lecture and al-Afghani’s answer with notes on the circumstances of this controversy (Qawadid al-Tanwir, supra, at note 1).
- 6.
Al-Naqd al-dhati (self-criticism) is the title of a well-known work by Allal al-Fasi, published in 1952.
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Haddad, M. (2020). Epilogue: What Reforms for Today?. In: Muslim Reformism - A Critical History. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36774-9_6
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