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Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam
By Mansoor Moaddel and Kamran Talattof, eds.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
This book consists of an introduction and thirty-four essays written by prominent thinkers from different Muslim countries. The editors focus on a number of significant issues that have occupied the minds of Muslim intellectuals from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the present time.
In their introduction, the editors' first lines reveal the content and goals of the book, the most important of which is to present a wide spectrum of ideas constituting the responses of Muslim intellectuals to modernity. It is obvious from the selection of essays that the editors' purpose is to reflect the modernist and fundamental discourses of Islam in a context of understanding as comprehensively and as equitably as possible, and deal with contemporary problems facing Muslims in the individual and social spheres of life.
The editors emphasize the feature common to both discourses: they emerged in relation to the loss to the West of Muslims' prior superiority in political and intellectual fields. In this context, both fundamentalist and modernist intellectuals are agreed that if Muslims are to restore superiority in these fields, they have to subject their religious and cultural legacy to critical thinking. Yet, the methods and starting points of this process differ according to the perspective from which the two parties approach the problems. But, one should bear in mind that both sides are consistent with each other on Islamic tenets such as the Oneness of God and the character of revelation of the Quran through the Prophet to all human beings.
Departing from the notion that the One who created nature and revealed the Quran is the same, modernist thinkers conclude that there should be harmony between them. This notion was advanced by prominent theologians and scholars, especially from India and Egypt, such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-97) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905), who are the leading figures of this movement.
The eventual aim of these modernist thinkers was to reconcile Islamic creeds with what had been discovered by the sciences: they sought an Islamic foothold by means of which to adopt and apply the same methods and procedures that enabled the West to...