Reinventing Islam, Sublating Modernity: A Conflict of Enlightenments

Abstract

The present paper aims to show how the return to Islam initially conceived by Muslim reformists has not been simply a conflictual reaction to the secular ideology sustaining modernity, but rather an effort to transform Islam into a religion within modernity. It argues that this return has in fact been a major paradigm shift within the theologico-political discourse of Islamic tradition and that it is this very shift that led to the reformation of this religion. In this perspective, this study shows how the reactivation of sharia by reformist thinkers did not mean a rejection of the Islamic intellectual tradition, but it was precisely the result of the encounter between this tradition and the modern social sciences. The paper then reconstructs the dialogue between Muslim reformists and 19th-century European thinkers, dialogue which was crucial in shaping Islamic reformation. It shows to what extent reformed Islam was a response of Muslim reformers to the diagnosis of the project of modernity made by European reformist thinkers such as François Guizot or Auguste Comte. Through their confrontation, the paper develops a comparison between the theoretical backdrop of European modernity and the premises of Islamic reformation as two alternative conceptions of the Enlightenment project. By discussing Kant, Foucault, Habermas and Koselleck’s thesis on the historical and philosophical roots of the European Enlightenment, this study ultimately seeks to understand in which way the theological structure of Islam has led the project of the Islamic Enlightenment in an analogous but fairly differentiated direction.