Locating Islam

By the nineteenth-century, the idea of ‘religion’ as a universal phenomenon had become firmly entrenched. Religions in the particular were therefore expressions of this universal phenomena, mapped onto human civilizational evolution. The explanation of difference moved away from a theologically-based true/false binary, and was relocated onto a universal taxonomy of mankind’s religious evolution. In this conception, ‘primitive’ religions were symptomatic of ‘primitive’ civilizations, ‘advanced’ religions likewise belonging to and reflecting ‘advanced’ civilizations. Historicism, as contextualization, enabled religions to be located in this taxonomy according to new criteria of civilizational progress. This chapter explores Islamic Modernists’ ‘location’ of Islam in this universal, phenomenological and civilizational taxonomy. The focus is on elucidating their understanding of Islam as part of, and contributing to, universal human history, and ways in which this new set of intellectual paradigms shifted their categorization and understanding of Islam as a universal religious phenomenon, as opposed to a set of texts, traditions, practices, and so forth. This chapter also elaborates the complex debates that Islamic Modernists engaged in with their Christian, religious studies scholarly counterparts, particularly over the position of Islam relative to other monotheistic traditions.