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Appeared, slightly modified, in islam21, London (http://islam21.org) (No. 23, June 2000) |
Islam and the Crisis of Modernity
Modernity is
facing a crisis today. And, it is a crisis not of power but of meaning, not of
the efficacy of modern instruments but of the legitimacy of modern goals, not
of the ability of modernity’s champions to carry its project forward but of the
ultimate beneficence and morality of the project itself. For modern societies
are not helpless at facing the inner challenges of governance and economy,
primary determinants of the human condition according to the modernist scheme
of things, nor are modern polities vulnerable to any threats by external
enemies. No, there are no slaves within the walls of modern Rome, or any hordes
of barbarians at its gates. And yet, the denizens of the modern city are not
celebrating, they are not jubilant and exultant but feel puzzled and chastised.
Puzzled because their global city is not a city of humanity, chastised because
of the realization that no city in history can ever incarnate perfect harmony,
justice or truth. Thus, to their dismay, they have discovered that the promise
of modernity to create its own Utopia, the Cosmopolis of humanity, will
forever remain unfulfilled, that not all the modernity’s men and horses will be
able to put the Humpty-Dumpty of our humanity together again.
It is only in
this sense, namely the inability of modern reason to redeem its promise of
delivering a model of perfect historical order, that the expression ‘crisis of
modernity’ has any legitimacy and it is to this intellectual impasse that the
present reflection is devoted. The crisis, then, comes to light through the
insight of contemporary philosophy that modernity is no longer able to function
as a doctrine, that it can lay no claims to possessing any coherent
worldview or meaningful cosmology. Or, stated differently, all the normative
claims of modernity, its umpteen prescriptions for societal utopias and
development projects, are no more than cultural and historical prejudices of
the civilization in command. These are the arguments of power, by power, for
power. The discourse of reason is no less of a historical construct than that
of revelation and just as authoritarian and hegemonic.
Paradoxically,
modern (Enlightenment) reason, which prided itself on its discovery of history
and made the grand metaphysical claim about historical existence and not some
kind of trans-temporal eternity being the true home of man, is now humbled by
the most disastrous upshot of its own truth. For the logic of quis custodiet
ipsos custodies (Who guards, in turn, the guardians?) compels it to
acknowledge that reason itself is a product of history and not some
trans-historical criterion of right and wrong! Or, that there exits not one
universal Reason but a host of local, historical and contingent reasons. The
eternal question of philosophy about the nature of the best regime, and the
inescapable query of every human soul about the goal and end of human existence
cannot, therefore, be settled within the courtroom of reason. However, this
humbling of reason before the mystery of human existence is no cause for shame
for the neo-orthodoxy of relativism. On the contrary, the failure of
Enlightenment reason to overcome the recalcitrance of history against theory is
taken as a proof of the intractable and arbitrary nature of all truth-claims.
Truth according to the gospel of nihilism is nothing but the mask of reason
that power wears; it is a verbal game, a discursive strategy to maintain the
hegemony of the powers that be. All universal schemes, all grand theories, all
meta-narratives - religions as well as ideologies, political doctrines as well
as methodologies of social engineering - have therefore no legitimacy for the
enlightened post-metaphysical being.
Earlier, at
the defining moment of modernity, there was no amazement at the mystery of
human existence, no humility before the intractability of the human condition
and no awe for the concealment (ghayba) of Being that inform all
modernist and postmodernist discourses today. On the contrary, it was asserted
that since philosophy’s unmasking of the ‘cunning of reason’ revealed an
identity of the rational and the real, a congruence of the normative and the
empirical, history had come to an end and the timeless Utopia of mankind was at
hand. All that a society needed to do was to emulate the example provided by
the European spirit, to follow the curve of its progress and development in
‘universal history’, and the rewards of a perfect social order would be its.
The discovery of history as a system, as a decipherable norm of reason
and a predictable goal of development, thus transformed history into sociology
and opened the floodgates the utopian technologies of social engineering. All
the suffering and misery that ensued in the wake of these experiments, indeed
the legitimisation of the politics of genocide and ethnic cleansing that is
also the gift of utopian modernity, can be attributed directly to the claims
that human reason had, in the unfolding of the European Geist and in the
march of the nation-state in history, discovered the true end of man!
Today we
know that the moral and intellectual impasse that any ‘universal’ philosophy of
history creates cannot be overcome by remaining faithful to the original claims
of modernity, namely by asserting the ability of reason to prescribe a perfect
norm for historical existence. Indeed, from the moral point of view, the
antinomy of norm and history that is inescapable within the paradigm of
Enlightenment can be abolished only if we say farewell either to universal reason
or to universal morality. For a reason that determines the course of
world-history is a reason that is also sovereign over moral will, just as a
history that follows the dictates of the moral will necessarily renders
superfluous any regime of a universal and sovereign reason. If morality be the
exercise of free will, it cannot operate within restraints of any kind
including those of reason; similarly, if reason be the essence of man, it
cannot stop short of prescribing norms that are true for ‘all times and
climes’. Hence, this deadlock can be removed by any of the two strategies:
Either one accepts the sovereignty of existence (history) over norm (theory)
and banishes morality from the discourse of reason altogether, or one upholds
the primacy of the norm, but then exiles history form this theoretical vision.
Either a normless historicity or a ahistorical normativity, either a scheme of
(trans-historical) reason or a disorder of (para-rational) history! Whatever
the choice, morality is either subsumed by theoretical rationality or consumed
by political contingency.
Paradoxically,
then, the legacy of Enlightenment that causes the greatest Angst to the
modern soul springs from the insight that the human condition, when eliminated
of its transcendental moorings, appears ‘beyond good and evil’. Either the goal
of humanity, that renders its suffering bearable and meaningful, lies outside
the horizon of history, or man is simply a ‘meaning-creating animal’ who is the
source of her own morality. In actual practice, however, this crisis has merely
paved the way for the rule of contemporary nihilism. For as the modern world
finds it increasingly difficult to conceive a distinction between good and evil
that is not grounded in human will and design, and yet discovers that normative
judgments cannot be supported by empirical claims, it has begun to despair of
the possibility of, ultimately, sustaining any distinction between right and
wrong. By renouncing the possibility of transcendence and inaugurating the sovereignty
history over theory, modern man has chosen to live a world without norms. His
is a cognitive universe that lacks the possibility of moral judgment.
Today,
modernity is metamorphosing itself from a doctrine to an anti-doctrine.
Instead of claiming any ‘truth’ for its model of the inner and outer worlds, it
is now pleading that the notion of ‘truth’ itself be abolished, at least within
the domains of philosophy and science. Modernist (Kantian) philosophy was/is
proud of its ability to demarcate a clear line between reason and non-reason.
It posits an identity of reason and knowledge; what lies within the limits of
reason is known or knowable, and what lies outside its domain is unknowable and
hence conjectural. (Indeed, reason has now been reduced to experience, to pure
sense-perception!) So, the dilemma before the modern man is that she could
either remain within the bounds of reason and learn to coexist with the
uncertainty of all truth and the partiality of all knowledge, or she may step
outside the borders of reason and may create some sense of meaning by
conceiving and imaging the whole, but she may do so only with the assurance
that such a ‘whole’ would always be arbitrary and unverifiable. One is thus
confronted with the frustrating incongruence of knowledge and meaning, the
conflict between the method – rationality – of science, which by its very
empirical nature is necessarily reductionist, and man’s search for meaning,
which is unable to shun the ‘unscientific’ questions of totality and ultimacy.
Significantly,
reason now seeks refuge in the anti-doctrinaire modernism of modernity and
conceives its task as that of the ‘de-construction’ of the modernist subject,
the uncovering of the underlying metaphysical foundation of its discourses, and
the de-divinization of all language and discourse. Indeed, according to Richard
Rorty, the most outspoken spokesmen of this philosophy, ‘truth is merely a property of
language; that where there are no sentences, there is no truth; and that the
idea that world decides which descriptions are true no longer makes sense.’ Moreover, it also follows that
‘since only descriptions of the world can be true or false, only sentences can
be true, truth is contingent upon the ability of human beings to make languages
in which to phrase sentences.’ Positing an identity of truth and language, the
debunker of modernity and its metaphysics then reaches a point where we humans
‘no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as quasi-divinity, where we
treat everything - our language, our conscience, our community - as a product
of time and chance.'
Consequently,
the anti-modernist utopia may now be spelt out as ‘the culture of liberalism’
that would be ‘enlightened and secular, through and through. It would be one in
which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or
a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there
are nonhuman forces to which human being should be responsible. It would drop,
or drastically reinterpret, not only the idea of holiness but those of
"devotion to truth" and "fulfillment of the deepest needs
of the spirit". The process of de-divinization.... would, ideally,
culminate in our no longer being able to see any use for the notion that
finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings might derive the
meaning of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal,
contingently existing human beings.'
Modernity’s
main achievement, if you follow this logic, is to have advanced a set of
claims, about reason, man and history, which, with the maturing of its
reflection, she was able to dispose off as false! And it is this discovery,
that the axioms and givens of modernity have been fallacious, which is now
hailed as reason’s greatest contribution to our understanding of the human
condition. Still, this failure does not dim the modernist light or cast any
shadow on the modernist project. For the assertion is that it is not merely
modernity that is unable to validate itself from its own criteria of
rationality, but that all philosophies of the whole, all universal histories,
all doctrines of salvation, all visions of an End are unverifiable/falsifiable
and hence unscientific and non-rational. Modernity is, you may say, a spoilsport;
if she cannot have it her way, she’ll not allow anyone to play at all!
The crisis
of modernity is most starkly encountered in the deconstruction movement that
pulls reason down from its transcendent, and empirically unassailable, throne
of universality and consigns it to a regime within history. Though it is not
dissimilar to the strategy that modern rationalists earlier applied against the
defenders of revelation, the application of the modernist method to the
modernist truth has caused much panic in their own ranks. Visibly terrified and
confounded by the devastation of their proud heritage which this assault has
caused, the champions of modern reason have come to the realization that reason
without a foundational text will always remain vulnerable to the nihilistic
gaze of historicizing vision, that the corrosive solvent of its relativising
epistemologies will always render the modernist truth as one among a
multiplicity of contingent and dated untruths. Little wonder that in a
last-ditch effort to defend its honour, one of the most outspoken champions of
modernism has offered an apology on its behalf which is, most strikingly,
nothing less than a panic-stricken plea for the adoption of a dogmatic and
fundamentalist line of defence! Reason should defend itself not on the ground
of logic and argument, but on that of the axiomatic – incontestable –
superiority of its self-confessedly foundational text!
Given the
realisation that the intellectual debates of our day have three, rather than
the customary two, interlocutors, the late Ernest Gellner classified these
primary epistemological orientations as those of: ‘1) Religious fundamentalism,
2) Relativism, 3) Enlightenment rationalism or rationalist fundamentalism.’ (Postmodernism,
Reason and Religion. London, 1992. p. 2.) What is remarkable about this
apology is that in fighting the ghost of ‘religious fundamentalism’, Gellner’s
rationalism can defend itself only as a dogma; that it can meet the challenge
of its putative adversary by a producing a veritable confessio! For
while Gellner is adamant that ‘there is no and can be no Revelation’ (84), he
also proclaims, without a trace of diffidence or irony, that the ‘epistemology
of Enlightenment’, as enshrined in the Kantian text, is absolute; that it is
‘transcendent twice over’, in ‘being beyond and outside a culture or any
culture, and being beyond and outside this world.’! (82). Needless to say that
this, perforce incontestable and unfalsifiable, claim about the a priori
authority of ‘one’s own text’ is exactly what rationalism dismisses as dogmatic
and arbitrary; it constitutes its principal argument against the claim of
transcendence on behalf of Revelation! Thus, when Gellner, striking a
manifestly sanctimonious posture, laments that ‘the notion of a Revelation
favouring and endorsing its own source’ legitimises itself by a ‘blatantly
circular argument’, he must be justifiably accused of inexcusable logical
incoherence and plain moral duplicity, for his own claim about the cognitive
authority of the Kantian text is as arbitrary and ‘blatantly circular’ as any
other. Far from proving the cognitive superiority of his own text, Gellner
merely lends support to the postmodernist claim that Enlightenment reason is
merely one of the contingent texts of history that seeks to establish, in the
name of universality and science, the regime of its own hegemonic discourse!
For all its
propagation of the (transcendent) ‘cognitive ethic’ of Kant, Gellner’s
desperate bid to confer Enlightenment reason a foundational text merely alerts
us to the confessional nature of modernism! The authority of reason is thus not
of a universal method but that of a transcendent text; for the method itself
acknowledges its submission to the text and derives its legitimacy from it!
More than anything, then, the ‘fundamentalist’ variety of rationalism is
symptomatic of the gravity of the crisis which afflicts modernity today and
which renders its discourse dogmatic but also self-defeating. It merits our
attention chiefly because it typifies an extremist attempt to preserve the
authority of modernity as a doctrine. However, by foreclosing the
possibility of revelation, it proclaims the truth of a closed, deterministic
universe and, as such, presents itself as an antithesis of religious faith.
Needless to say, the fundamentalist and doctrinaire form of modernism cannot be
reconciled with the dictates of Islamic faith and conscience and must therefore
be dismissed as a falsehood that denies and distorts the ultimately
transcendent truth of being, cosmos and man.
Fortunately,
the intellectual and moral reign of modernist imperialism is over. Modernity
has been chastised; it has been forced to become more modest in its
truth-claims. Today, even the most outspoken apologists of modernity
acknowledge,
-
that
the truth claims of Enlightenment reason are based on circular logic;
-
that
the notion of a sovereign, transcendent and ahistorical, subject whose reason
is the touchstone of all knowledge is extremely ‘problematic’;
-
that
the doctrine of progress is ‘paradoxical’;
-
that
the cult of freedom which renders all ‘taboos’ illegitimate and unnecessary is
inimical to the preservation of any kind of moral, and by extension social and
political, order;
-
that
the charter of the modern political community, nay any political community, is
always parochial and exclusive;
-
that
the universality of justice and rights is a metaphysical claim that cannot be
redeemed within a socio-political context;
-
indeed,
that the jurisdiction of both reason and meaning extends far beyond the cosmopolis
of modernity.
Whatever
its other promises or discomforts, the delegitimation of modernity at the
level of doctrine has undoubtedly opened a new intellectual space and
created a different agenda for a dialogue between modernists and others, within
the civilization of Islam as well as between Islam and the West. And, even if
so far the true potential of this intellectual opening has not been grasped by
any notable thinker on either side, the possibility of a future conciliation
and accommodation (in default of a genuine synthesis!) between modernism and
religious faith cannot be ruled out. The reasons for such a conjecture are not
hard to seek: any debate between two doctrines that each promises a total
salvation is not a dialogue; it is not a conversation that is open to the
possibility of mutual adjustment. The vehemence of modernity’s encounter with
Islam may be explained by the fact that the kind of modernism that was
forcefully introduced and dispensed throughout the Muslim world aspired to
being more than a mere apology for colonial rule; it presented itself as a
universal doctrine of liberation! It had the pretension of propounding a new,
scientific, cosmology and worldview, and by consequence, of rendering obsolete
all ‘traditional’ worldviews and religions, Islam included, on cognitive
grounds.
Modernism
thus legitimated itself as the epistemology of Reason and advanced
universal claims for its truth. Such was their faith in the power of reason and
science that modernists earlier could confidently declare that not only were
all the secrets of the physical universe within their grasp, but that a
‘universal science of man’, which eliminated the need for every kind of
subjective and emotional judgment in societal matters, was going to be the
logical end result of this enlightenment. Marxism, of course, was the most
extravagant and revolutionary example of the kind of scientific positivism,
which, in retrospect, appears so naïve and well-meaning and yet so
unintelligent and inexorable. Be that as it may, modernism in its heyday was a
supremely arrogant doctrine that claimed to provide a total account of ‘all
that is’, and a salvation - the enlightenment of humanity - that ensued from
the recognition of this all-inclusive truth. Little wonder, it did come in
conflict with Islam with its faith in Allah, the Transcendent God Who is the
ultimate source of all meaning and existence but Who, unlike the cosmos of
science, cannot be fully comprehended by the faculties of human intelligence.
For, God is forever ‘greater than’ any human effort to grasp His essence. He is
greater than any account of His being, any image, any metaphor, greater than
the cosmos and ‘all that is’ of the sensible and intelligible worlds. For
Muslims, any compromise with doctrinaire modernity puts this sense of the
Transcendent, and the existential commitment that flows from it, at peril.
It is for
similar reasons that any ‘dialogue’ between Islam and ‘Postmodernism’, between
a doctrine of Transcendence and Truth and an anti-doctrine that is
fundamentalist in its rejection of truth, universality and transcendence, is a
contradiction in terms. Not only would any ‘conversation’ between the
protagonists of these two irreconcilable metaphysical systems be morally and
intellectually pointless, it would also be, from the Islamic standpoint,
tactically counterproductive. For such a move will only be tantamount to
recognizing that postmodernism, a mere symptom of the crisis of modernism, is
the true philosophy of our times, that its insights afford an edifying and
emancipating account of our human condition today. No, only a chastised
modernism that is cognizant of the limits of reason to produce a cosmology and
a worldview, that knows of its complicity in the conception and execution of
the imperialist project but does not renounce the utopia of a common humanity,
can be a partner in the future dialogue with a universalist and
‘non-fundamentalist’ Islam.
Nor can
there be any questioning that for all its misgivings and censure of the
modernist project, Islam cannot turn its back on the vicegerency (khilafa)
of Adam, it cannot renounce the mandate of humanity to act as the agent of
Divine will. Thus, any vision of humanity, any philosophy of man, which seeks
to improve the human condition, which aspires to extending man’s significance
and role in the cosmos, must not be dismissed out of hand as being utopian. The
vocation of the Islamic intellect is not to reduce man to insignificance, which
paradoxically both modern science and philosophy do, but to guard him against
the lure of Prometheanism, to immunize him against the delusion of sovereignty.
Within the limits of man’s acceptance of a moral authority higher than his own
whims, meliorism as a philosophy and way of life is not necessarily
illegitimate. Accordingly, it is not enough that the Muslim thinker merely
recognizes the reversal of modernity’s epistemological stance and underscores
the aporias, dead ends, of its discourse. No, Muslim thought must not only
acquaint itself with the story of Enlightenment reason’s fall from grace, it
must also, without falling into the nihilistic abyss of ‘postmodernism’, bring
forth a conciliatory vision of a single humanity, and hence renew its
commitment to the moral unity of mankind. Whatever the perils of universalism
within the ideologies of culture and politics, its indispensable role in the
sustenance of a transcendent vision, the sine qua non of Islamic faith,
must not be devalued.
Given the
admission, within the courtroom of philosophy itself, that the ultimate meaning
of human effort and existence is beyond the arbitration of reason, that its
regime does not extend to the true home of man, it is but natural that any
dialogue between Islam and modernism cannot be consumed by the ‘contingent’
issues of governance, economy, globalisation and so forth. Thus, inasmuch as
there exists a compulsion, be it indigenous or foreign, to reduce Islam to
governance and identify its essence with a ‘state’, it must be resisted and
challenged. For it leads nowhere but to the moral and intellectual wasteland of
fundamentalism, to sterile polemics between modernism and Islamism that, paradoxically,
both inhabit an immanentist metaphysical universe. To assert this, however, is
not to deny either the legitimacy of such a debate, or to minimise the
desirability ideological struggle in matters of political actuality.
Nevertheless, a debate on these premises, on grounds of political and
civilizational loyalties, does not hold the promise of evolving into a joint
reflection on the moral state of the world today. For only an Islam that is
true to its calling of being the transcendent faith of humanity and a modernism
which is cognizant of its vocation as the doctrine of a method, can summon
sufficient humility and self-confidence to carry out such a dialogue on
universal morality. Needless to say that for the partisans of civilizational
purity, for those who identify Islam and modernity with given political
constituencies, such a universalising project holds little attraction.
As for those for whom the universality of Islam
and the moral unity of man are two sides of the same coin, there is a compelling
urgency to initiate a new Islamic discourse that is more detached from the
contingent concerns of Muslim polities and their putative others. Islam’s
non-negotiable commitment to the ultimately transcendent, and
trans-existential, nature of man and his mission in life would further demand
that the future Islamic discourse be fully alert to the immensity of being and
matter that science has revealed to us. The task of Islamic intellect would be
to not to disown this universe but to examine whether the world of science is a
meaningful world, whether it can be conceived as a cosmos, universe or nature
without the postulation of a transcendent other. Needless to say that any
cogent and meaningful metaphysics that has Islamic pretensions will have to
rescue science from scientism. The same goes for all other philosophies and
worldviews that identify man with genes and posit the annihilation of his being
within the world of history and time. Islam’s dialogue with modernity, then,
must have a philosophical and intellectual profile, and it must take full
cognisance of the metaphysics, ethics and teleology of the Qur’anic revelation.
All subsequent Islamic thought and reflection is premised on the accomplishment
of this task, as is the integration of various disciplines and perspectives,
philosophical, moral, utopian, even social and political, within a normative
Islamic discourse.