REVIEW: The Islamic Enlightnment

The Islamic Enlightenment
Genre: Religious, non fiction,
            History
Publisher: Liverlight
Source: Penguin Random House
Rating: 4/5


An interesting recreation of Islam's modernization over the past few centuries, focused specifically on three major sites of change in Iran, Turkey and Egypt. This is a standard intellectual history, and charts the lives of most of the well-known Islamic thinkers of this period (Afghani, Abduh, Kemal, Tahtawi, Ale Ahmad etc.), while also recounting the works of a few other lesser-known writers and activists. De Bellaigue's basic contention is that Islam as we know it today has been radically and irrevocably shaped by the forces of modernity. Even ferociously "anti-modern" approaches to religion are colored by their interaction with the thing they are rejecting. Islamism is not a rejection of modernity as much as an articulation of a different way of being modern, one that attempts to take inspiration and guidance from the past. Like quantum physics once something is being observed its own behaviors necessarily change, and Islam's interplay with Enlightenment ideas once it encountered them is no different.


The book seems to have been intended as a rebuttal to the asinine claim made by some pop intellectuals that Islam is not modern and needs to be confronted by modern ideas. It generally accomplishes this, and is thus worthwhile for people seeking to understand contemporary Islamic thought and practice around the world - though I regret that he did not include South Asia. De Bellaigue does a good job of crafting a coherent narrative that enriches ones understanding of contemporary political events in many Muslim countries, places that are far from being mired in ancient ideas today, for better and worse.


The book demonstrates that Muslim countries have adopted and still desire enlightenment even when some of them are governed by Islamic movements. Turkey, Iran and Egypt are profiled before WW1 to the present. 

If Islam engaged so successfully with modernity until the First World War, why since then has reactionary revivalism been able to impose itself on ever larger swathes of the Muslim world?

The rise of Islamism is a blowback from the Islamic Enlightenment – a facet, however detestable, of modernity itself.

Although Muslims were not the authors of the achievements that we now associate with the Enlightenment. No Istanbul blacksmith discovered movable type. No Muslim Voltaire sniped at the clerics by the Nile. But there is a great difference between accepting that Muslim civilization did not initiate the Enlightenment and saying that it did not accept its findings or eat of its fruit. This is a big claim to make. It means that Muslims are either congenitally barred or – even worse – have deliberately cut themselves off from experiences that many consider being universal. It means that the lands of Islam have remained aloof from science, democracy and the principle of equality. It is a claim that is often heard in today’s divided, rebarbative, edgy world, and it is nonsense.


Thank you to Penguin Books for sending me a review copy of this !