ABSTRACT
At the end of this journey into Islam’s predicament with cultural modernity there are some basic conclusions to be drawn. The journey has been made in a number of steps and has also included some propositions for religious reform and innovative cultural change. It is a part of this chapter on conclusions and future prospects to review the Islamic responses to the current challenges and the predicament with cultural modernity. Among these responses one finds, earlier, Wahhabism and neo-Salafism and today, Islamism. These are religious ideologies that deny the existence of the current issue altogether. Their supporters admit a “minha/crisis” and prescribe the solution of a return to pure tradition based on the revealed, holy scripture. This prescription is believed to be the only remedy for Muslims. In contrast to the neo-Salafist orthodoxy and to the Islamist invention of tradition, the response of Islamic conformism does not overlook the challenge and seeks to accommodate it. However, the accommodation that the conformists envision is not a real remedy, because it fails to engage in what I earlier termed “cultural accommodation of social change.”1 This formula summarizes my insights on the issue. By this formula I mean that in an interplay between social and cultural change it can be expected that values, norms, and the related view of the world will also change. This is needed to allow a balance between these two aspects of the process of change. It is not an essentialization to state that some Islamic values are resistant to change because Muslims believe that they emanate from God, are thus immutable, and ought never to be subjected to change. Those Muslims who are committed to this belief resist cultural adjustment and admit no process of cultural accommodation to social change. In leaving aside those Muslims who are resistant to cultural change I turn to
the Islamic conformists who are willing to adjust, but I see, however, that they restrict their efforts to an ad hoc adjustment that they pursue in a very pragmatic manner. Islamic modernism is another important response, for which I have coined the term “Islamic dream/or illusion of semi-modernity.”2 For a proper understanding of this issue the reader is reminded of the distinctions made in the Introduction and in Chapter 1. At issue is a differentiation between institutional and cultural modernity, which is basic among these distinctions. The first part of modernity – i.e. the institutional one – is based on modern science
and technology and on the instruments they produce. Institutional modernity relates also to power. The other part of modernity is cultural, as outlined in line with the work of Jürgen Habermas. Cultural modernity relates to values, worldviews, and to their substance rooted in “the principle of subjectivity.”3 This substance can be made easier to comprehend by calling it individuation or an individualism based on the recognition of human abilities to recognize the world and to change it. This is the meaning of Max Weber’s “Entzauberung/disenchantment” of the world, repeatedly referred to as an intellectual guide for the present book. In the following conclusions I shall draw together the findings of the foregoing chapters with the focus on what I term the “Islamic dream of semi-modernity” as the contemporary Islamic exit strategy for the predicament with modernity. This strategy is not another modernity; it is a defensive culture.
