ABSTRACT
This book is about the role and place of Islam in modern Muslim societies. It covers a historical period that begins around 1800 and continues to the present day. Much of the analysis, however, focuses on developments that date from the mid-twentieth century. An edited work, with a range of contributors from diff erent academic fi elds of study, the book lacks an overarching theory of modernity or Islam’s relation to it. But modernity and modernization are at the heart of each chapter, and a few words about their meaning and impact will set the stage for what is to come. Modernity can be understood simply as a period of time during which a series of dramatic social, economic, and cultural transformations took place. The period, however, is not the same for every region and people around the world. In Europe, where modernity and the benefi ts that fl owed from it fi rst emerged, the transformations began, more or less, in the seventeenth century. In the Muslim world, as noted above, the story began later. Modernization constitutes the processes by which societies and peoples become modern. Being modern is often associated with being aware, or self-conscious, of the changes that are occurring in society and of actively engaging with these changes. The condition of being modern, then, as one scholar has noted, is “an attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it” (Berman 1988: 5).
