Islamic Modernism In The West Essay

Islamic Modernism in the West: The Reoccurrence of Andalusian Intellectual Community in the Time of Post-Modernity The notion of the compatibility of Islam and modernity has been widely debated issue in sociology in the last decades because modernity is characterized as the emergence of new particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes that reject or revise many religious traditions in various ways. Thus, it appeared as phenomenon of transition from the traditional world to the modern by means of social differentiation, epistemological transformation, and functional specialization on a large scale. It has also emerged by the amalgam of new practices and institutional forms such as science, technology, industrial production, urbanization, and …show more content…
Islam in western countries has very different circumstances form those in countries where Islam is the majority religion. Islam in these countries is a minority in a pluralistic and secularized context. Islam is also internally pluralistic, as it reproduces in itself different cultural national, theological, and juridical interpretations of Islam, to a degree that is hardly observable in Muslim majority countries and in other countries where the presence of Islam is not the result of a recent migration process (Allievi 2014:428). These situations exposed them to a transformative dialectical dialogue with modernity, an universal (at the same time local) understanding of Islam and more sophisticated (nuanced) critique of modernity in its birthplace (Zaidi 2011:59). Finally, being and living in the west for a long time have deeply affected the vision and methods of western Muslim intellectuals, and they genuinely experienced the realities of the most powerful countries of globalizing world. They also significantly benefited from the pluralistic and free intellectual religious market of western societies as well as the lack of …show more content…
Yet they also know that one reason for the failure of early modernization efforts has been that their discourse is not rooted in indigenous popular cultures and hence is inaccessible to most Muslim populations who are still attached to traditional and religious values. They also condemn both the Arab-Islamic regimes that have instrumentalized religion to serve their political purpose, and the popular islamists who have ideolgized it for having undermined Islam and contributed to Muslim societies’ stagnation. Western Muslims have sought a more nuanced approach to the relationship between modernity and their indigenous cultures and systems of values. Their method is not merely picking and randomly synthesizing elements of their own cultures and modernity. On the contrary, they do assess their own culture in the light of modernity; but they also take a critical approach to modernity and its outcomes. In their critique of aspects of modernity, they draw heavily on the ideas of Western critics of modernity, or at least versions of modernity’s critiques including postmodernist