Islam and the Enlightenment Feature by Neil Davidson, March 2006
The intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th century that became known as the Enlightenment helped a new class to come to power in Europe. Neil Davidson asks why the more advanced civilisations of the Islamic world did not develop a similar movement of their own. In the current Western controversy over Islam, one theme recurs with increasing predictability. Many writers are prepared to acknowledge Muslim cultural and scientific achievements, but always with the caveat that Islamic civilisation never experienced an equivalent to the Enlightenment. "Islam never had to go through a prolonged period of critically examining the validity of its spiritual vision, as the West did during the 18th century," writes the historian Louis Dupre. "Islamic culture has, of course, known its own crisis... yet it was never forced to question its traditional worldview." The same view has also been expressed by individuals who were originally from Muslim backgrounds but have subsequently abandoned their religious beliefs. Salman Rushdie has recently argued that Islam requires "not so much a reformation... as an Enlightenment". Muslims have responded in different ways to the claim that their religion has never produced an Enlightenment. Ziauddin Sardar has criticised it in the New Statesman on two grounds. On the one hand, "It assumes that 'Islam' and 'Enlightenment' have nothing to do with each other - as if the European Enlightenment emerged out of nothing, without appropriating Islamic thought and learning." On the other, "It betrays an ignorance of postmodern critique that has exposed Enlightenment thought as Eurocentric hot air." So Islamic thought was responsible for the Enlightenment but the Enlightenment was intellectually worthless. This is not, perhaps, the most effective way of highlighting the positive qualities of Islamic thought. Sardar's incoherence is possibly the result of his own critical attitude towards Islamism. More mainstream Muslim thinkers generally take one of two more positions. full: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9680 -- www.marxmail.org
