The Rumi Forum presented “Did Islam Miss Out on Modernity?” with Dr. Karim Douglas Crow.
Summary:
Did Islam Miss Out on Modernity?
Rumi Forum recently hosted Dr. Karim Douglas Crow. Dr. Crow is a principal research fellow at the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies in Malaysia. He performs policy-oriented research into the history of ideas, interfaith issues, and inter-Muslim dynamics. Dr. Crow specializes in the “civilizational implications of globalizing trends within Muslim societies, and their reciprocal relation with Euro-American culture. Dr. Crow earned his doctorate at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill.
Dr. Crow is with us today to address a popular concept that has been often discussed in the past decade and a half: the concept that the global Islamic community is not part of the modern world. This concept has been commonly discussed, especially in academic literature published since September 11, 2001. Included in this literature, Dr. Crow says, has been discussion that there is some kind of internally unresolved problem within the global Muslim community about whether or not they want to “engage with modern issues with the rest of the world”. Dr. Crow asserts that this discussion has its roots in imperialism and the imperialist tendency to question Asiatic and otherwise imperialized people’s rationality.
To clarify this assertion, Dr. Crow began by explaining the background of the roots of this discussion, clarifying that modernity as we currently understand it was established during the enlightenment. “Modernity” was largely constituted by a break with religious institutions in Europe (especially the Catholic church’s contentious relationship with rationality, and its uneasy relationship with intellectual development).
Thus, many in the West today view the association between Islam and politics in the Muslim world with pre-modernism. Dr. Crow contends that this association is in error.
The spread of Enlightenment ideals, he says, were accompanied by assumptions about non-European races—assumptions which were accepted largely without contradiction in Europe. Implicit in these assumptions was the idea that other races could not have achieved the advances that Europe had, and that there was something “unique” about the European mind.
With this context in mind, Dr. Crow described to us how current questions about Islam and modernity fit into the idea of modernity as dictated by Eurocentrist, enlightenment standards.
In response to early questions about Islam’s relationship with modernity, Dr. Crow notes that some Muslim thinkers and community leaders, for whom this question was an issue in the past, addressed Islam and modernization through the perception of an inferiority complex that was imposed upon them by Eurocentric norms of modernity and progress. There was a “washing off effect”, he claims, that caused some thinkers to believe that Europe did indeed possess a particularly scientific worldview and a particularly rational outlook. These thinkers believed that the way to progress societally was to adopt the “scientific worldview” of Europe, thus rejecting some paradigms that had persisted in their societies pre-Enlightenment. This phenomenon created the sense in younger, Westernized Muslim intellectuals that the Islamic world needed to “catch up” to the West’s social and political progress.
Currently, many Western academics and politicians question: why hasn’t Islam developed its own form of modernity? Because it is known that Islamic and European philosophical thinking is derived from the same origin, Western academics question why Islam has not developed secularly, as the West has.
Dr. Crow argues that the positioning of the West as ‘modern’ and the Muslim world as ‘pre-modern’ is evidence of a line of thinking that privileges Western definitions of modern society. This line of thinking includes the idea that Europe is the center of economic progress and activity, and that individualism, capitalism, and reason defined in relation to these ideas are the only values that lead to a modern society. Dr. Crow emphasized to the audience that this line of thinking was aggressively spread through European colonialism. This dominance, both intellectually and economically, is a phenomenon made possible only through European exploitation of resources, such as silver bullion, from other lands.
Here, Dr. Crow made a much needed clarification: being ‘modern’ should not be a phenomenon defined only by Europe. Those living in the Muslim world, and in other non-western contexts, are not less modern, because they, too, live in the modern age. Dr. Crow here emphasizes a relativism that legitimizes a multitude of experiences of modernism and is not constrained to modernism solely as defined by the West. The question is does Muslim society have to achieve the type of modernity that has characterized Europe, or can they pursue their own type of it? As Dr. Crow says, “there is a notion that Muslim societies have “failed to develop and accentuate the rational legacy within their own traditions”.
He feels that the main issue is the Eurocentrism of rationality. European nations assume that in order for the Islamic world to join modernity, that includes them embracing ‘secularization’ and reconfiguring religion’s role in their society. The thing they fail to realize here is that religion in regions like the Middle East is not going to go away. These nations will not be joining modernity in the fashion that European nations did, and many questions surrounding Islam’s compatibility with modernity, posed by Western academics, ignore this fact.
Bios:
Dr. Karim Douglas Crow, Principal Research Fellow at the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies–Malaysia where he performs policy-oriented research into history of ideas, inter-faith issues, and intra-Muslim dynamics. His competence includes civilizational implications of globalizing trends within Muslim societies and their reciprocal relation with Euro-American cultures. He earned his Doctorate cum laude from The Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Montreal. For over fifteen years in North America (1981–1997) he taught Arabic Language & Literature and Islamic disciplines at: Columbia University, New York University, Fordham University, The University of Virginia, and University of Maryland. He served in Malaysia as Professor of Islamic Thought at the International Institute of Islamic Thought & Civilisation (1999–2005); and in Singapore at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (2006–2008).
Moderator:
Prof. Clare Wilde is a Professorial Lecturer at Georgetown’s Department of Theology, where she has taught since 2005. She earned her Licentiate in Arabic and Islamic Studies from PISAI (Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam) in Rome in 1998, and is writing her dissertation (The Qur’an in Early Christian Arabic Texts) under the directorship of Sidney Griffith at The Catholic University of America. From 2000-2006, she served as editorial assistant for Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, and has published articles on the intersection of Islam and Syriac and Arabic Christianity.