Interviewer: May I just for a point of clarity for my thinking. So would you be defining modernity more in terms of European dominance in political systems in financial systems? Or would you be touching on modernity also as technological development? Or what about hierarchical structures? Cause if you think of Islam and especially Latin Christendom, the extent to which you had a very strong hierarchy of clergy in the religious structure in Europe Latin and particularly Latin Christendom. The extent to which in Islam you had at least in my understanding a far more diffused system of authority. There’s a quote from Alexis [Tofto] which I don’t know if people are familiar with that touched, that sort of touches on this. The extent to which [Tofto] is accurate in what he says about Christianity or what he says about Islam is a matter of discussion. But Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Quran not religious doctrines only but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The gospels on the other hand deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone among a thousand reasons is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold it’s power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages as in all others. And that was in 1840 in Democracy in America. So when you’re conceptualization of modernity, is it this European dominance of the world that combines a number of different factors? Or is it more of a philosophical mindset that is not particular to Europe?

Karim: It’s both of course but there’s no gain saying that what we understand as modernity started in Europe and therefore it has a specific root; social and economic and political roots in European experience. Not to say that it’s uniquely European because all of us are modern. [IB] is a modern phenomenon. Even peasants in Indonesia are part of the modern world and live a modern existence. The idea that somehow modernity has still yet to be achieved by other peoples is wrong in the sense that it’s assuming that there is only one form of modernity. There are many ways to be modern; they are not all the same. The question is Muslim societies are achieving their own form of modernity; whether it has to be the modernity that Euro-American societies assume to be the one pattern which includes a marked secularization and a retreat of religion from the public sphere and a social and economics pattern that enforces a certain type of social ethos which is undermining the family as an extended institution. And ethical values that people cherished for millennia but which now seem to have no utility. And also the financialization of society with its insidious way of transforming the relations that people have with material objects and with material values. These have all become so widespread and taken for granted. All so called developing countries are basically furthering the Euro-American model of modernity while parts of their own society are struggling to achieve of a form of modern existence which would have room for aspects of their own traditional culture and religion and to speak world view if you want to call it philosophy. What I’m really interested in though is the role that rationality plays in this. Because the assumption for example that Muslim societies are not signing up to the modernity project as Cardinal Newhouse said; I think he’s passed away. And this also popular view in Europe that Europe is threatened to become EuroArabia or something because of the large number of Muslim immigrants living and working in Europe whose values are somehow imimicable or empathetical to Euro American modern social understanding of what life should be and how society is organized. These raise deep issues which tie in with much older embedded perceptions of the other; the Moslems beating at the gates of Europe. The uneasy feeling that Islam is somehow more wedded to irrational and violent and fanatic expressions than modern civilized people in the west are.

I recall the speech by Pope Benedict in Regensburg a few years ago which evoked these deeply embedded perceptions and assumptions. And then the problem of course of the global war on terror which is an open ended enterprise; the endless war and which somehow assumes that there has to be another civilizationally strategically and also religiously if you will at least from the point of view of some Christians in the West, evangelicals who have a Manichean vision of existence. So the notion that somehow Muslims failed to develop and accentuate the rational legacy within their own tradition derived in large part from the [Hellenic] sciences which they had translated, the philosophical enterprise and also encouraged by various rationalist disciplines which are indigenous to Islam including aspects of theology and ethical thinking and a form of mysticism which developed in a very deep metaphysical direction and which combined aspects of rationale and philosophical interests with a profound spiritual practice usually referred to as Hekima, a theosophical approach to philosophy or [Irfan] form of [nosis] and which is still very much alive in countries like Iran.

Hans Kung published a book recently: Islam Past Present and Future, the third in his trilogy about the monotheistic faiths. And it’s quite popular and it’s been well received but it’s built on an assumption that the three monotheistic prophetic revealed traditions have gone through a series of paradigm changes or shifts or world views or assumptions about their role in history. And that all three are now faced with a final paradigm shift which he calls post modern which implies a sort of acceptance that there is a secular framework in which people of faith have to make an adjustment or come to terms with and that the older exclusivist and mono [valiant] ways of looking at truths are no longer valid. People can no longer insist on the exclusive truth claim of their on monotheistic faith against others which leads to conflict and irreconcilable differences but rather they has to be an acceptance of relativism, some form of value pluralism and adjustment to the demands of modernity. I’m thinking a Catholic thinker like Charles Taylor here in the United States is the eminent example of this type of trend in religious thinking, Hans Kung also in his view of the three religions, a global ethic paradigm which Hans Kung promotes, and even in many circles of progressive and a liberal Muslim thinking who are positive sort of shift away from a faith based world view and in embrace of a more rationalist basically Greco-Hellenic understanding of the role of reason and science with faith. So it becomes relegating faith to a situation where it has to be one of several claimants to finality and absolute certainty.