Has Islam Missed Its Enlightenment?

Abstract

Reinforced by 9/11, Muslims find themselves increasingly accused of having failed their Enlightenment. The implication is that Islam, being a pre-Enlightenment religion, is archaically a-rational. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a partially unrepeatable European phenomenon (an overdue emancipation from stifling church domination). Part of its import was of a general nature. Its overall rule of rationality promoted a supreme confidence in human reasoning (humanity as the mea­sure of all things), rejection of revelatory religion and meta­physics, separation of Church and State (secularism), belief in a noninterventionjst Deity and the law of nature, extreme "scien­tific" materialism, and the expectation of unlimited "progress." While some of its fruits were positive (e.g., the rule of law, lib­eral democracy, and market economy), other elements led to dis­aster after Deism gave way to a pervasive agnosticism and athe­ism in the runeteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., colonialism, two world wars, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons, and fascism. !slam may be pre-Enlightenment, but it is an enlightened religion. Muslims never conceived of a categorical conflict between science and religion or religion and philosophy.