Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam

Abstract

The two editors of this volume have successfully pooled their expertise in sociology, politics, and modern Islam to bring together a cogent and wellorganized reader of key texts depicting the self-statements of what may be tentatively called Islamic “modernism” and “fundamentalism.” The selection of 34 articles and treatises (18 on modernism, 16 on fundamentalism) is preceded by a scholarly introduction that also contains short biographies of the writers represented in this volume. For the purpose of organizing this anthology, the editors chose to highlight what they describe as two “episodes” in modern Islam: the powerful wave of Islamic modernism that arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries, and the perhaps more powerful wave of Islamic fundamentalism that arose from the 1930s onward. This semi-chronological division of two sociocultural and ideological waves is to be taken not as a representation of rigid categories, but merely as an heuristic devise meant to focus the reader’s attention on the contrasts and differences between them. The editors are aware that the designations “modernism” and “fundamentalism” are ideal types, that the distinction between them begins to weaken as one closely examines their particular and concrete manifestations, and that one type may develop traits or characteristics of the other, given appropriate social circumstances. As ideal types, however, the editors believe that Islamic modernism and fundamentalism may be identified on the basis of positions taken by specific intellectuals or ideologues on five central and “historically significant” issues: jurisprudence, politics, western civilization, gender, and lifestyle. Consequently, these are the categories according to which they ...