Muslims shouldn't be afraid of modernity

Every religion is crazy in its own peculiar ways. It's difficult for me to decide which deserves to win the Looniest of Them All award.

Christianity deserves consideration for its "born of a virgin" and "walked on water" weirdnesses (among others). Judaism's rituals and requirements are beyond strange (such as the Sabbath Feature on our oven). Hindus are into all kinds of bizarre stuff, including Tantric sexual fluid transactions.

But whenever I read about how scared Muslims are of the modern world, I'm struck by how dangerously crazy this attitude is.

After all, Islam is the controlling force in many important nations. When a large portion of humanity is stuck in a fondness for the past, it's tough for Muslim cultures to make much progress.

This leaves them as outliers in our increasingly global civilization, cursing the Western world for leaving behind an Islamic fantasy of how great things were in the Middle Ages when organized religion ruled the roost.

I bemoaned Muslim's fear of modernity on my other blog back in 2004, when I told the tale of how I labored hard and long on a paper that was submitted to a "Traditionalist" journal whose editor was a fan of Fritjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and other bashers of modern times -- when God took a well-deserved back seat to science.

And the more I learned about Traditionalism, the more I became wary of this approach to religion and spirituality (the intellectually voracious can read an extensive critique by a Muslim here; I agree with his basic points about Traditionalism, but disagree that Islam is the one true religion). For example, Traditionalists have a strange fondness for medieval times, when the Church ruled every aspect of society.

Since Traditionalism has a close connection to Sufism, and thus to Islam, any philosophy that longs for the good old days when fundamentalist religion ruled the cultural roost has to be looked at with a wary eye after 9/11/2001. Especially after 11/2/2004, because the American religious right would exchange hearty high-fives with most of the tenets of Traditionalism—leaving aside the minor detail of whether Islam or Christianity is the traditional religion that we bow down to.

Anyway, the essay wasn’t at all what “Sacred Web” wanted, as I ended up being much more supportive of science than the editor had anticipated. That was rejection #1. I then sent a shorter version of the essay off to “Science and Spirit” magazine, figuring that my title was right up their alley. That was rejection #2.

So now I say, screw this one at a time rejection business, I’ll put the piece up on the Internet for everyone in the whole world to ignore simultaneously.

Heck, I'll do it again, six years later.
Download Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing

I was reminded of this strange Islamic modernity sucks! attitude when I came across an essay by Seyved Hossein Nasr this morning. "We and You -- Let Us Meet in God's Love" was submitted to the Catholic-Muslim Forum held at the Vatican in 2008.
Download We and You -- Let Us Meet in God's Love

It has a warm and fuzzy ecumenical title, and tries to argue that Islam and Christianity have a lot in common, so they should get along. But Nasr lapses into his fear of modernity, which pretty much destroys his thesis that we're all one big happy world family.

There are also significant differences between Islam and Christianity due to their very different encounters with modernism and secularism. Obviously in dealing with Christianity today, we Muslims are not confronted with St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and the builders of the Cologne Cathedral, however real these dimensions of traditional Western Christianity might still be.

Rather, we face a Christianity that bears the deep wounds of five centuries of battle with forces opposed to religion, from the secular humanism and skepticism of the Renaissance to the materialism associated with the 17th century Scientific Revolution and the subsequent secularization of the cosmos to the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, to the historicism and evolutionism of the 19th century to the current post-modern critique of religious texts and the virulent atheistic attacks being made recently in the West against religion as such.

...Of course there are those in the West who claim that the problem is precisely that Islam did not experience in depth modernism and especially the Enlightenment to which Muslims would respond, thank God that this did not happen to us.

Wow.

What must be remembered is that these Dark Ages-adoring thoughts are coming from a moderate Muslim, not an extremist. Nasr longs for the not-so-good old days when a fundamentalist religiosity permeated every aspect of society and culture, preventing the free expression of ideas and open scientific study of nature's laws.

In my "Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing" essay, I wrote:

William Quinn, in his book The Only Tradition, discusses what he considers to be the last truly “traditional” culture, medieval Christendom. Maybe I’m missing something, but this description of the times doesn’t strike me as particularly appealing, or even genuinely spiritual:

The cultural norm was to imbue and perceive in the most trivial and seemingly insignificant task a link to the sacred whole, "God’s plan," thus transforming that task into something significant of the great (hieratic) chain of being (and becoming). Barbara Tuchman writes that "Christianity was the matrix of medieval life: even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg ‘during the time you can say a Miserere.’" It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter.

This bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the vision of Christian fundamentalists in the United States, who write frequent letters to my local newspaper calling for a return to the “values on which this country was founded” (translation: they want everyone to believe just the way they do, and government should make sure that those beliefs become the law of the land).

I agree, with Wilber, that while modernity has created many problems, it also has brought many benefits: democracy, scientific advances, the end of slavery, freedom of artistic expression. How many readers truly would prefer to live in 12th century France (as a serf, not a noble) rather than 20th century America, Canada, England, or any other modern culture?

Well, Seyyed Hossein Nasr apparently would, along with many -- hopefully not most -- of his fellow Muslims.

Until they decide to join modern times, it's going to be difficult for Islam to fit in with the world as it is, most of which, thankfully, is a lot different from the religion-dominated world backward-looking Muslims reverence.

Comments

[Willie R.]

Better watch out, Brian. The slightest insult involving Muslims, Mohammed, or the Koran gets you on the same list as Salman Rushdie - your head is to be separated from your torso at the first opportunity.

Seventy-odd virgins await your attention!

[Dogribb]

I think the main thrust against modernity is simple envy and rationalization.They place God above all that is material as a trump card to modernity.Prevents them from accepting the serious lacks that their cultures possess."Your reward is in heaven"is good enough for them.

[jon weiss]

Which part of the Muslim world are we talking about? Certainly not Dubai.

To prefer traditional religious ideas, and understanding is common and may have little to do with other aspects of modernity.

[Sunny Jay]

I think it is important to consider how geographical and historical backgrounds can influence the trend and eventual crystalization a religion can take. When a man wants to start a movement and embark on a crusade; the notion of having God on one's side is a powerful incentive to sway the crowd and give the leader(in this case Mohammed) a sense of higher purpose. Alot of people have died because of Islam and the other world religions are just as guilty. Is it the religion or is it the followers who let their religon down? We all know the answer to this question deep down. I often wonder; if God is so powerful and all mighty; why does he need people to fight in His name? Surely, he is self sufficient and independant.
Anyway, the rigidity of the Quran and it's message has been conserved for many years. Perhaps the Mulllah's and scholars fear that a moderate and modernized version of teh Quran could lead to a religion that becomes mocked in the future for lacking any real back-bone...this is what most muslims feel about Christianity deep down....a religion that lost its way. It's an interesting subject. Islam depends on discipline as one of the cornerstones of it's foundations and it is blasphemy to question and laugh at certain aspects of that religion regardless of how "out of touch with reality" it may be. I really can't envisage a muslim comedian making jokes about the Quran and Mohammed. They will make fun of terrorism but in the Quran it does state that one should terrorise the non-believers. I'm sure the Christian Crusades were fuelled with similar motto's. The problem is; muslims who live in this country have the best of both worlds i.e. they can go to the mosque, preach to their friends and work collegues about how important it is to be a good muslim and then later on...those same muslims eye up another man's girl and all that goes out of the window. Is this hypocracy? Would it be easier to tolerate if the muslim wasn't such a preacher too? Probably; but it is a fundamental part of Islam to spread the last testament of God and revolutionise the world into Islamic Law. That would mean no more bacon sandwiches, no more gin and tonic and no late night poker for me! My good friend who is a muslim told me off for playing poker as it is gambling but he advised me to dabble in shares and stocks. He was also willing to have sex outside wedlock with a white girl but would only marry a muslim girl who is a virgin. That is as moderate as it will ever get I'm afraid....adaptation to Western society with an eventual relapse back to being good ole Ali.

[Me]

Well, modernity DOES suck...