Marshall Hodgson. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History
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io Modernity and the Islamic heritage 237
still logical and systematic observation which made possible inductive
science. Hence the finality of his prophecy, for now the human mind
was able to mature to the point where further revelation would no
longer be necessary to help it along in its historical growth. Iqbal tried to
show this partly in terms of the Quran
itself,
with its appeals to the
observation of nature and its relative freedom from myth, ritual, and
supernaturalism; but chiefly in terms of novel forms of thinking which
he thought he saw in various Muslim philosophers and scientists, forms
which would account for the marked difference in tone between the
scientific thought of the ancient Greeks and that which the Latin West
took over from the Muslim Arabs, and from which developed modern
science. The scientific implications of the new principle inherent in Mu-
hammad's revelation took time to be developed in human minds; hence
the Muslims themselves came to see it only gradually. They had, how-
ever, worked out its essential features, on the level both of theology and
of practical science, when the Occident, after its fertilization by transla-
tions from the Arabic, took over the task from them and moved ahead
with spectacular rapidity. The whole of Modernity, with its sense of
technical rationality, has been its fruit.
But it was no accident, Iqbal could maintain, that it was non-Muslims
who most rapidly developed this germinal principle of Islam. For an-
other aspect of Muhammad's revelation - which the Occident did not
however, accept - had been equally important. This was the principle of
historical continuity in the new divinely-founded and world-embracing
community - a community which had not only produced the first intima-
tions of modern science but had spread itself unprecedentedly over the
eastern hemisphere, creating a trans-national network of social institu-
tions founded on a strong sense of egalitarian justice. The finality of
prophecy would itself endure as the permanent foundation, grounded
in historical actuality, of all aspects of future human life. That is, Islam
contained both a principle of movement - which, detached by the West,
had produced Modern science - and also a principle of continuity; the
two principles must ideally be in balance with each other. At one stage of
the development of the principle of movement, it may have required a
community less perfectly rooted in the divine ultimate to develop this
one principle with full rapidity, unchecked by the other. Eventually,
however, the community that is more truly divinely rooted must take
over again and restore balance in the development. He could hope this
would come just in time (he was writing after the First World War),
before the one-sidedly materialistic and rootless West destroyed itself
and the whole world too.
238 II Islam in a global context
For Iqbal, then, Islam
was not
simply
a
code
of
ever-dwindling range
of relevance,
but
the enduring resource
of
an evolving historical commu-
nity, constantly
to be
worked
out
anew
in
detail,
yet
retaining
its
integ-
rity
in
richly historical terms. This community must
in the
end, after
the
moral bankruptcy
of the
West, inherit
the
whole world, including
the
Modernity which
it had
initiated.
This
was a
beautiful
and
even persuasive theory,
and no
more false
to
history than the major theories which have inspired the broader-visioned
historical actions
of
modern Western peoples.
Yet it is
after
all
false
to
history,
as are so
many Western theories.
It is not
merely that Iqbal,
being western-trained, sees history
(as do the
Western theorists) chiefly
in terms
of the
Mediterranean regions (though emphasizing
the
Middle
East rather than Western Europe)
and
ignores
the
other major cultural
centers
and the
broader historical processes that embrace them all. Deci-
sive
is the
fact that
his
evaluation
of the
historical role
of
Islam
(and
therefore
of its
potentialities
vis-a-vis
the
"rootlessness"
of the
West will
not stand
up
under detailed factual criticism.
He
does
not in
fact show
that Islam carries
a
more durable historical moral tradition than does
the
West.
In
the
Middle Ages, this need
not
have mattered overmuch.
But a
creative cultural revival cannot now be founded
on
intellectual specious-
ness.
The
very speed
of
historical change must make
out of
date
the
unexpressed conventions
and
barely balanced compromises
on
which
any such scheme
is
based. Accordingly, Iqbal's attempted formulation of
the solution falls before
the too
rapid surge
of
history by the same test
as
in
the
case
of
Muhammad Abduh. Despite themselves,
his
followers
must
end up,
most
of
them, carving
a
niche
for
Islam within
a
world
formed
by
Modernity, rather than integrating Modernity into
a
more
fundamental Islam.
In
time,
as
more
and
more details associated with
the Islamic tradition must give way, this threatens
to
again reduce Islam
to
a
vague emblem
of
goodness.
Some groups have taken
the
approach outlined
by
Iqbal more seri-
ously than
is
common, notably
the
followers
of
Mawdudi
in
India
and
Pakistan. They have tried
to
work
out a
system
of
modern industrial life
as perhaps
it
might have been
if
informed
by a
Medieval Muslim moral-
ity rather than grounded
in
Medieval Occidental institutions. They wish
to achieve capital investment without exploitative interest
by
taking
as
their point
of
departure
the
Medieval
waqf,
the
pious foundation,
or the
Medieval partnership rules; they wish
to
take advantage
of the
intrica-
cies
of a
modern legal structure without
the
biased pleading
of
hired
io Modernity and the Islamic heritage 239
lawyers, by taking as their point of departure the Medieval mufti, the
impartial legal adviser to the judge.
It is the increased awareness of the individual's historical potentialities
that encourages Mawdudi to propound his reforms in such radical
terms.
In Indian Islam he has a long line of predecessors, of whom he is
fully conscious, who have worked to establish the Islamic social ideals in
the place of a strikingly unideal reality. Ahmad Sirhindi for instance, was
stirred especially by the spectacle of a Muslim monarch, Akbar, refusing
to give even lip-service to the ideal of an Islamic state; but - like other
Sufis (many of whom refused to be tainted by any dealings with any
Muslim ruler) - his basic concern was with the drastic departure of all
Muslim military rulers from the principles of equality and of humane
justice which the Muslims' sharia inculcates. Shah Wali Allah, while
concerned in particular at the decline of even outward signs of Muslim
power in India at the end of the eighteenth century, was more fundamen-
tally concerned to see established - by means of Muslim rule - the
healthy social order which he felt Islam was ideally designed to bring
about. In each case, their idea of perfect justice was extremely remote
from the reality they saw around them - on the whole, perhaps as re-
mote as in the time of Mawdudi.
But the concrete reforms they offered were in each case much less
trenchant and less ambitious than Mawdudi's proposals. The most they
could look to in practice was the restoration of the Muslim law in those
aspects of life traditionally reserved for it, and a greater purity of the
ruler's application of his still arbitrary power. Mawdudi's movement has
called for a genuinely fundamental reappraisal of all the institutions of
society, including the constitution of the state. For in Mawdudi's time
the pace of history has put all these things vividly into question; the new
entity of Pakistan has moved from basic law to basic law; the concerned
individual has an obvious leverage in attempting to make even drastic
changes. Because of the acceleration of history, Mawdudi can - and
must - aim much higher than his predecessors.
Yet, at the same time, Mawdudi's concrete results have so far been still
less adequate than what was accomplished by Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah
Wali Allah. The very pressure of historical change which makes it rele-
vant to propose a new sort of state constitution may make it futile to try
to base it on Islam. Mawdudi and his friends - well trained in Islam as
they are - have shown typically little sophisticated awareness of the
actualities of the modern world. Perhaps their inventions might show
some organic continuity with the Muslim law; but they have yet, I be-
240 II Islam in a global context
lieve,
to
show
how
they may
be
developed
in
practice
out of
the world-
wide network
of
Modern institutions. More precisely, one cannot picture
an attempt
to
impose them seriously without inducing
so
drastic
a
revo-
lution
as to
shatter
(as
would Communism)
any
historical continuity
with older Islam, shattering
it
even more completely than continuity
with what the modern West created. For the Medieval Islamic morality
is
not,
in
such matters, so fundamentally different from the Medieval Chris-
tian morality which
was in
fact explicitly rejected
in the
evolution
of
Modern institutions; how should
it
prove more viable than did the Chris-
tian morality?
As yet, the
most evident practical consequence
of
Maw-
dudi's efforts
had
appeared
in
riots against alleged heretics. This
is
surely
not so
much Mawdudi's fault
as the
fault
of the
same historical
tensions which made possible
his
high aims.
The
frustration of
the concerned
Muslim
Islam, meanwhile, without discovering
a
clearly viable basis
for
provid-
ing full spiritual roots
for the
rapidly evolving societies
of the
future,
continues
to
remain vigorous
as the one
focus
for
imaginative
self-
identification
in the
perspective
of the
past.
It is
strong, even violently
strong,
as a
principle
of
social allegiance
and as
rallying point
of
histori-
cal consciousness.
It
serves
as a
rationale
for
moral doctrine.
And
natu-
rally
at the
same time
it is a
fertile source
of
controversies over such
matters
as
sexual segregation, birth-control
- or the
status
of
infidels.
"Islamic civilization" remains highly problematical,
but at
any rate West-
ern civilization is
not
taking its place.
In
most Islamic lands, Islam and
its
associated cultural heritage must remain
the
point
of
departure
for the
concerned individual,
if he has any
such
at
all.
Yet
the
tensions between
the
Islamic heritage
and the
demands
and
hopes
of
Modernity remain unresolved. As compared with the West,
the
tension between cultural orientations (going back
as far as the
time
of
Mehmet
Ali),
between the older Islamic one often stagnant or fanatical
in
tendency,
and the
Modern
one too
often imitative
and
insecure, some-
times seems starkly unbearable
and in any
case
not
conducive
to
much
hope.
The
more historical change presses
(and
such pressure
is
world-
wide once
it
occurs
at
all),
the
more explosive
the
result
-
unless,
per-
haps,
there may
be
evolving
a new
sort
of
cultural norm.
Sometimes, indeed,
it
seems
as if the
standard
of
expectations,
the
form
of
historical self-identification, that
now
serves will serve
the con-
cerned individual most readily
is one
without
a
heritage
at all in the
older sense. Such
a
standard would
not be
closely tied
to any of the
io Modernity and the Islamic heritage 241
Medieval civilizations
and
religions; instead,
its
watchword would
be
Progress,
and for it the
pace
of
technical innovation would provide
its
own norms. This may amount
to the
"Brave New World"
-
that appall-
ing
and all
too possible vision
of
Aldous Huxley's;
it
may be fulfilled
in
the communist tendency
to
turn
all
civilizational background into valu-
able but lifeless museum pieces;
or it
may hold quite other premises,
yet
to be fully explored.
The acceleration
of
history, then,
has had a
double effect among con-
sciously concerned Muslims.
It
has placed them
in a
historical situation
at once highly demanding
and
diversely frustrating, where they have
suffered an uprooting even more severe than that
of
concerned Western-
ers,
but
with
far
less
of
the compensating sense
of
historical experiment
and achievement. This has underlined the need
for
them to reassert and
reinterpret
in
modern terms
the
dignity
of
their Islamic heritage
as a
means
of
present self-identification without which they cannot
cre-
atively envisage
a
future.
But the
same historical situation
has
severely
handicapped any such development
of
the Islamic heritage on
a
Modern
basis.
With
its
insistent primacy
of
technical considerations,
the
general
tendency
of
Modernity continually
to
shift and blur the relevance
of
any
given aspect
of
life tends to downgrade all bodies
of
tradition; but for the
Muslims,
the
effort
to
counteract this tendency
is
frustrated
by
addi-
tional elements
of
discontinuity, resulting from
the
initially destructive
impact
of
Modernity and from the continuing gulf between the West and
themselves which the pace
of
events reinforces. The possibility
of
main-
taining the values associated with deep nurture
in a
rich tradition seems
slim.
The similarity
between Islamic
and
Western problems
in
maintaining the
heritage
Some still like
to
suppose that Modern life (or
at
least what is good
in
it)
necessarily presupposes the long Occidental, even perhaps the Christian
cultural heritage. They would like
to
see other peoples (and perhaps
the
Western Jews also) join
in
this. But from the world point
of
view, such
a
suggestion raises fundamental questions.
It is not
merely the alienness,
the enemy-role
of
the West that has made so many Muslims consciously
try
to
avoid
any
Westernization
in a
regional-cultural sense.
At
least
as
great a barrier has been the ambiguous relevance of the Occidental past to
Modernity, even within
the
West. Actually,
the
cultural discontinuity
in
the West is in practical ways very like that in Islam. It becomes a question
whether any
of
the older civilizations
is
showing signs
of
surviving as
a
242 II Islam in a global context
living force (rather than merely as
a
part
of
the contributing background,
like ancient Sumeria).
16
Many have felt that
the
repeatedly expressed
concern with, above
all,
the "future of Western civilization" was arrogant,
but
it
must
be
considered whether
it is
not, rather, delusive.
Here we cannot discuss such questions
at
any length, but they must be
touched
on,
lest what
has
been said about
the
Muslims
be
left
in a
false
light. Increasingly numerous are the concrete problems which show strik-
ing basic similarity
in
the Western and
in
the Islamic lands. This comes
in
part from
the
working
out of the
Great Transformation
as a
world-wide
event, notably in the major threat to survival posed to
all
alike by the great
gulf which
it
created.
The
more
it is
emphasized
the
more
the non-
Western lands succeed
in
adopting
the
more "evolutional,"
the
more
(at
least seemingly) advantageous aspects
of
the Transformation.
In
the
schools,
for
instance,
the
problem becomes remarkably alike
in
Egypt
and the
United States:
how can a
serious heritage
- the
great
Classics
in
either case, above all
- be
transmitted
to a
mass clientele with
full responsibilities
of
citizenship, while
at
the same time meet the needs
of
a
technical age?
For
even
the
technical need
is not
merely
for
enough
mathematics
and
natural science;
it is for an
ability
to
assimilate ever-
new information over
a
very wide range.
It
requires
an
ability
to
judge
among claimants
to
authority
in
enormously varied fields,
in
addition
to
a knowledge
of
some
one set of
facts. Such education
is
likely
to be
essentially
the
same everywhere,
and
everywhere will strain
the
educa-
tor's resources. Everywhere, many educators find
no
room left
in it for
any
set of
ancient classics.
In art,
again,
it
is
a
question
in
each area
how
we
are to
retain
the
reality
of a
sense
of
style.
The
twentieth-century
geometric
and
abstract styles bear almost equally little relation
to
each of
the older traditions,
and
are used with equal facility as bases
for
"nation-
alistic" reminiscences everywhere. How should
an
American child learn
to know
as "his own" the
Italian Renaissance prints
and as
"alien"
the
Japanese Tokugawa prints which have
an
equal place
of
honor
on the
living room wall?
In
the
churches, Christians wonder
how to
transcend
a
threatening
polarization between religion
as a
technique
for
"peace
of
mind"
in an
age where
all
formulable dependabilities
are
undermined,
and
religion
as
a
sectarian refuge from submersion
in the
anonymity
of two
billion
television sets.
But
Islam faces much
the
same dilemma between those
for whom
it is a
vaguely defined assurance
of
righteousness,
and
those
16
Certain aspects
of
this question have been stated quickly
by
Dennis Wrong, reviewing
Max Lerner's "America as
a
Civilization"
in
the
American Journal of
Sociology,
March i960.
io Modernity and the Islamic heritage 243
for whom it is a tool of defense against the encroachments of Modernity
and the West. It has been suggested for some time that the several
religions should join force in "combating materialism and atheism." This
might prove premature. Each of them has a more basic problem in
learning how to make the inherited religious lore speak with greater
creativity to modern men; even here to a degree, at least, they must all
use like methods.
It can be questioned whether, in concretely facing these questions,
concerned men of a West-European cultural background, Catholic, or
Protestant, or Jewish, who hope to prevail over the relentless technical
rationalizing which comes at an accelerating pace in all aspects of life,
can claim to have found principles much more sound than those found
by Muhammad Abduh or Iqbal in Islam. It is for this reason that it can be
suggested that the relative ease of the transition, in the West, has
masked our problem of continuity, making it relatively painless rather
than eliminating it; and that Westerners can see their own problems
mirrored in a clearer and starker and therefore somehow truer form
when we look at the problem of continuity in Islam. The faster history
moves, the more Westerners are likely to become aware of the problems
themselves.
In the end we must no doubt recognize that the breach with our
several pasts is a common problem not to be solved in isolation by any of
the peoples - not even by the Western peoples, it is clear to us now that
this is the case with the problem of armaments and of the risk they carry
with them of undue militarization within each land. Some are suspecting
it will prove to be the case with such questions also as juvenile delin-
quency and the problem of developing a sense of responsibility in a mass
society; it may eventually prove to be equally the case on the level even
of theology. If it is true that we must come to solve all such questions co-
operatively, Europeans, Muslim, Hindus, Chinese together, then con-
cerned Westerners will have to learn to see the problem of the great gulf
created by the Modern Transformation as its own problem too, and learn
somehow to reach across it, envisaging our common problems in terms
that allow for the divergent effects of Modernity on both sides of it. And
the concerned representatives of other traditions likewise will have to
forgive the West its guilt and accept it as a partner in solving the com-
mon dilemmas. For Modernity is neither the outcome of purely Occiden-
tal traits nor a stage through which each land can pass in its own way. It
is an event in our common world history which we must face together.
in
The discipline of world history
