دین و جامعه شناسی

Islam and the Languages of Modernity.

by Dale F. Eickelman

THE SECULAR BIAS of modernization theory has had a significant role in deflecting attention away from the role of religious practices and values in contemporary societies, particularly in the Muslim majority world. In the early 1960s, a leading public intellectual saw the Muslim world as facing an unpalatable choice: either a "neo-Islamic totalitarianism" intent on "resurrecting the past," or a "reformist Islam" that would open "the sluice gates and [be] swamped by the deluge."[1] Another suggested that Middle Eastern societies faced the stark choice of "Mecca or mechanization."[2] At the least, such views suggested an intensely negative assessment of the possibilities of evolution in Muslim societies and an inherent preference for militantly secularizing reformers such as Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) and the Pahlavi Shahs of Iran, Reza Shah (1878-1944) and his son, Mohammed Reza Shah (1919-1980).

Although such views were first expressed in the 1960s, they remained prevalent in the 1990s. In 1994, for example, Ernest Gellner reiterated the view that "Muslim society" remained the exception to the pervasive trend toward a shared culture of nationalism with its ensuing fruit of modernity--commonly educated, mutually substitutable, atomized individuals with the potential for participating in a "civil society." Gellner argued that civil society precludes the "ideological monopoly" that Islam supposedly enjoins. [3]

In such formulations, Islam is viewed as a particularly salient example of the diminishing or obstructive role of religion and of religious thinkers in achieving a modern society in which individuals negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options not necessarily congruent with collective religious sentiments. [4] Open societies claim to respect religion and religious worship. At the same time, however, in the words of philosopher Richard Rorty, religion usually functions as a "conversation-stopper" outside of circles of believers. [5]

Rorty's observation points to a second underlying continuity in the view of most modernization theories concerning the contemporary role of religious intellectuals. Writing in the heyday of modernization theory in the 1960s, Edward Shils observed that "intellectual" work originally arose from religious occupations, but that religious orientations in modern times attract "a diminishing share of the creative capacities of the oncoming intellectual elite." In Shils's view, "the tradition of distrust of secular and ecclesiastical authority--and in fact of tradition as such--has become the chief secondary tradition of the intellectuals." [6] The notion of the sacred had shifted, in his view, from religious concerns to a focus on and mastery of the technological, organizational, and political skills most useful in forging a modern state. The present thus belongs to the liberals and the technocrats, found primarily in the differentiated "modern" class. Shils argues that only intellectuals attached to these "modern" values have the vision to rise above parochial identities and to attach themselves to the notion of a modern nationstate. "Religious" intellectuals are thus implicitly marginalized.

Common to all variants of modernization theory is the assumption of a declining role for religion, except as a private matter. To move toward modernity, political leaders must displace the authority of religious leaders and devalue the importance of traditional religious institutions. "Modernity" is seen as an " enlargement of human freedoms" and an "enhancement of the range of choices" as people begin to "take charge" of themselves. [7] Religion can retain its influence only by conforming to such norms as "rationality" and relativism, accepting secularization, and making compromises with science, economic concerns, and the state.

Recent history offers formidable challenges to modernization theory. Of all the countries of the Third World, Iran was a society that had undergone enormous modernization prior to 1978-1979. Nonetheless, the state's greatest challenge emanated from the growing urban middle classes, those who had benefited the most from modernization. Revolution, not political stability, was the result. Moreover, it was religious sentiment and leadership, not the secular intelligentsia, that gave the revolution its coherence and force.

Writing from the perspective of the late 1990s, an Iranian political scientist, Fariba Adelkhah, goes further. She argues that the real Iranian revolution is taking place only now, with the coming of age of a new generation of Iranians who were not even born at the time of the 1978-1979 revolution. This new generation is creating and participating in an Iranian "religious public sphere" (espace public confessionel) in which politics and religion are subtly intertwined, and not always in ways anticipated by Iran's established religious leaders. The emergence of this public sphere has also been accompanied by a greater sense of personal autonomy for both women and men. [8]

Latin America also offers contrary examples to the conventional wisdom of modernization theory. In Peru and Guatemala, new networks of trust, confidence, and organizational capacities have arisen with religious change as groups of clergy, including progressive Catholics in Peru and evangelicals in Guatemala, create a social capital in which "'stability' is created from below, not imposed from above." [9] The United States might serve as a further example, in which religious congregations, hierarchies, and religious special interests contribute significantly to ongoing debates over collective values. [10]

How disconcerting to the view of modernity and modernization as excluding religion from the public sphere and the nation-state to see no less a committed political leader than Vaclav Havel write that "human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots outside the perceptible world." On the state and its probable role in the future, Havel writes that "while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God." [11] Havel considers modern thought, "based on the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalized," to have reached a "final" crisis. The way out, he concludes, is for the politician of the future to trust in "soul, individual spirituality," and, above all, "in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world." [12] Labeled by some as a contemporary "Romantic Rebel," Havel's ideas nonetheless influenced U.S. debates over funding for basic science research in the mid-1990s. [13]

Havel notwithstanding, it is primarily in the Muslim world that--in Gilles Kepel's evocative phrase--we are faced with the "revenge of God." [14] In a globalized McWorld, only the "green menace" of "Jihad" offers resistance to the advance of modernization and the Enlightenment. Or does it?

THE RETURN OF RELIGION

It is easy to be critical of Samuel Huntington's "West versus the Rest" argument, but he was one of the first political scientists to spur other political scientists as well as international relations theorists to encourage colleagues and policymakers to reemphasize the role of culture and "tradition" in political and international relations. [15] Decades before Huntington's "West versus the Rest" argument, other writers, notably Edward Shils, vigorously argued that "tradition" is not a residual concept that can uniformly describe the "pre-modern" values of all civilizations and cultures. For the premodern era as for today, it is difficult to see civilizations and cultures as sharply demarcated and closed. [16] "Traditions" are clusters of cultural concepts, shared understandings, and practices that make political and social life possible. [17] Such pervasive cultural understandings play a crucial element in constituting what we now recognize as "multiple modernities." [18] They coexist with and shape the exp erience of modernity. In this sense, ethnicity, caste, and clientelism can be as distinctly modern as the idea of individual choice.

A principal difficulty with Huntington's "West versus the Rest" formulation is that, having reintroduced culture and religion to thinking about politics, he overstated their coherence and force, in addition to treating the Muslim world as a monolithic bloc. Culture became an independent variable. The view of religion as a stark alternative--either an independent or a dependent variable--can be avoided by adopting an approach to understanding politics that goes beyond power relations and interests alone. Approaching these issues in a more effective way also requires incorporating an understanding of the shared, often implicit, ideas of what is right, just, or religiously ordained--ideas upon which individuals in a society or from different societies base cooperative relations. Such background understandings are common to adherents of religion, be it Islam, Christianity, or Hinduism. Evolving doctrinal considerations are only one factor among many that contribute to the creation of frameworks of practices and understandings, and adherents to religious traditions are far from monolithic in their use of these frameworks.

Politics is also a struggle over people's imaginations, a competition over the meanings of symbols. It encompasses the interpretation of symbols and the control of institutions, formal and informal, that produce and sustain them. This interpretation is played out against a backdrop of values and practices embedded in a "social imaginary"--the implicit understandings against which the beliefs and practices in any given society are formulated.[9] More broadly, politics can be conceived as cooperation in and contest over symbolic production and control of the institutions--formal and informal--that serve as the symbolic arbiters of society. Politics as Leviathan is thus decisively abandoned in favor of politics as symbolmaker. [20]

The role of symbolic politics in general, or of "Muslim politics"--in the sense of a field for debate and not a bloc of uniform belief and practice--can be seen as less exceptional if the European experience with secularism is kept in mind. Historian Dominique Colas argues that religious discourse was a basic precondition for the rise of the early modern public sphere in Europe. [21] To this day, strong "background" understandings of Christianity remain in such matters as blasphemy laws, religious holidays, and public prayers. [22] Indeed, contemporary defenders of secularism often exaggerate the durability and open-mindedness of thoroughly secular institutions, be they in the United States, in Turkey, or in India. In the context of the Muslim-majority Middle East, the militant secularism of some governing elites--the Turkish officer corps, for example--is associated with authoritarianism and intolerance rather than with "enlightenment" values.

Because the Muslim-majority world remains feared by those who regard it as the last outpost of the antimodern, the role of religious intellectuals in contributing to an emerging public sphere is often overlooked. This public sphere is rapidly expanding because of the growth of higher education, the increasing ease of travel, and the proliferation of media and means of communication.

In country after country since the 1950s, access to higher education has rapidly expanded. Morocco, for instance, committed itself to universal schooling after gaining independence from France in 1956. Though in 1957 only 13,000 secondary-school degrees were awarded and university enrollments remained low, by 1965 there were more than 200,000 students in secondary schools and some 20,000 in universities. By 1992, secondary-school enrollment topped 1.5 million and university students numbered 240,000. While illiteracy rates in the general populace remain high--38 percent for men and 62 percent for women--there is now a critical mass of educated people who are able to read and think for themselves, without relying on state and religious authorities. [23]

The situation in Oman is more dramatic, because the transformation has taken place in a much shorter period. In 1975-1976, a mere 22 students attended secondary school. Little more than a decade later, in 1987-1988, 13,500 did. In 1997, there were 77,000, and there are more than 8,000 students in post-secondary institutions, including the national university, which opened in 1986. [24]

Elsewhere the story is much the same, although the starting dates and levels of achievement differ. In Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia, mass education has reached every city, town, and village. In Turkey, for instance, adult illiteracy rates as of 1995 were 8 percent for males and 28 percent for females, down from 65 percent and 85 percent, respectively, four de-cades earlier. Secondary schools are now ubiquitous, and both private and public universities have proliferated. In Indonesia, university enrollment, only 50,000 in 1960, reached 2.3 million in 1996. [25]

Even where educational expansion has not kept up with population growth, large numbers of citizens now speak a common language. In Arabic, for example, there often is a great divide between the colloquial speech of everyday use and the formal, standard language of newspapers, radio, and public speech. Education, especially higher education, in the "public" language of formal, literary Arabic allows people to "talk back" to religious and political authorities in this public language. Education, like mass communications, also makes people more conscious of their beliefs and practices and encourages thinking of them as a system, allowing for comparison with other ideas and practices. Education and the greater ease of communication also erode intellectual and physical boundaries and enable connections to be made across formerly impenetrable barriers of class, locality, language, and ethnic group.

Both mass education and mass communications, particularly the proliferation of media, profoundly influence how people think about the language of religious and political authority throughout the Muslim world. We are still in the early stages of understanding how different media--print, television, radio, music, and the Internet--influence groups and individuals, encouraging unity in some contexts and fragmentation in others.

Although rivaled by other media, the printed word remains a privileged cultural vehicle for shaping religious beliefs and practices throughout the Muslim world. Books and pamphlets, including banned ones, are discussed and invoked in sermons, lectures, reviews, and conversations. In seeking to ban and confiscate them, censors only draw attention to their existence and increase their circulation. [26]

At the high end of this transformation is the rise to significance of books such as al-Kitab wa-l-Qur'an: Qira'a mu'asira (The Book and the Qur'an: A Contemporary Interpretation), an eight-hundred-page work first published in 1990 by the Syrian civil engineer Muhammad Shahrur. He has subsequently published books and pamphlets elaborating his views on the role of the state, civil society, and democracy in Qur'anic thought. [27] The first book has sold tens of thousands of copies throughout the Arab world in both authorized (in Damascus and Beirut) and pirate (in Cairo) editions and is widely distributed in photocopies in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where its circulation has been banned or discouraged. Books such as Shahrur's could not have been imagined before large numbers of people could read and understand its advocacy of the need to reinterpret ideas of religious authority and tradition and to apply Islamic precepts to contemporary society.

Shahrur draws an analogy between the Copernican revolution and Qur'anic interpretation, which he says has been shackled for centuries by the conventions of medieval jurists and those willing to follow in their tradition:

People believed for a long time that the sun revolved around the earth, but they were unable to explain some phenomena derived from this assumption until one person, human like themselves, said, "The opposite is true: The earth revolves around the sun." ... After a quarter of a century of study and reflection, it dawned on me that we Muslims are shackled by prejudices (musallimat), some of which are completely opposite from the [correct perspective]. [28]

On issues ranging from the role of women in society to rekindling a "creative interaction" with non-Muslim philosophies, Shahrur argues that Muslims should reinterpret sacred texts anew and apply them to contemporary social and moral issues: "If Islam is sound [salih] for all times and places," then we must not neglect historical developments and the interaction of different generations. We must act as if "the Prophet just ... informed us of this Book." [29]

Shahrur's ideas directly challenge the authoritative tradition of Qur'anic exegesis (tafsir) and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). The subtitle of his first book--A Contemporary Interpretation--uses the term qira'a, which can mean either reading or interpretation, rather than the term tafsir, which directly evokes the established conventions of traditional Islamic learning from which Shahrur advocates a decisive break. Shahrur argues that traditional disciplines of learning such as tafsir have implicitly acquired an authority equal to that of the Qur'an itself, except that the juridical tradition says little about tyranny, absolutism, and democracy. [30] Such ideas are at the center of an emerging global debate in which all Muslims--argue thinkers such as Shahrur--have a personal obligation to participate.

Because Shahrur's ideas pose such basic challenges to established religious authority, he has been attacked in Friday sermons in Damascus and elsewhere, even though one leading legal scholar, Wael Hallaq, recently wrote that Shahrur's efforts to reformulate Islamic jurisprudence are the "most convincing" of those of all contemporary thinkers. [31]

The vigorous discussion his ideas have provoked is all the more noteworthy because his notion of disseminating his ideas is almost as formally rigorous as Kant's notion of "public" contained in his essay on the Enlightenment. For Kant, the idea of "public" is the words of a writer appearing before readers without the help of authoritative intermediaries such as preachers, judges, and rulers. With the exception of a small study circle in Damascus composed mostly of engineers, Shahrur's primary means of communication is the book, an unadorned means of persuasion that appeals to a growing educated middle class and continues to represent the pinnacle of knowledge to others. His public appearances are infrequent and he has never appeared on radio or television in the Arab world.

Shahrur is only one of many public intellectuals in the Muslim world who implicitly attack both conventional religious wisdom and the intolerant certainties of religious radicals, and he argues instead for a constant and open reinterpretation of how sacred texts apply to social and political life. Another Syrian thinker, the secularist Sadiq Jalal al-'Azm, does the same. A debate between al-'Azm and Shaykh Yusif al-Qaradawi, a conservative religious intellectual, was broadcast on al-Jazira satellite television (Qatar) on May 27, 1997. For the first time in the memory of many viewers, the religious conservative came across as the weaker, more defensive voice. A similar debate took place in December of 1997 on the same program, between Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd and the Egyptian religious thinker Muhammad 'Imara. Such discussions are unlikely to be rebroadcast on state-controlled television in most Arab nations, where programming on religious and political themes is generally cautious. Nevertheless, satellite techno logy and videotape render traditional censorship ineffective. Tapes of these broadcasts circulate from hand to hand in Morocco, Oman, Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere. [32]

Other voices also advocate reform. Fethullah Gulen, Turkey's answer to media-savvy American evangelist Billy Graham, appeals to a wide spectrum of religiously minded Turks, both in Turkey and elsewhere in the world. In televised chat shows, interviews, and occasional sermons, Gulen speaks about Islam and science, democracy, modernity, religious and ideological tolerance, the importance of education, and current events. [33] Religious movements such as Turkey's Risale-i Nur appeal increasingly to religious moderates, and the link between Islam, reason, science, and modernity, and the lack of inherent clash between "East" and "West," promote education at all levels and appeal to growing numbers of educated Turks. One need not visit Turkey to learn more about the movement; its web site is available in English and Turkish. [34]

Iran's Abdukarim Soroush argues that a proper understanding of Islam enjoins dialogue, a willingness to understand the opinions of others, adaptation, and civility. Indonesian and Malaysian moderates make similar arguments. [35] To the annoyance of more conservative clerics, Soroush has captured the religious imagination of Persian speakers in Iran and abroad, and his work, in printed translation and on the Internet in several languages including Turkish, Arabic, and English, has a reach far beyond Iran.

Not all influential religious books are aimed at highbrows. Mass schooling has created a wide audience of people who read but are not literary sophisticates, and there has been an explosive growth in what a French colleague of mine, Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, calls generic "Islamic books"--inexpensive, attractively printed mass-market texts. [36] Some of these books address practical questions of how to live as a Muslim in the modern world and the perils of neglecting Islamic obligations, and not all appeal to reason and moderation. Many have bold, eye-catching covers and sensational titles such as The Terrors of the Grave, or What Follows Death. [37] Other, more subdued works--usually written by men--offer advice to young women on how to live as Muslims today. Often based on the sermons of popular preachers, Islamic books are written in a breezy, colloquial style rather than the cadences of traditional literary Arabic and are sold on sidewalks and outside mosques rather than in bookstores. While Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz is considered successful if he sells five thousand copies of one of his novels in a year in his own country, Islamic books often have sales in six figures.

As a result of direct and broad access to the printed, broadcast, and electronically recorded word, more and more Muslims take it upon themselves to interpret the textual sources--classical or modern--of Islam. Much has been made of the "opening up" (infitah) of the economies of many Muslim-majority countries, allowing "market forces" to reshape economies, no matter how painful the consequences in the short run. In Bangladesh, women's romance novels, once a popular specialty distributed in secular bookstores, now have Islamic counterparts distributed through Islamic bookstores, making it difficult to distinguish between "Muslim" romance novels and "secular" ones. [38]

In a way analogous to economic market forces, intellectual market forces support some forms of religious innovation and activity over others, and in all cases support--or in the most negative instances must appear to support--reasoned public discussion and debate. The result is a collapse of earlier, hierarchical notions of religious authority based on claims to the mastery of fixed bodies of religious texts. Even when there are state-appointed religious authorities--as in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Malaysia, and some of the Central Asian republics--there no longer is any guarantee that their word will be heeded, or even that they themselves will follow the lead of the regime.

RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS IN THE EMERGING PUBLIC SPHERE

Thinkers such as Muhammad Shahrur are redrawing the boundaries of public and religious life in the Muslim-majority world by challenging conventional religious authority. The replacement they suggest implies a constructive fragmentation. With the advent of mass higher education has come an objectification of Islamic tradition in the eyes of many believers. Questions such as "What is Islam?" "How does it apply to the conduct of my life?" and "What are the principles of faith?" increasingly are foregrounded in the consciousness of many believers and are explicitly discussed. These objectified understandings have irrevocably transformed the Muslim relationship to sacred authority. Of crucial importance in this process has been a "democratization" of the politics of religious authority and the development of a standardized language infixed and disseminated by mass higher education, the mass media, travel, and labor migration. This has led to an opening up of the political process and heightened competition for the mantles of political and religious authority. Without fanfare, the notion of Islam as dialogue and civil debate is gaining ground.

A new sense of publicness is emerging throughout Muslimmajority states and Muslim communities elsewhere. It is shaped by increasingly open contests over the use of the symbolic language of Islam. New and accessible modes of communication have made these contests more global, so that even local issues take on transnational dimensions. Muslims, of course, act not just as Muslims but according to class interests, out of a sense of nationalism, on behalf of tribal or family networks, and out of all the diverse motives that characterize human endeavor. Increasingly, however, large numbers of Muslims explain their goals in terms of the normative, globalized language of Islam. Muslim identity issues are not unitary or identical, but such issues have become a significant force. It is in this sense that one can speak of an emerging Muslim public sphere and a reconsideration of the role of religion in "modern" societies elsewhere.

This distinctly public sphere exists at the intersections of religious, political, and social life and contributes to the creation of civil society. With access to contemporary forms of communication that range from the press and broadcast media to fax machines, audiocassettes, and videocassettes, from the telephone to the Internet, Muslims, like Christians, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, and others, have more rapid and flexible ways of building and sustaining contact with constituencies than was available in earlier decades. The asymmetries of the earlier mass-media revolution are being reversed by new media in new hands. This combination of new media and new contributors to religious and political debates fosters an awareness on the part of all actors of the diverse ways in which Islam and Islamic values can be created. It feeds into new senses of a public space that is discursive, performative, and participative, and not confined to formal institutions recognized by state authorities.

Just as there are multiple paths to modernity, [39] there is a growing practical awareness throughout the Muslim majority world of multiple claimants to the task of articulating how Islamic virtues should relate to public and political life. In this respect, print and other media direct consciousness to and craft certain models of civility, membership within a community, and citizenship within a nation, all resting on more or less mutual packages of commitments and expectations. [40] As in Hinduism and Christianity, the real "clash of civilizations" in the modern era is not, as Robert Hefner says, "between the West and some homogeneous 'other' but between rival carriers of tradition within the same nations and civilizations." [41]

Publicly shared ideas of community, identity, and leadership take new shapes in such engagements, even as many communities and authorities claim an unchanged continuity with the past. Mass education, so important in the development of nationalism in an earlier era, [42] and a proliferation of media and means of communication have multiplied the possibilities for creating communities and networks between them, dissolving prior barriers of space and distance and opening new grounds for interaction and mutual recognition.

Two cautions, however, are in order. The first is that an expanding public sphere need not necessarily indicate more favorable prospects for democracy; any more than "civil society" necessarily entails democracy (although it is a precondition of such). Authoritarian regimes are also compatible with an expanding public sphere. They may claim to speak for the "people," although multiple and alternative forms of communication, as well as shared knowledge and ways of thought in the modern world, offer wider avenues for awareness of competing and alternative forms of religious and political authority.

The proliferation of communication and education in today's global society is increasing the power of religious intellectuals in much of the Muslim-majority world. Increasingly, these intellectuals have become a transnational elite. Acquiring such a global presence may diminish the importance of cultural traditions, but it increases disparities of class. Mobility increases for a small segment of the elite with globalization, but polarities increase in the more localized remainder. As a consequence, religious intellectuals like Iran's Abdokarim Soroush become more in tune with Edward Said, but at the risk of losing touch with the local majority.

In the present era, to paraphrase the Sorbonne-educated Sudanese religious intellectual Hasan Turabi, an 'alim, or religious intellectual, is as likely to be an engineer or doctor as a religious scholar. [43] Even the idea of Islamic law, the shari'a, once a matter entrusted to specialists, now involves large numbers of people--and not just a scholastically trained religious elite--who debate its meaning and application. [44] Just as the new media have blurred the line between public and private, so has the modern era blurred the assumed hard-and-fast line between religion and politics.

The prevailing secularist bias of many current theories of society has alternately marginalized and demonized religious forces and religious intellectuals. I have emphasized trends in the Muslim world because they have been characterized as especially resistant to "modernity." Yet the Muslim majority world is as open as that of any other civilizational domain. We live in a world in which an Islamic leader such as Fethullah Gulen meets popes and patriarchs, advocating diversity and tolerance in the public sphere more than many of those who are secular. Far from compromising the public sphere, religious movements and religious intellectuals in the Muslim-majority world can advocate compromise and a mutual agreement to persuade by words rather than by force. Religious intellectuals may claim strong links with the past, but their practice in the present conveys significantly different ideas of person, authority, and responsibility.

Dale F. Eickelman is Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations, and chair of the department of anthropology, at Dartmouth College.

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ENDNOTES

(1.) Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 129.

(2.) Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 1964 [1958]), 405.

(3.) Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 211.

(4.) See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1991), 1, 11.

(5.) Cited in John Keane, "The Limits of Secularism," Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 1999, 12.

(6.) Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 17.

(7.) T. N. Madan, "Secularism in Its Place," Journal of Asian Studies 6 (1987): 747-759.

(8.) Fariba Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran, trans. Jonathan Derrick (London: Hurst & Company, 1999), 105-138.

(9.) Daniel H. Levine and David Stoll, "Bridging the Gap Between Empowerment and Power in Latin America," in Transnational Religion and Fading States, ed. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), 75.

(10.) Robert Wuthnow, Producing the Sacred: An Essay on Public Religion (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

(11.) Vaclav Havel, "Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State," New York Review of Books, 10 June 1999, 4-6.

(12.) Vaclav Havel, "The End of the Modern Era," New York Times, 1 March 1992, E15.

(13.) Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other Passions (Woodhury, N.Y.: AIP Press, 1995), 117-121.

(14.) Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World, trans. Alan Braley (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

(15.) Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72 (3) (Summer 1993): 22-49. For comments on Huntington's argument as it applies specifically to the Muslim world, see Dale F. Eickelman, "Muslim Politics: The Prospects for Democracy in North Africa and the Middle East," in Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa, ed. John Entelis (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 35-38.

(16.) Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 213- 261. On the permeability of the boundaries of Muslim civilization, see Paul Wheatley, The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, 7th--10th Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in press).

(17.) Charles Taylor, "Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1993), vol. 14, 213.

(18.) Shmuel Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

(19.) See Taylor, "Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere," 218--219.

(20.) See Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5--11.

(21.) Dominique Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories, trans. Amy Jacobs (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).

(22.) Keane, "The Limits of Secularism," 12.

(23.) World Bank, Knowledge for Development: World Development Report, 1998--1999 (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1999), table 2 and prior editions.

(24.) Sultanate of Oman, Ministry of Development, Statistical Year Book, 1996 (Muscat: Ministry of Development, 1997), 541, and prior editions.

(25.) UNESCO, Statistical Yearbook, 1998 (Latham, Md.: UNESCO Publishing and Bernan Press, 1998), table 3.7.

(26.) Dale F. Eickelman and Jon Anderson, "Print, Islam, and the Prospects for Civic Pluralism: New Religious Writings and Their Audiences," Journal of Islamic Studies 8 (1) (January 1997): 6.

(27.) Muhammad Shahrur, al-Kitab wa-l-Qur'an: Qira'a mu'asira (The Book and the Qur'an: A Contemporary Reading) (Beirut: Sharikat al-Matbu'at li-l-Tawzi' wa-l-Nashr, 1992); Shahrur, Dirasat Islamiya al-mu'asira fi-l-dawla wa-l-mujtama'a (Contemporary Islamic Studies on State and Society) (Damascus: al-Ahali li-l-Taba'a wa-l-Nashr, 1994); Shahrur, al-Islam wa-l-iman: Manzumat al-qiyam (Islam and Faith: A Treatise on Values) (Damascus: al-Ahali li-l-Taba'a wa-l-Nashr, 1996); and Shabrur, Mashru' mithaq al-'amal al-Islami (Proposal for a Charter on Islamic [Political] Practice) (Damascus: privately printed, 1999). The best representation of Shabrur's views in English is Shahrur, "The Divine Text and Pluralism in Muslim Societies," Muslim Politics Report 14 (July--August 1997), and various commentaries posted on [less than]http://islam21.org[greater than].

(28.) Shahrur, al-Kitab wa-1-Qur'an, 29.

(29.) Shahrur, Dirasat Islamiya, 23. As popular as Shahrur's views are in some circles, some conservative Muslims argue that he underestimates the ability of madrasa-trained religious scholars to adapt their version of authoritative religious learning to new contexts. However, most observers agree that madrasa-trained scholars are losing their audience and former authority.

(30.) Ibid.

(31.) Wael B. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 253.

(32.) See John F. Burns, "Arab TV Gets a New Slant: Newscasts Without Censorship," New York Times, 4 July 1999, A1, 6.

(33.) Bulent Aras, "Turkish Islam's Moderate Face," Middle East Quarterly 5(3) (September 1998): 23-30; Eickelman, "Inside the Islamic Reformation."

(34.) [less than]http://www.nesil.com.tr> [greater than]

(35.) Vakil Vakili, Debating Religion and Politics in Iran: The Political Thought of Abdokarim Soroush (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996). For Indonesia, see Nurcholish Madjid, "The Necessity of Renewing Islamic Thought and Reinvigorating Religious Understanding," in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 284-294.

(36.) Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, Les gens du livre. Edition et champ intellectuel dans l'Egypte republicaine (People of the Book: Publishing and Intellectual Field in Republican Egypt) (Paris: CNRS editions, 1998), 171-198.

(37.) Ahmad al-Tahtawi, Ahwal al-qubur wa-ma ba'd al-mawt (Cairo: Dar al-Bashir, 1987).

(38.) Maimuna Huq, "From Piety to Romance: Islam-Oriented Texts in Bangladesh," in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and Jon Anderson (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), 133-161.

(39.) Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization, 396-426.

(40.) Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (Reading, England: Ithaca Press, 1997), 55-56; Salvatore, "Staging Virtue: The Disembodiment of Self-Correctness and the Making of Islam as a Public Norm," Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam 1 (1998): 87-119.

(41.) Robert W. Hefner, "Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age," Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 92.

(42.) Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 28-29.

(43.) Hasan al-Turabi, "The Islamic State," in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 245.

(44.) Frank E. Vogel, Islamic Law and Legal System: Studies of Saudi Arabia (Leiden: Brill, in press). See also John R. Bowen, "Legal Reasoning and Public Discourse in Indonesian Islam," in Eickelman and Anderson, eds., New Media in the Muslim World, 80-105.

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Publication Information: Article Title: Islam and the Languages of Modernity. Contributors: Dale F. Eickelman - author. Journal Title: Daedalus. Volume: 129. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 119. COPYRIGHT 2000 American Academy of Arts and Sciences; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group