“Islam and modernity: the fight between reason and literalism”.

“ When the wind of civilization had ceased to blow over the Maghreb and al-Andalus, and the decline of scientific knowledge followed that of civilization, the sciences disappeared… We find only a few notions of them, among rare individuals, who must escape the supervision of the doctors of the Orthodox faith “.
Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqadimma

Rationality and secularism are not foreign to the Arab-Muslim Thought Movement; the Arabs fell passionately in love with Greek philosophy and they largely contributed to spreading it in Europe thanks to a formidable effort of translation.

Intellectual curiosity, excited by the translation of Greek, Latin, Indian and Pehlvis works, in the 8th and 9th centuries, led to the founding of the first important Islamic theological school, called Mo’tazilism.

This doctrine relied on falsafa (Muslim philosophy) to interpret the Koran; it is based on reason, rigorous logic and freedom of thought.

This school appeared at the end of the Umayyad era, but experienced real growth under the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’moûn. The latter encountered resistance from conservative circles led by Ibn Hanbal, founder of the most rigorous legal school of Sunni Islam: “say about God only what God (in the Koran) and his prophet (in the Sunnah) says.” Ibn Hanbal prompted the caliph al-Mutawakkil (848-861) to decree the end of the era of reflection and interpretation of the Quran. However, the school of Mo’tazilism survived several centuries after its official condemnation and its fall left a dangerous void in the face of triumphant Hanbalism.

Falsafa has enabled the progression of knowledge in a large number of scientific fields: medicine, geography or astronomy, in the service of astrology. It was about developing minds, caring for bodies, putting scientific instruments, such as mathematics, at the service of power (taxation, metrology, the science of measurements, etc.) and a better understanding of the universe created by God.

In the lineage of the Mo’tazilites, we find Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Ruchd (Averroes), and many others. All of them waged a merciless battle against those who wanted to lock thought in the shackles of dogma and opened the way for those who, later in Europe, allowed thought to free itself from the tutelage of religions.

Ibn Taymiya, the formidable heir of Ibn Hanbal, appeared later, in the 14th century. After the Crusades and their consequences, the Mongol invasion dealt the final blow and led to the dislocation of the Abbasid caliphate; it was the culmination of a crisis marked for Islam by terrible disasters whose fear of seeing Islam disappear had the effect of the collapse of traditional religious structures and the awakening of Hanbalism via Ibn Taymiya.

This fundamentalist trend will be taken up by the Wahhabists, a movement founded by Mohamed Ibn Abdelwahhabe (1703-1791). The goal of Ibn Abd Al Wahhab was to expel the Ottoman Turks from the Arabian Peninsula and to establish in Arabia a purified Islam such as it existed at the time of the Prophet Mohammed (570-632) then to propagate it throughout the Muslim world. Like Hanbalism and the school of Ibn Taymiya, the Wahhabi movement is a literal, rigorous reading of Islam which refuses interpretation, modernity, openness to other civilizations and cultures: it is strict and puritanical Islam.

Contemporary Islamism or “political Islam” is crossed by two main trends which are reformism and fundamentalism, each of these trends developing radical currents which must also be distinguished from each other.

Fundamentalism, which is to be distinguished from conservatism, is traditionalism resulting from the thought and action of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The fundamentalists have their radical groups and their networks, the most famous and undoubtedly the best organized being the Al-Qaeda network. Its global home, including in its radical form, is Saudi Arabia. The action of fundamentalism is a violent expression directed especially against the West and the United States.

Reformism was inaugurated more than a century ago by al-Afghani and Mohammed Abdou, continued by Rachid Rida and especially by the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, founder in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. The reformists also have their radical movements, for example that of Seyyed Qotb and La jama’at al-islamiyya, responsible for the attack perpetrated in 1981 against President Saddate: “Wanting to start by waging war against imperialism is a useless and futile action, a pure waste of time. We must concentrate on our Muslim problem, namely the establishment of shar’ia in our own country above all, and subordinate everything there to the cause of God. » Thus, the action of reformists is limited to the seizure of power in Muslim countries to establish shar’ia.

Contemporary Islamism therefore presents itself as a complex world which has been nourished by colonialism and its consequences, by misery, humiliation, frustrations and the succession of failures in the Muslim world, without forgetting the repression of the corrupt and dictatorial regimes which govern these countries.

These movements also feed on the contempt of these polemicists who present Muslims as people outside the “free world”, bizarre and followers of an obscurantist religion refractory to the values ​​of freedom and democracy of the “civilized world”.

This Islamophobia delights Islamists and plunges moderate Muslims into a “binary, Manichean vision”, which consists of perceiving Western societies as being generally hostile to Islam and Muslims; this hostility risks locking Muslims into a ghetto that Islamists want to maintain at all costs to isolate Muslims from external influences in order to succeed in their indoctrination program.

The fight against Muslim extremism begins on the one hand with the desire to understand Muslim culture and to establish a dialogue with the aim of coexistence and not for domination: “if it is authentic, the desire to understand other cultures excludes any dominating ambition. This is humanism. Otherwise barbarism prevails” writes Edward Said in “Orientalism”.

On the other hand, a great effort on the part of Muslim thinkers must be made in order to reconcile Islam with modernity and secularism (the school of Mo’tazilism shows us that this is something possible and achievable). This phase must go through a reform of Islam which will promote ijtihad (effort of interpretation) and reject literalism.

On the other hand, despite prejudices, the desire to exclude and discrimination, Muslims (especially young people) must not lock themselves into community ghettos, but become more involved in civil society and thus become full-fledged citizens respecting the values ​​and institutions of the countries in which they live.

Conclusion

“ask for knowledge from the cradle to the grave”

1- Those who say: reconciling Islam and modernity is impossible are impostors (the school of Mo’tazilism is proof of this).

2- After this brief historical analysis, we realize that Muslim fundamentalism has always been a reaction to external aggression.

3- these impostors, who use Islamism to cast suspicion on an entire religion, aim to isolate Muslims, discredit them and above all demonize them.

4- Muslims must not fall into this trap and must, to fight against these impostors, use intelligent means: get involved in social movements, educate themselves, educate themselves and ban physical and verbal violence; These are, in my opinion, the best ways to combat prejudice and discrimination and not leave the field open to these hypocrites disguised as humanists who dare to justify the new colonial wars.