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ISLAMIC MODERNISM AND
THE RE-ENCHANTMENT
OF THE SACRED IN
THE AGE OF HISTORY
MONICA M. RINGER
ISLAMIC MODERNISM
AND
THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF
THE SACRED
IN THE AGE OF HISTORY
ISLAMIC
MODERNISM
AND THE
RE-ENCHANTMENT
OF THE SACRED IN
THE AGE OF HISTORY
r��r��r
MONICA M. RINGER
For my parents
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values
to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Monica M. Ringer, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun– Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in KoufrUni by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 7873 1 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 7876 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 7875 5 (epub)
The right of Monica M. Ringer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related
Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Historicism, Modernity and Religion 1

1. Locating Islam 44
2. Islam in History, Islamic History 67
3. The Islamic Origins of Modernity 111
4. The Quest for the Historical Prophet 140
Conclusion: God’s Intent – The Re-enchantment of the Sacred
in the Age of History 172
Bibliography 187
Index 202
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Edward Tylor, in his seminal anthropological work, Primitive Culture, notes

caustically that ‘If in this enquiry we should be obliged to end in the dark,
at any rate we need not begin there.’ Inversely, historians are notoriously
suspicious of origin stories. This project is the product of a long engagement
with a series of questions. Can religion be modern? What would modern
religion look like? And the elephant in the room: What is modernity? I begin
and end the book with Max Weber’s notion of ‘disenchantment’ as a way
of emphasising the ways in which these questions matter to us now no less
than they mattered in the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that Weber,
even as he characterised the modern project as one necessitating the embrace
of disenchantment (Entzauberung), literally, the ‘de-magicification’ of the
world, articulated a vision of disenchanted scholarship as an ethical end in
and of itself. Weber concluded that in the age of disenchantment, we each
must ‘find and obey the demon who holds the fibers of his very life’.1 The
project of understanding the role of history in the generation of modernity
has certainly been my demon for as long as I can remember. I find myself at
the end of this project deeply convinced that history, defined by historicist
methodology and epistemology, is the quintessence of modernity.
Amherst College has been a very supportive place for me for the last
seventeen years. I have benefitted from the generous support of the Dean
of the Faculty and the Senior Sabbatical Fellowship, and have been con-
tinually encouraged by the interest and commitment of my students. In
particular, in the fall of 2016, I offered an advanced history seminar entitled
‘An Era of Translation: The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire’ to a very
special group of students. Those conversations we held in my office over tea
provided a welcome opportunity to think through some of the theories of
applying translation to modernity that appear in this book.
1
Max Weber, ‘The Disenchantment of Modern Life’, lecture given in 1917.
[ vi ]
Acknowledgements [ vii
Most of all, I am grateful for the collegiality and generosity of my fellow

faculty at Amherst, in the Five Colleges, and in the academy more gener-
ally. Heartfelt thanks to friends and colleagues who have commented on
draft chapters of this book, including: Michael Bessey, Andrew Dole, Tayeb
El-Hibri, Yasemin Gencer, Sergey Glebov, Adi Gordon, Margaret Hunt,
Melih Levi, Afshin Marashi and Suleiman Mourad. I have also benefitted
from conversations with Houri Berberian, Houchang Chehabi, Trent Maxey,
Yael Rice, Tariq Jaffer, Amina Steinfels and Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi.
Paul Rockwell and Sanam Nader-Esfahani graciously checked a number
of French translations. My research assistants, Shahruz Ghaemi, Yasmeen
Saeed and Julia Molin, helped enormously. Nicola Ramsey at Edinburgh
University Press has been wonderful, as have Kirsty Woods, Eddie Clark and
the entire production team. Thanks to them, and to the anonymous reviewer
for their careful read.
I enjoyed two stints away from Amherst at crucial moments, which in
some ways marked the beginning and end of this project. In the famously
cold winter term of 2014, I had the honour of teaching a graduate seminar
at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Thank you to my ‘home’
department of NELC and especially to A. Holly Shissler, Fred Donner,
Franklin Lewis and Richard Payne who gave me such a warm welcome. I
am forever grateful for the language tutoring of Melih Levi (Turkish) and
Ayşe Polat (Ottoman). I have fond memories of the U of C. I remember one
morning, as I was trudging to the campus in arctic temperatures wrapped
in absolutely every piece of winter clothing I owned, a young man sped by
wearing only a sweatshirt. It reminded me of a particularly funny scene at
the very end of A Short Walk in the Hindu-Kush, as Eric Newby and his travel
companion, inadequately outfitted, underprepared and having experienced
incredible deprivations, prepare for the night. As Newby recounts, ‘the
ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it’. As they begin
to blow up their air-mattresses, they were belittled for their weakness by
Wilfred Thesiger, the inveterate traveller, dressed only in ‘an old tweed
jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-
soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter’.
Several years later, in the fall of 2018, I spent a sabbatical semester as
an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. My hosts,
Eugene Rogan and Homa Katouzian, saw little of me as I was determined
to complete a first full draft of this manuscript. I will never forget my
daily routine that fall in Oxford: walking from Folly Bridge through Christ
Church Meadows on my way to Jericho Coffee on High Street; watching
the morning bustle against the backdrop of Brasenose College; waiting to
be let in to the Radcliffe Library just before it officially opened at 9:00 am
in order to get my favorite seat; lunching at the Vault and Gardens and, if
I needed a change of scene, spending the afternoon up in the coffee lounge
at Turl Street Kitchens. Oxford was an idyllic writing retreat. I am counting
the days until I return.
viii ] Islamic Modernism
Lastly, thanks to friends and family for your encouragement, and at critical
moments, your patience, as this project consumed me. You know who you
are. My daughter, Soraya, has always counted herself as ‘my biggest fan.’ I
trust she knows that I am hers as well.
Monica M. Ringer
May 2020
INTRODUCTION:
HISTORICISM, MODERNITY AND RELIGION
The wonderful adaptability of the Islamic precepts for all ages and nations;
their entire concordance with the light of Reason; the absence of all mysteri-
ous doctrines to cast a shade of sentimental ignorance round the primal truths
implanted in the human breast,– all prove that Islam represents the latest devel-
opment of the religious faculties of our being.1
Syed Ameer Ali (1873)
The modern project will not be accomplished until belief in the supernatural,
in whatever form it takes, is destroyed, just as belief in magic and sorcery have
already been. All of that is of the same order.2
Ernest Renan (1848)
Introduction
On Friday, 18 May 1883, the Parisian Journal des débats politiques et littéraires
published an article by ‘Cheik Gemmal Eddine’ (Sheikh Jamal al-Din) who,
the editors noted by way of introduction, ‘has come to Paris to learn our lan-
guage in order to study sciences and European civilization’.3 In this article,
Jamal al-Din, the peripatetic journalist, intellectual and political activist
famous as ‘al-Afghani’, proposed a corrective to renown French Orientalist
Ernest Renan’s speech presented fifty days earlier at the Sorbonne entitled
1
Ali, Life and Teachings of Mohammad, 187.
2
Renan, L’Avenir de la Science, 766.
3
Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 18 May 1883, p. 3. Published precisely fifty
days after their publication of Renan’s lecture at the Sorbonne entitled ‘Islam and
Science’.
[1]
2] Islamic Modernism
‘Islam and Science’, which was subsequently published in the same journal.4
In it, Renan argued that Islam was a metaphoric ‘iron band’ crowning the
heads of Muslims that prevented rational and scientific thought and which
therefore accounted for Islamic societies’ backwardness vis-à-vis Europe.
Afghani took issue with Renan’s characterisation of Islam as uniquely hostile
to science. Instead, he proposed that the same held true for all religions:
Religions, by whatever names they are called, all resemble each other. No agree-
ment and no reconciliation are possible between these religions and philosophy.
Religion imposes on man its faith and its belief, whereas philosophy frees him
of it totally or in part.5
Renan and Afghani, despite important differences, agreed on the same

operating assumption, namely, that religion was in conflict with science
and thus inhibited progress. Their dispute was symptomatic of the larger
debates concerning religion and science that raged throughout the nine-
teenth century – not only in Christian Europe, but also in Islamic societies.
The conflict between religion and science was not, therefore, a specifically
Christian conundrum, but also an Islamic one.
Despite their open criticisms of religion, both Renan and Afghani were
religious modernists, dedicated to the reconciliation of modernity and reli-
gion. Humans, they insisted, were homo religiosus; they could not dispense
with religion. At the same time, modern civilisation required a rupture with
religion as currently understood and practised.
The conflict between religion and science was understood as indicative
of the larger question of generating modernity and progress. As Afghani
confessed in a rhetorical flourish at the end of his article, ‘It is permissible to
ask oneself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such a live light on
the world, suddenly became extinguished; why this torch has not been relit
since; and why the Arab world still remains buried in profound darkness.’6
For Afghani and Renan alike, Islam was to blame. At the same time, Afghani
proposed that Islam was also the solution– t he means of relighting the torch
of civilisation and progress.
Afghani’s ‘Response to Renan’ was the first, but not the last, of the Muslim
refutations of Renan’s increasingly infamous lecture. By the turn of the
4
Ernest Renan (1823–92) was one of the most famous nineteenth-century French
philologists and Orientalists, and held the renowned Chair of Hebrew at
the Collège de France. In his day he was considered one of France’s leading
intellectuals alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert and Stendhal. His renown stretched
from academic and intellectual circles into political and popular circles due both
to the controversies surrounding him, as well as to his widely read, and equally
widely criticised, Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus), first published in 1863.
5
Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 18 May 1883, p. 3.
6
Afghani, ‘Answer of Jamal ad-Din to Renan’, in Keddie, An Islamic Response, 187.
Historicism, Modernity and Religion [3
century, at least four other refutations had been penned by Muslim intel-
lectuals, ranging in order of publication from Ataullah Bayezidof (1883), Ali
Ferruh (1887), Syed Ameer Ali (1901) and Namık Kemal (1908). Scholars well
into the twentieth century continued to write refutations, including Celal
Nuri and Mohamed Abduh.7 As Afghani noted in his article in the Journal des
débats, Renan was ‘the great philosopher of our times. . . whose name was
renown throughout the entire Occident and had penetrated in the furthest
counties of the Orient’.8
These refutations demonstrate that debates concerning the relationship of
religion and science did not operate in isolation. Islamic modernists were in
conversation with each other, even as they were in conversation with reli-
gious modernists from other religious traditions. In particular, Islamic mod-
ernists engaged in religious reform in an age of European colonialism and
attendant claims of ownership of ‘modernity’ and ‘civilization’. So, whereas
the editors of Journal des débats positioned Afghani as a seeker of ‘European
civilization’, Islamic modernists articulated their own Islamic genealogy of
modernity, progress and civilisation. Islamic modernism lies not only at the
nexus of the relationship of religion to modernity, but also at the nexus of
European and non-European modernities. Understanding Islamic modern-
ism in the context of other nineteenth-century religious modernisms is the
project of this book.
Modernity as Disenchantment?
Max Weber’s famous articulation of modernity as the ‘age of disenchant-
ment’9 long reigned as an accurate depiction of the irreligion that presum-
ably lay at the heart of modernity. For Weber, ‘disenchantment’ was an
inevitable consequence of progress from savagery to modern civilisation.10
Disenchantment entailed both triumph and loss– the breaking of the spell
of magic, the renunciation of illusions, the shining of the light of truth into
the dark corners of ignorance; yet at the same time, the fading of the ‘sense
7
For a bibliographical discussion of all the Muslim refutations to Renan’s lecture, see
Cündioğlu, ‘Ernest Renan ve “reddiyeler” bağlamında Islam-bilim tartişmalarına
bibliografik birkatke’, 1–94.
8
In the original, al-Afghani describes Renan as ‘le grand philosophe de notre temps,
l’illustré M. Renan, dont la renommé a rempli tout l’Occident et pénétré dans les
pays plus éloignés de l’Orient’, Journal des débats, 3.
9
Max Weber described modernity as concomitant with the ‘progressive
disenchantment of the world’ in a lecture given in 1917. Weber, ‘The Disenchantment
of Modern Life’.
10
Weber described those people who believed in and practised magic, in other words,
people who gave credence to magic as explanatory, as ‘savage’. He opposes this
worldview with modern ‘civilized’ man who has abandoned magic and embraced
‘the truth of science, which alone seizes not upon illusions and shadows but upon
the true being’. See Weber, ‘The Disenchantment of Modern Life’.
of mystery’ and exile from the ‘enchanted’ world.11 Regardless of one’s per-
spective on the (dis)advantages of disenchantment, modernity was under-
stood as necessitating a distancing from, if not open antagonism to, religion.
Otherwise put, the emergence of the modern spelled the end of religion, of
long-cherished religious accounts of the world, of history, and of human-
kind’s place in history. Natural law replaced miracles; and an evolutionary,
geological account of the world, with humankind emerging only towards the
very end, replaced older, biblical accounts of Creation. Modernity is closely
associated with the secular, the absence if not downright rejection of religion
as historically explanatory or philosophically meaningful. This understand-
ing of modernity remains influential. Charles Taylor reiterated Weber’s
understanding of modernity when he stated:
Everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ances-
tors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world and we
do not, or at the least much less so. We might think of this as our having ‘lost’
a number of beliefs and the practices that they made possible. Essentially, we
become modern by breaking out of ‘superstition’ and becoming more scientific
and technological in our stance toward our world.12
This narrative first emerged in the Enlightenment, long perceived as the cru-
cible of modernity and, with it, secularism. As Jonathan Sheehan explains,
‘The old consensus saw an Enlightenment forcing religion into the corners
of human experience and destroying the stories it told about nature, society,
and mankind.’13
Now, almost exactly one hundred years after Weber’s impassioned plea to
embrace ‘disenchantment’, scholars acknowledge that the modern has wit-
nessed neither the absence of religion nor the triumph of secularism. Religion
has not exited the stage of history. The study of modernity has faltered in
accounting for the discrepancy between modernity as it has been claimed,
and modernity as it is. Is the persistence of religion evidence of the failure to
become modern– the enduring residue of the pre-modern or anti-modern?
Or have we not defined modernity in ways that can account for the presence
of religion? What is modernity, if not disenchantment?14
The problem of understanding modernity has spilled over into our con-
ception of the Enlightenment– the crucible of modernity – long affirmed
as a project of disenchantment. Was or was not secularism central to the
Enlightenment project of rationalism? If so, then did Enlightenment fail? If
not, then what was the Enlightenment? As David Sorkin argues, we need
11
Taylor, A Secular Age, 2.
12
Taylor, ‘Afterward: Apologia pro Libro suo’, 302–3.
13
Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization’, 1065–6.
14
For a discussion of the scholarship on western modernity as ‘enchanted’, see Saler,
‘Modernity and Enchantment’, 692–716.
to completely rethink the Enlightenment project. ‘Contrary to the secular

master narrative’, he argues, ‘the Enlightenment was not only compatible
with religious belief but conducive to it. The Enlightenment made possible
new iterations of faith.’15
These questions are further complicated by the ongoing centrality of
what I term ‘the definitional puzzle’. How, in other words, do we define
the Enlightenment and modernity? Which components are essential, and
which tangential? Modernity, as a definition, emerged exclusively in a
binary relationship– it consistently relies on casting itself as the antithesis
of a constructed ‘other’– w hether this other is ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’, or
‘secularism’ and ‘secular’– modernity sustains itself by claiming a rupture,
a rejection. Modernity juxtaposed itself to definitions of tradition that it
itself generated. Similarly, ‘religion’ as a term emerged in the context of the
quintessentially phenomenological and comparative enterprise of explain-
ing difference over time and space as a consequence of European travel
and exploration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The utility of
‘religion’ as a category of analysis is inversely proportional to its specificity.
In order to be meaningful, it has to be specific, but to invoke comparison
necessarily leads to its flattening out and the impoverishment of meaning.
Religion was deployed in the Enlightenment project of constructing secular-
ism as religion’s ‘other’. Both terms, modernity and religion, therefore, glean
meaning from claims of rupture and difference – from their (artificial) con-
struction of their necessary ‘other’. Modernity as an age of disenchantment
is inherently a modern myth.16 The powerful binary of modernity versus
religion has been carried forward into the study of modernity, which has
long evaluated modernity as either present or absent. Societies are, in this
reckoning, either modern or not.
The historiography of modernity has been caught up in this definitional
quagmire. Scholars have attempted to offer alternative definitions of modernity
in order to resolve the discrepancy between modernity defined as antithetical
to religion, and the ongoing presence, and relevance, of religion. However, any
definition turns out to be empirically unverifiable. It is not enough to propose,
for example, that Scottish modernity is fundamentally different from Ottoman
modernity; even within a ‘national’ or local modernity, there are profound var-
iants.17 The fragmentation of modernity into all of its particular manifestations
represents an endless process of definitional Balkanisation.18 Modernity resists
definition; like puzzle pieces assembled from various puzzles, definitions are
15
Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 3.
16
Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment’, 692–3.
17
For a discussion of the current state of the historiography of the Enlightenment, see
Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion’ and O’Brien, ‘The Return of the Enlightenment’,
1426–35.
18
For a discussion of the heterogeneity and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment’s
project of modernity, see Conrad, ‘Enlightenment in Global History’, 999–1027.
repeatedly taken up, but resist piecing together. Nor is the solution to abandon
modernity altogether, to suggest that perhaps modernity does not exist or that
the Enlightenment did not take place.19
Approaching the problem differently, Sheehan suggests that scholars
interrogate the definitions themselves. ‘What would it mean,’ Sheehan
wonders,
for the idea of the Enlightenment if it came to include religion? Can a category
defined by its opposition to superstition, faith, and revelation survive when this
opposition disappears? What would a reconciliation of the Enlightenment and
religion mean to the story of modernity’s origins?20
Other scholars have also suggested that we move away from struggling with
‘the definitional puzzle’, to consider the Enlightenment as a process. In other
words, putting definitions as truths aside, we ought to focus instead on the
‘strategies’ or the ‘media’ of the production of modernity.21 Secularism, in
this vision, Sheehan writes,
would be an account of how new ‘religions’ were produced in and through the
media of the Enlightenment. It would be an account of how religion was made
modern, how it was reconstructed in such a way as to incorporate it into the
fabric of modernity.22
Along the same lines, Karen O’Brien proposes a refocusing on the

Enlightenment as a process, when ‘specific ways of knowing and talking
about nature were sanctioned or discounted’.23 Florian Zemmin, too, sug-
gests that scholars focus on the ‘epistemic frameworks of Modernity’.24
I agree that we need to shift our focus from ‘finding the right definition’ to
exploring the relationship of religion to modernity’s epistemic framework.
I propose that we push this reconceptualisation of the Enlightenment and
modernity further to reimagine both their nature and their relationship to one
another. I am convinced that there is a missing link– an intellectual epistemic
revolution– which, once properly understood, renders the Enlightenment
and modernity comprehensible and accounts for both commonalities and
variations of modernities. This missing link is historicism.
We should view the Enlightenment as a process of the digestion and
assimilation of ideas and implications of the Scientific Revolution and ‘Age
of Discovery’. The implications of these ideas gradually, over the course of
19
Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion’.
20
Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion’, 1067.
21
Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion’, 1079–80.
22
Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion’, 1076–7; see also 1079–80.
23
O’Brien, ‘The Return of the Enlightenment’, 1429.
24
Zemmin, Modernity in Islamic Traditions, 166.
the eighteenth century, coalesced into a particular constellation– a n inter-

related cluster of ideas that were mutually constitutive– which ultimately
resulted in a fundamental epistemological and methodological shift in land-
scape. This constellation, which I will call historicism, produced an intellec-
tual revolution.
This new intellectual landscape of historicism necessitated, and enabled,
a fundamental reconceptualisation of ideas, a redefinition of definitions, a
reconstitution of epistemological and methodological assumptions about
humankind and humankind’s relationship in the world over time and
place. By the end of the eighteenth century, science, history and religion
had been fundamentally reconceived and redefined, epistemologically and
methodologically.
Historicism gave rise to claims to modernity as a civilisational level. In
other words, modernity is the product of the penetration of historicism as
a set of assumptions about the nature of history and humankind’s place in
it. Historicism was the earthquake that fundamentally reshaped the intel-
lectual landscape– and produced new epistemological and methodological
‘conditions of possibility’.25 Definitions of modernity arise as consequences
of the passage through the terrain of historicism. As ideas and institutions,
intellectual assumptions and practices travelled through this landscape, they
were reshaped, reconceived and redefined. Historicism, as epistemology and
methodology, both necessitated and allowed for the reconceptualisation of
science, of history and of religion. The result was modernity.
The slow digestion of the imperatives of historicism is demonstrated by
the famous ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ which erupted in the
early seventeenth century. The nature of the quarrel ostensibly concerned the
relative value of ancient versus contemporary literary and aesthetic models.
Yet at a more abstract level, the quarrel was symptomatic of the gradual
development and consolidation of historicism. At stake was the nature of
history. Was it flat? In other words, could ancient models be emulated, or, as
historicist understandings of history would have it, were there fundamental
ruptures in history which made precedent as emulation irrelevant. Joseph
Levine points to the epistemic implications of historicism when he explains
that the quarrel was ‘always and everywhere about history, about the
meaning and use of the past and about the method of apprehending it’.26 As
Jacques Bos describes: ‘[moderns] argued that the literary and artistic norms
of the ancient world were not necessarily applicable in the cultural context
of the present. The present, in other words, is fundamentally different from
the past.’27
25
De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, chapter IX ‘Spatial Stories’.
26
Levine, ‘Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered’, 84. On the quarrel, see also Leerssen,
‘The Rise of Philology’, 23–35; and Bos, ‘Nineteenth-Century Historicism and its
Predecessors’, 133.
27
Bos, ‘Nineteenth-Century Historicism’, 137.
Arnaldo Momigliano proposed that Edward Gibbon successfully navi-

gated between the two shores of the quarrel and as a consequence, put an
end to the squabbling.28 I see Gibbon differently, as a historian who suc-
cessfully employed historicism as method and epistemology. Gibbon’s The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire thereby marks the petering out of the
quarrel, not because Gibbon reconciled, or synthesised, the two ‘sides’, but
because Decline and Fall evidenced the successful absorption of historicism. It
was his historicist method, I believe, that accounted for Gibbon’s enormous
standing. Decline and Fall was the ‘climactic work of eighteenth-century
historiography . . .’29 As Henry Hart Milman, an English historian and com-
mitted ecclesiastic, observed in his 1838 introduction to Gibbon, ‘The great
work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history . . . It has obtained
undisputed possession, as rightful occupant, of the vast period which it
comprehends.’30
Returning to the idea of disenchantment, with the penetration of histori-
cism, older definitions and locations of religion gave way to new definitions
and locations in the construction of the modern. Disenchantment spelled
the end of certain ways of understanding and practising religion, but simul-
taneously, gave rise to new concepts and practices. The religion that was
abandoned was delegitimised as ‘traditional’ whereas the religion that was
newly embraced was legitimised as ‘modern’. We need to relinquish the
immutability of the term ‘religion’ and instead see it as unstable and in a
process of continual redefinition. We can read Weber’s disenchantment
thus as not only signifying the loss of enchantment of tradition as eternal
and unconstructed, the breaking of the spell of religious truth, but also of
the attendant redefinition and relocation of religion into the modern that
resulted. While magic was denounced as false consciousness of the Divine,
and while miracles were renounced as primitive ignorance of natural law,
this did not mean the end of religion in the modern. Disenchantment facili-
tated re-enchantment as some definitions of religion were abandoned and
others constructed.
This process of translating religion from pre-modern definitions and loca-
tions to ‘modern’ definitions and locations occurred over the course of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as evidenced by the ubiquitous conflict
between ‘science and religion’. David Sorkin argues that ‘religious enlight-
eners’ were deeply engaged in reconciling science and religion throughout
the eighteenth century. He notes that they believed that enlightenment and
faith were ‘compatible if not identical goals’.31 As Sorkin explains, ‘religious
enlighteners’ advocated for the unity of truth:
28
Momigliano, ‘Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method’, 452–4.
29
Levine, ‘Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered’, 88.
30
Henry Hart Milman, Prebendary of St Peter’s, and vicar of St Margaret’s
Westminster, preface to Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, iii.
31
Religious enlighteners championed ideas of reasonableness and natural reli-

gion, toleration and natural law that aimed to inform, and in some cases reform,
established religion. Religious enlighteners were theologians, clergy, and reli-
gious thinkers who were fully committed partisans and reformers of their own
tradition.32
For Sorkin, ‘the religious Enlightenment constituted a conscious search for

a middle way between extremes’,33 or what, I would suggest, is best under-
stood as a project of translation. According to Sorkin, the French Revolution
of 1789 led to the hardening of the binaries of religion and secularism,
which ‘destroyed the religious Enlightenment’.34 Nonetheless, the process
of marrying religion with modernity via the agency of historicism continued
throughout the nineteenth century in many religious traditions, including
Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam.
Viewing modernity as a product of historicism enables us to disentangle
modernity’s own claims from empirical reality. We should therefore focus on
what modernity claims to be, claims that present themselves as a set of defi-
nitions that function to (de)legitimise certain ideas and practices in certain
contexts. We need to investigate the stories that modernity tells of itself, as
the politics of claims and definitions, rather than being seduced into reifying
claims as truths.
This conception of the relationship between modernity and religion also
resolves the thorny issue of accounting for the multivalence of moderni-
ties. Commonalities are due to this shared historicist landscape – confined
to the boundaries of possible routes through this terrain. Disparities are the
product of different routes taken– different contexts, be they political, social
or religious. This perspective enables us to speak meaningfully of differences
between religious traditions– for example, European Christian modernity
versus Hindu modernity versus Islamic modernity – but equally, if not more
importantly, differences within the same religious tradition. We can under-
stand ways in which definitions and locations of religion proposed by dif-
ferent religious modernists are a function of their position within the larger
field of Christian or Hindu or Islamic modernities.
In Europe by the nineteenth century historicism had emerged as normative
– it had achieved the status of doxa, an unconscious epistemology, or
in Casanova’s formulation, ‘an unthought’.35 But the development and
32
33
34
Sorkin notes that ‘The French Revolution was “that volcano-crater,” in Carlyle’s
words, that so forcefully jolted Europe as to constitute a seismic shift. Europe’s
political and cultural terrain was irrevocably altered, and in a manner that virtually
eliminated the religious Enlightenment.’ See Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment,
21, 311.
35
Casanova, ‘The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms’, 57.
10 ] Islamic Modernism
a doption of historicism in Europe, and the resulting claims to modernity, are

not uniquely European stories. Historicism penetrated well beyond Europe.
Religious modernists, in other words, intellectuals engaged in redefining
and relocating religion as a means of claiming the modern, hailed from many
different religious traditions.
This book takes up the story of Islamic modernism as a subset of nineteenth-
century religious modernisms. A comparative perspective enables us to
establish the contours of nineteenth-century religious modernisms and to
explore commonalities and differences between them. Moreover, an investi-
gation of Islamic modernism also offers insights into the nature of modernity
itself, and its deeply contested relationship to Europe.
To take one example, Europeans typically claimed that the separation of
religion from law demonstrated Christianity’s superiority to Judaism and
Islam. Islamic modernists disagreed with this evaluation. So, whereas Lord
Cromer declared that Islam ‘crystallises religion and law into one insepa-
rable and immutable whole, with the result that all elasticity is taken away
from the social sphere’, this was not the only possible interpretation of reli-
gion to modernity. Indian lawyer, intellectual and Islamic modernist, Syed
Ameer Ali, argued that religion must buttress laws. ‘The glory of Islam,’ he
insisted, ‘consists in having embodied the beautiful sentiment of Jesus into
definite laws.’36 ‘The compatibility of the laws promulgated by Mohammed
with every stage of progress,’ he explained, ‘shows their founder’s wisdom.
The elasticity of laws is the great test of their beneficence and usefulness,
and this merit is eminently possessed by those of Islam.’37 The objective of
scholarship on religious modernisms should not be to decide which perspec-
tive is ‘correct’– that is, which is ‘modern’ and which is not– b
ut to explore
possible definitions and locations of religion for ways in which they claimed
modernity in particular political, social and religious contexts. As Sorkin
persuasively argues in the context of the European Enlightenment, ‘We
must renounce the temptation, however intellectually seductive or politi-
cally expedient, to designate any one version, either in any one place at any
one time, or in any one cultural or religious tradition, the Enlightenment.’38
Similarly, we must resist the temptation to assume that particular, European
modernities are more ‘true’ than others.
The Landscape of Historicism

Historicism is often cited as central to nineteenth-century European intel-
lectual history. Johannes Zachuber describes the adoption of historicism as
‘a paradigm shift in European thought if ever there was any’.39 Chakrabarty
36
Ali, Life and Teachings of Mohammed, 183.
37
Ali, Life and Teachings of Mohammed, 227.
38
39
Zachhuber, Theology as Science, 4.
Historicism, Modernity and Religion [ 11
emphasises its importance in the development of ‘political modernity’ yet

confesses that historicism ‘is not a term that lends itself to easy and precise
definitions’.40 For all that historicism is recognised as constituting a paradig-
matic shift, one that denoted the modern, the nature and timing of this shift
remains obscure. Rather than assigning one particular moment as its begin-
ning, a ‘big bang’ origin, historicism has a complex genealogy. Various ideas
were emerging in the Enlightenment in the works of Spinoza, Vico, Voltaire,
Montesquieu, Hume and others, that would gradually coalesce into a fully
developed historicism by the nineteenth century.41 A detailed exploration
of the emergence and development of historicism in the eighteenth century
must remain outside the scope of this project. This book takes up the project
of articulating the epistemology and attendant methodology of historicism
in its fully developed form in the nineteenth century, in order to illuminate
ways in which Islamic modernist thought translated Islam into the modern
and, in so doing, claimed the torch of progress and civilisation.
Historicism is most accurately described as a constellation of ideas includ-
ing progress, universalism, comparativism, evolution, civilisation, human-
ism and science, to name the most salient. These ideas orbited around the
central concept of context. Contexts were discreet, bounded and finite –
spatially and temporally specific– sui generis. Each society in historical time
and space was thus embedded in and reflective of its particular context in
what Reinhardt Koselleck, following de Certeau, terms ‘the conditions of
possibility’.42 Accordingly, ideas and institutions, customs and practices, all
belonged to and participated in the same context. They reflected it and were
mutually sustaining.
History was comprised of a series of discreet contexts, like beads on a
string – linked, yet individually distinct. Indicative of this historicist concep-
tion of history was the belief in the fundamental difference, the ‘foreignness’,
of one context to another. In other words, that as discreet and contained,
contexts were qualitatively different from one another. By the nineteenth
century, frequent allusions appear concerning the rupture between times or
‘ages’. For example, Rousseau wrote that ‘the Mankind of one age is not the
Mankind of another age’.43 Expressing a similar viewpoint, Indian reformer
40
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 22.
41
Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Theologico-Political Treatise (1670); Gianbattista Vico
(1668–1744), Scienza Nuova (1725); Voltaire (1694–1778), An Essay on Universal
History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations, From the Reign of Charlemagne to the Age
of Lewis XIV (1757); Montesquieu (1689–1755), Considerations on the Causes of the
Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734); and David Hume (1711–76), The
History of England (1754–62), are some of the key individuals whose works figure
prominently in the genealogy of historicism. See Bod, Maat and Weststeijn (eds),
The Making of the Humanities.
42
Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 3.
43
Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses, as quoted in Sheehan, ‘When was
Disenchantment?’, 226.
Syed Ameer Ali frequently referred to what he called the ‘circumstances

of the age’.44 Historicism functioned as both a concept and a method– the
presumption of and location in historical context. Societies were context-
specific, defined by and bound by their historical contexts. To historicise was
to reveal and position in context, to understand the internal dynamics, and
limits of possibility, of that particular historical moment.
As each historical time was unique contextually, the past also became
‘othered’ and ‘estranged’.45 The difference between past and present contexts
made emulation, imitation and replication of the past an absurd enterprise.
The perception of a civilisational rupture between present and past, the
‘pastness’ of the past,46 made the past into an object of inquiry. The foreign-
ness of one context to another meant that contexts had to be understood and
evaluated on their own terms. Historicism involved the contextualisation of
the past and the reconstruction of past contexts. Historical criticism involved
the impartial, critical assembling and weighing of ‘empirical’ historical data
about particular cultures, in order to reconstruct the contours of particular
contexts. Impartiality and the intellectual freedom to look with fresh eyes
were critical components of criticism, which positioned itself as scientific,
and vehemently opposed any constraints such as dogma or tradition which
constituted ‘blind’ acceptance.
Alongside historical criticism, the nineteenth-century historian’s toolbelt
included what I term ‘historical empathy’. Whereas historical criticism might
fruitfully be understood as the deployment of critical distance, ‘historical
empathy’ involved the deployment of emotional proximity in order to recon-
struct and imagine ‘foreign’ contexts. Historical empathy was understood as
transportative – physically and temporally. The historian, through empathy,
could be transported to a different context via this methodological ‘rabbit
hole’. The historian moved virtually into a different space and time, but
retained the critical distance that derived from their own context. Emotion
and visual experience were both thought to have ‘connective’ effects that
enabled a certain intrinsic connection between the historian and their object
of study. Vision and experience created the capacity for empathy – the
immersion of ‘Self’ in a foreign context– and thus provided an enhanced
perception of the ‘Others’ context.
The nineteenth-century historian was trapped between the desire to
overcome historical distance, and the recognition of the limitations of this
possibility. The deployment of ‘historical empathy’ was a powerful method-
ological point of contention in the nineteenth century. Some scholars insisted
on the retention of critical, impartial distance, whereas others believed in the
value of generating emotional proximity. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in
44
Ali, Life and Teachings of Mohammed, 234–5.
45
Zammito, ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s)’, 323.
46
Bos, citing Auerbach. Bos, ‘Nineteenth-Century Historicism and its Predecessors’,
8.
his History of England (1848–1861), advocated for the importance of imagina-

tion when he wrote:
To make the past present, to bring the distant near. . . to call up our ancestors
before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show
us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned
wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these parts of the
duty which properly belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the
historical novelist.47
Other scholars vehemently disagreed. Leopold van Ranke (1795–1886), oft

cited as the father of ‘modern’ historicist method, insisted on ‘sticking to
facts’.48 ‘I resolve to avoid in my work,’ Ranke wrote, ‘all imagination and all
invention, and to hold myself absolutely to facts.’49 This is the impetus which
lies behind Ranke’s famous statement of purpose, to study history ‘as it actu-
ally happened’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen).50
The perception of history as a series of contexts entailed two possible con-
sequences. The first, that all is constructed and context-specific; the second,
that there exists something other than context, something that, by defini-
tion, transcends context; something permanent, ahistorical and absolute, an
eternal immutable truth– in other words, ‘essence’. Twentieth-century rela-
tivism committed to the first option; nineteenth-century historical thought to
the second. Essence, rather than being inimical to the embrace of historicism,
was intimately bound up with it.
The notion of essence was imbued with its genesis– its time and place
of origin. Origins were the location of primordial essence akin to the DNA
of a culture. Origin as essence contained agency – the inherent potential of
future civilisational development. Language and religion were the principal
components of essence. Language embodied intellectual and creative pos-
sibility; religion embodied both intellectual and moral capacity. Essence
was expressed in context, in the ‘customs and manners’ of a given culture,
which included science, arts, religion and literature, as well as gender rela-
tions (marital customs, the status of women), freedom/bondage (slavery),
47
Lika, ‘Fact and Fancy in Nineteenth-Century Historiography’, 152, citing Macaulay,
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 1, 188–9.
48
Lika, ‘Fact and Fancy’, 154.
49
Ranke’s original statement reads: ‘Je pris la résolution d’éviter, dans mes travaux,
toute imagination et toute invention et de m’en tenir sévèrement aux faits.’ Cited
in Lika, ‘Fact and Fancy’, 154.
50
Ranke’s sentence in context is as follows: ‘To history has been assigned the office
of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To
such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually
happened.’ Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514,
introduction. For a discussion on the particular translation of Ranke’s phrase, see
Gilbert, ‘Historiography: What Ranke Meant’, 393–7.
technology (military triumph, architecture) and religion.51 Language and

religion were thus the most salient markers of the level of civilisation of a
particular culture. Max Müller, one of the most important theorists of the
discipline of religious studies, in a letter read aloud at the Congress of the
History of Religions held in 1900 in Paris, claimed that ‘everyone today
seems completely familiar with the idea that whomever only knows one reli-
gion, knows none, and that one cannot understand a religion if one does not
know its origin and history’.52
The association of origin with essence explains nineteenth- century
scholarly preoccupations with the ‘Ur’ as origins– the Ursprache, the ‘Ur’
monotheism. The quest for origins was ubiquitous and manifest in attempts
to determine the origin of mankind, the origin of Christianity, the origin of
language, the origins of government, human inequality, and so on. This idea
witnessed it zenith in the quest to identify the language of Paradise.53 This
grail linked the works of Hobbes and Rousseau with Feuerbach and Darwin,
and inspired such diverse classificatory disciplines as archaeology, philology
and religious studies, as well as anthropology and biology.54
Philology, religious studies and history were all animated by this histori-
cist understanding of history as the travelling of essence through different
contexts. Human civilisational progress could be charted by these voyages,
by the passing of the torch of civilisation from one culture to another.
Philology undertook the excavation of essence from context, by attempting
to retrieve and reconstitute ‘original’ and thus ‘pure’ languages from the
vicissitudes of time. Franz Bopp developed the ‘family tree’ organisation of
languages to convey their relationships with one another. Related languages
were different parts of the same tree, with common roots even as they gradu-
ally diverged from each other along different branches.55 Charles Darwin
was influenced by Bopp’s linguistic tree and employed a similar visual idiom
to represent evolution.56
Jacob and Wilhelm, ‘The Brothers Grimm’, best known for their collection
of fairy tales, were philologists. They believed that language was a carrier of
culture and thus indicative of civilisational evolution. Philology was more
than the study of grammar– it was the linguistic archaeology of origins– t he
51
Leerssen, ‘The Rise of Philology’, 24.
52
Réville (ed.), Actes du premier Congrès international d’histoire des religions réuni a Paris,
du 3 au 8 septembre 1900 à l’occasion de l’Exposition Universelle, 35.
53
Olender, The Languages of Paradise.
54
The capaciousness of the quest for origins is evident in Hobbes, Leviathan (1651);
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755); Ludwig
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841); Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
(1857); and in Protestant biblical criticism and the genre of ‘the quest for the
historical Jesus’ exemplified by David Fredrich Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu (The Life of
Jesus) (1835) and Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus) (1863).
55
56
excavation of the trail of human civilisational progress. Philology could take

the scholar into prehistory, a place in the past much earlier than the earliest
written evidence. Folklore, like language, accumulated new elements as it
travelled through different contexts, even as it retained older ones– residual
traces of more primitive times– o f earlier stages of the civilisational journey.
As Orientalist Émile-Louis Bournouf (1821–1907) explained, it permitted the
retrieval of ‘religious ideas that, in the distant past, were common among
an entire race of men, as well as that which their descendants added much
later’.57 The step by step retrieval of original, ‘pure’ words from their his-
torical distortions, like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs, indicated
the path home back through civilisational time to the word in its original,
‘pure’ form. It is no coincidence that the frontispiece of the Grimm’s German
Dictionary published in 1854–71 included a vignette with the phrase: ‘In the
beginning was the word.’58
Adopting similar methods as philologists, religious studies scholars
worked to identify the essence of particular religions– the pure, inherent,
primordial form in which they were ‘born’. This methodology underpinned
the burgeoning of Semitic studies as fundamental to the establishment of
Jesus’ Jewish context, and the archaeological pursuit of the ‘essence’ of
Christianity.59 Only a knowledge of Jesus’ context, scholars insisted, could
enable the sifting out of that which belonged to his context from that which
was transcendent, universal and eternal.60 Historical time, thus, was the
march of human progress from savagery to civilisation, even as it also
entailed the gradual accretion of historical detritus. Scholars looked to the
future, even as they were preoccupied with discovering the primordial past.
Historical method was propelled by similar imperatives. In order to locate
the particular within the universal, historians needed to identify and ‘tag’
each culture as belonging to one or another civilisational level. As an explic-
itly comparative enterprise, historians sought to understand each culture’s
context, and to evaluate and locate it on a civilisational continuum. Religion
and language were essential, and thus viewed as the most salient markers
of the level of civilisation of a particular culture. Historicism thus embraced
the twin projects of locating cultures by dint of their religious ‘essence’ on
a universal taxonomy of progress, as well as explaining change over time
within a culture, based on the relationship of religious/linguistic essence to
changing context.
57
Burnouf, ‘La Science des Religions: sa méthode et ses limites’, 2.
58
The full biblical sentence is: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with
God, and God was the word.’ John 1:1. See Leerssen, ‘The Rise of Philology’, 30–1.
Grimms’ fairy tales were first published in 1812.
59
Thus, the application of historicism to biblical studies also resulted in the attempt to
retrieve the ‘essence’ of Christianity from history in a genre that would be termed
the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’. See Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus.
60
Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism.
History emerged as the story of universal civilisational progress.

Civilisation was imagined as a series of steps, or levels, that displayed
particular characteristics. Cultures were assigned to these different levels
of civilisation according to their ‘civilisational’ features. Primitive cultures
exhibited primitive features; advanced cultures exhibited advanced features.
Writ large, history was the charting of the progress of the torch of civilisa-
tion as it progressed from civilisational level to civilisational level, carried
forward by one culture before being taken up by another, more advanced
culture. At the granular level, history involved the location of specific cul-
tures within the universal civilisational hierarchy, the stringing together of
all cultures, past and present, in order of civilisational progress. Each culture
needed to be understood on its own terms, as reflective of and bounded
by its particular context, even as it could then be located within the larger,
comparative framework of human civilisational progress. Historicism, as
contextualisation, was thus a tool for understanding contexts in their par-
ticulars, as well as the movement from one context to another, the crossing of
civilisational thresholds. Historicism was the principle means of locating and
retrieving essence from history – only context could reveal its nemesis– that
which transcended context.
The explanation of difference in the nineteenth century moved away
from a theologically based true/false binary, to a location within a universal
evolutionary timeline. Religion, as phenomenological and thus comparable,
emerged as a category of analysis. All religions were ‘true’ in the sense of
their impulse to understand the Divine, but this truth was historically con-
tingent.61 Religious difference was understood as a function of greater or
lesser consciousness of the truth of the Divine, determined by the level of
civilisation; religious difference was civilisational difference. Primitive reli-
gions were characteristic of primitive civilisations, and advanced religions
characteristic of advanced, more evolved civilisations. Religions were organ-
ised along a civilisational continuum from primitive (savage) to the more
‘advanced’ level of polytheism (barbarism) and, ultimately, monotheisms.
Primitive religions were identified by particular features, such as the empha-
sis on performative, ‘mechanistic’ rituals, anthropomorphism and religious
explanations of natural law (miracles, weather, and so forth) whereas mono-
theisms were categorised, and thus claimed, as spiritual, ethical and rational.
This universalist, civilisational progress of religions cum civilisations gener-
ated a hierarchical taxonomy whereby cultures were located and classified
according to their level of religion.
The scholarly investigation of primitive cultures and religions was thus
a means of time travel– of the historical recovery of the various strata of
human civilisational development. As anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–
1917) explained in his influential book Primitive Culture, ‘the phenomena of
Culture [sic] may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a probable
61
Stroumsa, ‘History of Religions: The Comparative Moment’, 326.
order of evolution’.62 Primitive cultures were mined for the light that they
shed on human development more generally, not simply for what they
might illustrate about a particular society in time. They were viewed as
‘relics’ of earlier civilizational eras– as pockets of time/space that had not
progressed, but that had somehow remained fixed in an earlier civilisational
moment, preserved like insects in amber.
Historicism, via the new, scientific disciplines of history, philology and
religious studies, permitted both the identification of context and the pri-
mordial, unchanging ‘essence’ of a given culture. Civilisational progress was
a function not only of historical development as changing context, but of the
interaction in context of essences of religion and language. Languages, like
religions, were symptomatic of the ‘genius of each people’ and thus indica-
tive of their inherent civilisational potential.63 Indo-European languages,
European philologists insisted, were by dint of their grammatical struc-
tures, conducive to creativity and rational thought, which in turn created
the agency that enabled intellectual, religious and scientific progress, the
movement from once civilisational level to another. Non-Indo-European
languages (and here Semitic languages played the principal role of the
dichotomous ‘Other’) were less flexible, and because of this generated dog-
matism, passivity, and what Ernest Renan metaphorically termed an ‘iron
band’ that prevented intellectual and cultural creativity, critical thinking and
by extension, scientific advancement.64 As I have detailed in another project,
Protestant Christianity claimed to exemplify rational and thus ‘modern’ and
progressive religion– characterised by the interiorisation of ethics, indi-
vidual consciousness of the Divine, spirituality and rationalism– and in so
doing, claimed to best reflect progress and civilisation.65 European philolo-
gists and religious studies scholars thus concurred in claiming European civ-
ilisation as inherently creative, rational and capable of generating modernity
in ways that other, non-Indo-European and non-Christian peoples, were not.
The adoption of historicism in reshaping the subject and method of history
also altered conceptions of time. To chronological and natural conceptions
of time were added the idea of civilisational time. The dislocation of histori-
cal time from chronological time meant that societies were conceived of in
relation to civilisational progress, regardless of their location in chrono-
logical time. The equation of historical time with civilisational progress
led, as Koselleck noted, to the non-contemporaneity of the contemporane-
ous, and vice versa.66 In other words, cultures, simply because they were
62
Tylor, Primitive Culture, 6.
63
Condillac (1715–80) connected language to the essential character of a ‘people’. See
Olender, Languages of Paradise, 5–6.
64
See Ringer and Shissler, ‘The Al-Afghani-Renan Debate, Reconsidered’, 28–45.
65
Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran.
66
Here I am following Koselleck’s notion of the disconnect between historical
time and natural time. I believe that the concept of chronological time, however,
c ontemporaneous, did not necessarily belong to the same civilisational level.

In the same way, cultures might be at a comparable civilisational level with
others in the past. Tylor articulated this idea of civilisational comparability
when he explained that comparison in the ‘same grade of civilization’ need
have ‘little respect for date in history or for place on the map: The ancient
Swiss lake-dweller may be set beside the medieval Aztec . . .’67
The language of historicism was from the outset deeply imbued with the
interrelatedness of progress and civilisation. The terms ‘primitive’ and ‘back-
ward’ became coterminous not only with less advanced levels of civilisation,
but also with previous historical time. This explains modernity’s claim to
be somehow further along in time relative to the non-modern, which was
rejected as ‘backward’ even if it was contemporaneous. The idea of moder-
nity as the speeding up of time, or at least the perception of the speeding up
of time, functions as a claim to the increasing frequency of civilisational cum
historical ruptures.68
Historicism and the Challenge to Religion

There were several, interconnected reasons for the particularly troubled
relationship between religion and historicism. First, historicism disabled
pretentions of historical transcendence and truth– the ahistorical claims of
tradition. Through historicism, religion was embedded in history, and in so
doing, became contingent, particular and contextual. Religious dogma and
traditions, subject to the dissolvent of historicism, emerged not as transcend-
ent truths, but as human products of particular historical contexts.
Second, continued acceptance of the literal reading of sacred texts them-
selves became increasingly difficult within a comparative, historicist and
universal framework. How could biblical stories be read literally, alongside a
contextual interpretation of meaning? Did readers over the span of hundreds
of years understand the text similarly? How could one account for more
primitive religious understandings of biblical peoples? Similarly, genera-
tions of New Testament scholars struggled to reconcile Jesus’ miracles within
the framework of natural law.69 Enlightenment philosopher David Hume
best describes this phenomenon, since natural time suggests natural, organic
earthy rhythms (sunrise, sunset, seasons, and so forth) which I do not believe
are disengaged from concepts of historical time the way that chronological time
(formerly organising the sequence of dynasties or rulers that was the stuff of
much pre- modern history) was. Koselleck, Futures Past, 95. Some translators
have preferred the terms ‘simultaneous’ and ‘non- simultaneous’, but I prefer
‘contemporaneous’ and ‘non-contemporaneous’.
67
Tylor, Primitive Culture, 6.
68
Zammito, ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy’, 133.
69
For a history of biblical criticism, see Zachhuber, Theology as Science, and Howard,
Religion and the Rise of Historicism. See also Stroumsa, A New Science.
(1711–76) succinctly pronounced that ‘A miracle is a violation of the laws of

nature.’70 In the Islamic tradition, scholars were faced with the conundrum
of precedent– could the religious practices established by the Prophet in his
own historical context be eternally prescriptive?
Last, but not least, the adoption of historicism as a new epistemology
and methodology challenged existing Abrahamic historical frameworks.
Abrahamic texts (the Old and New Testaments and the Quran) provided
powerful historical narratives, from God’s creation of the world and human-
kind, to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the subsequent
series of prophets. These historical accounts were destabilised by the univer-
salist, comparativist and contextual epistemology and methodology atten-
dant in historicism. This project of reconciling religious historical accounts
with new ideas became even more troubled with the unearthing of archaeo-
logical evidence that challenged biblical dating and the narrative of Creation.
This, together with the European ‘discovery’ of new peoples in the Americas,
suggested alternative genealogies of human history – accounts that were
difficult to reconcile within the Abrahamic historical fabric. Christian apolo-
gists stretched the idea of common human ancestry from Adam and Eve and
the possibilities of the ‘Ten Lost Tribes of Israel’ to the breaking point.71 As
Rubiés notes, ‘While the history of mankind was illuminated by new types
of evidence, it could rarely be conceived without considering at the same
time the history of religion.’72 Evolution also compromised the Abrahamic
narrative of Creation by suggesting continuous development, or what Tylor
termed ‘the progression- theory of civilization’.73 Primitive peoples were
the earliest humans and significantly less civilised than biblical accounts of
Adam.
In Europe, by the eighteenth century, historicism had severely under-
mined the ‘truth’ of Christian tradition. Indeed, as Zachhuber declared, the
eighteenth century witnessed ‘the historicization of European intellectual
life. In this process, all areas of public discourse and rational enquiry were
increasingly inscribed in, and reconstructed as, historical development or
evolution.’74 Historicism imposed new meanings on history which fun-
damentally threatened the dogmas and truths maintained by religious
tradition. As a result, ‘religion was and remained a paradigmatic case of a
tradition that had lost its unquestioned validity’.75 By the nineteenth century,
the full embrace of historicism in Europe ushered in an era marked by the
70
David Hume (1711–76), An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Part I ‘Of
Miracles’.
71
On the rise of comparative frameworks and their effect on historical thought, see
Rubiés, ‘Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World’, 116–76.
72
Rubiés, ‘Comparing Cultures’, 143.
73
See Tylor, Primitive Culture, 35–6.
74
75
abandonment of formalism, ritual and tradition as inimical to reason and

feeble in the face of historical inquiry. Religious history was mapped onto
universal civilisational progress; the location of the particular in the univer-
sal story of mankind’s continuous ‘longing after the infinite’, to borrow Max
Müller’s impassioned formulation.76
The ubiquitous nineteenth-century debates that raged throughout Europe
concerning the (in)compatibility of ‘religion and science’ should be under-
stood as symptomatic of the ongoing exploration of the relationship between
new historicist and scientific methodologies, and the dismantlement of
tradition, dogma and Church authority. The emergence of these debates in
the eighteenth century and their continuation in the nineteenth century illus-
trates the ongoing attempts to digest the implications of historicism. They
mark the process of the translation of religion into the modern.
While undoubtedly commitments to the unchanging nature of Divine
truth gave way to the embrace of historicism as context, it is nonetheless
equally true that freedom from tradition opened up new religious possibili-
ties. We should understand modernity as the ‘age of disenchantment’– the
loss of enchantment with tradition as eternal and unconstructed, the break-
ing of the spell of religious truth– but equally of the intendent redefinition
and relocation of religion that resulted. In other words, while magic was
denounced as false consciousness of the Divine, and while miracles were cast
as symptomatic of primitive ignorance of natural law, this did not mark the
end of religion in the modern. Whereas some abandoned religion as irrecon-
cilable to modern science and historical method, others were committed to
their reconciliation– the unification of religion and modernity.
Paradoxically, the premise of context freed essence from history and
enabled it to be relocated and recontextualised in the present. Historicism
dissolved the fetters of tradition. So, while in the eighteenth century, Hume
declared that belief in miracles was ‘observed chiefly to abound among igno-
rant and barbarous nations’, by the mid-nineteenth century, David Friedrich
Strauss (1808–1974) asserted that ‘the supernatural birth of Christ, his mira-
cles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts
may be cast on their reality as historical facts’.77 Historicism enabled creative
opportunities to reconstruct and reinvigorate religion.
Deliverance from dogma and freedom to reinterpret and relocate religion
paradoxically went hand-in-hand. It is here, in this project of re-enchantment,
that we need to locate nineteenth-century religious modernisms. Religious
modernists, rather than bemoaning the loss of tradition as a fixed and per-
76
Max Müller, asserting the capacity of linguistics to recover religious expressions
over time, insisted that ‘if we will but listen attentively, we can hear in all religions
a groaning of the spirit, a struggle to conceive the unconceivable, to utter the
unutterable, a longing after the Infinite, a love of God’. Müller, ‘Lectures on the
Science of Religion’, 113.
77
Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
manent truth, sought instead to rationalise religious practice and ethics and
to resuscitate what they believed to be the essence of God’s intent from the
detritus of historical context. Religious modernists engaged in a profound
redefinition and relocation of religion– the re-enchantment of religion in the
age of history.
A New Age of Discovery

Historicism was the product of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment,
capaciously understood as themselves the product of connections and
exchanges between Europeans and many other peoples. Throughout the
nineteenth century, historicism as a new epistemology and attendant meth-
odology permeated well beyond Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
Middle East and South Asia were increasingly connected with Europe, and
with each other, through new networks of exchange and travel. Most impor-
tantly, these new networks, and the knowledge, experience and possibilities
that they offered, both created and demanded new explanatory mechanisms,
which contributed to the adoption of historicism.
New possibilities of steam and rail travel allowed both more rapid and less
expensive travel between cities, and linked ports in the Middle East to those
in South Asia and Europe. These new industrial technologies thus facilitated
more extensive travel, and greater numbers of people travelling, than ever
before. The travel routes created nodes of connectivity, cities bound by travel
itineraries that reorganised the production and diffusion of knowledge. Print
capitalism streamed along these arteries, but also flowed through smaller,
local capillaries, connecting the local to the trans-local in qualitatively and
quantitatively new ways. The routes of intellectual exchange, influence and
appropriation were deepened not only across spaces, but within them. New
technologies in transportation and print facilitated the development of larger
and more complex global networks that enabled the intellectual penetration
of new ideas.
The burgeoning of travel, whether experienced directly or disseminated
indirectly via the mushrooming press and personal interactions, led to a pro-
found disorientation of identities, space and time for the increasing numbers
of Middle Easterners and South Asians who were exposed to the new vistas
travel afforded. Nile Green, in his pioneering article on the ways in which
steam travel effected notions of Muslim ‘Spacetime’, noted that the string
of port cities that stretched from London to Bombay ‘presented confusing
medleys of peoples from far and wide, whose ambiguous identities confused
the conceptual borders between self and other’.78 These spaces of interac-
tion and ‘entanglement’ disrupted boundaries that assumed a firm link
between language, religion and place, and instead confronted travellers with
European Muslims, Middle Eastern Europeans and people of other complex
78
Green, ‘Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West’, 406.
and overlapping identities that forced new recalibrations of the criteria of

difference between ‘self’ and ‘other’. As T. S. Eliot perceptively remarked,
‘we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’.79
In similar ways, space defied easy mapping onto the binaries of Dar al-
Harb (the Lands of War) and Dar al-Islam (the Lands of Islam).80 Europe
became Islamic space, even as Middle Eastern spaces became Europeanised.
According to Green, ‘as “European” cities became part of a reconceptualized
Muslim geography, “Muslim” cities became correspondingly European in
appearance.’81 This disruption of spatial-identity correlation denoted by the
binary distinction of Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb led to the emergence of
the concept of the ‘Muslim World’ as a global marketplace for the produc-
tion of Islam.82 Key to the emerging Muslim world were Muslim intellectu-
als’ renewed acquaintance with sources of knowledge of Islam and Islamic
history that they encountered in Europe– whether textual, linguistic or
archaeological. Green is right to point out that ‘travelers discovered the
Muslim past as much as the European present’.83 Yet while the sources for
the ‘discovery’ of the Muslim past were undoubtedly an important conse-
quence of these interactions, I would further emphasise that it was not simply
the ‘discovery’ of unknown material, but the experience of disruption in this
second ‘age of discovery’ that led Muslim intellectuals to not only encounter,
but to find relevant, the conceptual explanatory framework of historicism.
Travel and the experience of the world as interconnected, literally and
figuratively, led to comparison, to new ways of framing self/other, to new
ways of accounting for difference, and to new ways of understanding the
particular in the newly imagined universal. The diversity of times, and
means of calculating times, expanded to include not only European time, but
a new conception of historical cum civilisational time.84 Evolutionary expla-
nations of the universal– of mankind’s gradual progress through a hierarchy
of civilisational levels– explained difference as resulting from ‘civilizational
factors’, themselves calculated and measured with new yardsticks of science,
79
T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’.
80
These two terms expressed a classic difference between lands in which Islam was
the religion of state, and lands in which it was not.
81
Green, ‘Spacetime’, 425.
82
Green, ‘Spacetime’, 427–8. In conjunction with the discussion of the emergence of
the ‘Muslim World’, see Green’s more recent exploration of ‘terrains of exchange’
and the marketplace for Islam in Green, Religious Economies of Global Islam.
83
Green, ‘Spacetime’, 403.
84
The introduction of European clocks into the Ottoman Empire added a further
dimension of time measurement to the already diverse systems operating
concurrently in the Tanzimat period. See Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks ‘Alla Turca’.
I distinguish between chronological increments of time measured by a variety of
clocks (and sun/moon calculations) and ‘historical’ time, which I argue is measured
by assessments of levels of ‘civilization’.
religion and language. History as a discipline involved the mapping of the

particular context onto universal human civilisational progress.
Just as European explorations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
led to concepts of universalism and a phenomenological approach to human
difference, so too did this new age of exploration facilitate the adoption of
these same explanatory paradigms elsewhere. As Guy Stroumsa notes in the
European context, the adoption of concepts of universalism resulted from
the experience of comparison; the fluidity of differences and often profound
commonalities between peoples and places necessitated more satisfying
explanations of difference than binary true/false categories, and led directly
to the phenomenological understanding of human societies as particulars in
a common universal.85 The birth of comparativism and historicism led to a
‘genuine revolution in knowledge and attitudes. . . which in turn allowed
a radical transformation in the perception of religious phenomena’ within a
framework of ‘the unity of mankind’.86 Travel in this new age of discovery
gave rise to explicit comparativism and a growing body of analysis concern-
ing ‘the secret of European strength’, which attempted to account for global
power disparities.87 Historicism offered an explanation for commonalities
and difference in time and place within an evolutionary model of human
development. History, as civilisation, became the story of this evolution.
This new age of discovery created conditions whereby historicism enjoyed
an explanatory capacity for Europeans and Middle Easterners alike. In other
words, it is not only that the Islamic past was rediscovered but that it was
reconceived and reconstructed. History was adopted as the story of context
as it changed over time; time was recalibrated as the progressive develop-
ment of civilisation. Not surprisingly, the adoption of these new, universalist
and historicist conceptions of time, space and history generated a plethora
of new history writing in the Middle East and South Asia, just as it did in
Europe.
If, as Felicity Nussbaum persuasively argues, we should lengthen and
widen the eighteenth century to acknowledge ways in which other peoples
and societies participated and contributed to the development of new para-
digms and ideas, then I would argue that we should identify the nineteenth
century with the bridging of these geographical and intellectual spaces.88
Historicism was adopted throughout the globe because it provided similar
explanatory models. From the beginning, historicism was the product of the
age of discovery. It spread through this second age of discovery, and found
new soil in which to flourish and become meaningful.
The nineteenth century thus moves us well beyond the concept of ‘contacts
and encounters’– however reciprocal– into new dimensions of c omplexity.
85
Stroumsa, A New Science, 2.
86
Stroumsa, A New Science, 2, 7.
87
Ringer, ‘The Quest for the Secret of Strength’.
88
Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century, 1.
We might conceive of this interconnectedness as the existence of many

centres and many, deeper edges.89 The exchange of ideas should not be imag-
ined as linear nor unidirectional, nor even reciprocal, but multi-dimensional
and multi- directional. The intellectual networks throughout the Muslim
world– a ‘world’ that now included European capitals, as well as Middle
Eastern and South Asian cities– w ere sites of participation in myriad over-
lapping conversations.90
Thinking Beyond Europe

Christianity was not the only tradition to crack under the weight of histori-
cism. Like their counterparts in other religious traditions, Islamic modern-
ists grappled with the challenge of reforming religion to take into account
new epistemological and methodological truths. Islamic modernism was
the consequence of these new intellectual commitments– to the intellectual
landscape of historicism, to ‘modern’ values and to the enduring meaning
of religion to humankind. Islamic modernists rewrote Islamic history and
developed a new historicist epistemology and methodology. In so doing,
they constructed ‘modern’ Islam as the union of modernity and religion– a n
Islam that they believed could generate progress and civilisation and resolve
the disparity between European power and Islamic ‘backwardness’. Islamic
modernism, currently represented in historiography as primarily (if not
uniquely) instrumentalist, was in fact deeply constitutive of modernities in
the Islamic societies of the Middle East (largely conceived) and South Asia.
The challenges and opportunities of the adoption of historicism were thus
clearly not uniquely European. Insofar as no society was immune to the
impact of modern science and insofar as historicism spread throughout the
world, they were global challenges and opportunities. Of particular fascina-
tion is the way in which different societies grappled with the religious impli-
cations of historicism. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian
intellectuals, concerned to reserve a place for religion in modernity, devel-
oped a variety of strategies in their attempts to subject religion and religious
traditions to new scrutiny. Muslim intellectuals engaged in the translation of
ideas across and within locales as they re-examined Islamic texts and tradi-
tions. Muslim intellectuals were engaged with historicism and its challenge
to religious tradition, just as their Catholic, Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian
counterparts were in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and beyond. The
89
I take up the concept of centre and edge as articulated by Bulliet, Islam: A View from
the Edge.
90
Green, ‘Spacetime’. For specific examples of nineteenth-century ‘connected’
histories, see Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries, and Marashi, Exile and the Nation.
For examples of ‘connected’ histories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
see Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, and Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the
Mediterranean.
challenge for the historian is to ‘fold in’ the local with the global without at
the same time flattening out unique local topographies.91
As evidence of the penetration of historicism beyond Europe, Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani (whose refutation of Renan inaugurated this introduc-
tion), in a letter dating from 1880/81, denounced Darwinism, caustically
remarking that ‘according to the view of [Darwin], it would be possible
that after the passage of centuries a mosquito could become an elephant
and an elephant, by degrees, a mosquito’.92 Yet even as Afghani mistakenly
characterised Darwinism as implying transubstantiation, Afghani was pro-
foundly influenced by historicism, evolutionism, comparativism, universal-
ism and the phenomenological view of religion as a category of historical
analysis. In other words, while he may have publicly rejected Darwin’s
ideas as irreligious, he nevertheless operated unconsciously within the very
same intellectual landscape that sustained Darwin’s ideas and evolutionary
thought more generally. More importantly, Afghani’s historicist epistemol-
ogy and methodology led him to insist on Islamic reform– on the redefinition
and relocation of religion in order to claim modernity – on the translation of
religion into the modern.
The turn to historicism as method and subject re-engaged scholars with
their own religious and historical traditions, opening up new avenues of
thought, new models and new methodologies. We must therefore reconceive
of these conversations as not only occurring between traditions, but more
importantly, within them. The adoption of historicism not only entailed an
engagement with European ideas and models, but also a re-engagement with
Islamic ones. This explains the explosion of discussions in the nineteenth
century amongst Islamic liberals and ‘fundamentalists’ alike regarding the
‘opening of the door of ijtihad’.93 It also explains their frequent allusion to
pre-modern rationalist and historical traditions, exemplified by al-Ghazzali
(d. 1111) and the Rashidun period (ad 632–61), respectively.
91
Nussbaum, Global Eighteenth Century, 8.
92
Afghani, ‘The Truth About the Neicheri Sect’, 136. Darwin’s only observations
concerning elephants and mosquitos are as follows: ‘Before man inhabited India
or Africa, some cause must have checked the continued increase of the existing
elephant. A highly capable judge, Dr. Falconer, believes that it is chiefly insects
which, from incessantly harassing and weakening the elephant in India, check its
increase. . . It is certain that insects and blood-sucking bats determine the existence
of the larger naturalized quadrupeds in several parts of South America.’ See
Darwin, The Origin of Species, 97.
93
On the emergence of debates surrounding ijtihad in this period, see Kurzman (ed.),
Modernist Islam. See also Hallaq, Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law;
Peters, ‘Idjtihad and Taqlid in 18th and 19th Century Islam’, 131–45; Watt, ‘The
Closing of the Door of Ijtihad’, 675–8; and van Ess, ‘La tradition dans la théologie
muʾtazilite’, 211–26.
The Historiography of Erasure

Scholars of European history have noted the centrality of the adoption of
historicism as an intellectual watershed that not only characterised the nine-
teenth century, but in many ways defined modernity. European historiog-
raphy has been less cognisant of the centrality of historicism to the history
of religious reform. Indeed, as Zachhuber has argued, it is primarily under-
stood as a ‘German story in which Enlightenment historiography is married
with romanticism and German idealism to produce an environment in which
a particular philosophical and theological understanding of history could
appear as the ultimate key unlocking the deepest mysteries of humankind’.94
The history of biblical criticism, which was an outgrowth of historicism, thus
is largely confined to explorations of German Protestant scholars, and only
secondarily part of a larger French and British story insofar as individual
scholars were influenced by German theological or philosophical thought.
Yet as religion was reconsidered and reconceived, it participated in gener-
ating the ‘theological foundations of modernity’.95 It is to this period that
we must look to understand the religious assumptions lying behind new
definitions – of civilisation, of progress – and their complex relationship in
the relocation of religion in emerging secularisms.96
While not in any way denying that the adoption and subsequent absorp-
tion of historicism played a central role in European conceptions of moder-
nity and definitions of ‘European-ness’, I would argue that this should more
accurately be understood as a universal story. The erasure of religion from
a participatory role in the development and articulation of modernity in
the historiography of the Middle East and South Asia is the result of the
intersection and interaction of two powerful forces: first, European claims to
ownership of modernity in the context of the broader process of developing
new taxonomies of difference in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;
and second, the internal dynamics of Middle Eastern reform movements.
Together, they disregarded Islamic modernism as participatory in the con-
struction of modernity.
Engagements with religion are part of a continuum of European intel-
lectual history and occupy a central place in the Christian tradition. Their
prominence in the historiography of modernity in Europe also lies, I
believe, in European efforts, both conscious and unconscious, to make it
so. In other words, the origins and definitions themselves – of secularism,
of civilisation, of modernity – were claimed by Europe as part of a process
of self-definition; a process heavily reliant on the non-European ‘other’
94
Zachhuber, ‘The Historical Turn’, 1.
95
In the Christian tradition, see Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity.
96
On the theological origins of modernity, see Howard, Religion and the Rise of
Historicism; Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Olender, Languages of
Paradise; and Stroumsa, A New Science.
which deliberately ignored and thus erased the process of interaction and
contribution of this constructed ‘other’. European definitions, claims
of origin and thus the assertion of ownership of modernity were aided
and abetted by European political dominance in an age of imperialism
and colonialism.
A second set of paradoxically complementary reasons for the absence of
religion in the history of modernity in the Middle East and South Asia lie
within the particular historical dynamics of the nineteenth-century reform
movements themselves. The Ottoman Tanzimat and similar nineteenth--
century reforms aimed at secularising and centralising the state in Egypt,
and to a lesser extent in Iran, North Africa, Afghanistan and Central Asia,
reduced the power and autonomy of religious institutions of law and edu-
cation and wrested them from the control of the religious establishment.
Similar secularising reforms were undertaken in South Asia, alongside
determined attempts to minimise religion in public life and combat ‘primi-
tive’ religious practices and ‘superstitions’. Such reforms challenged the
ulama institutionally, but also socially, culturally and intellectually, as new
state schools offered European-inspired curriculums, as newspapers and
journals increasingly dominated public discourse, and as reformers called
for increased public participation in and/or oversight of government. The
gradual shift ‘from subject to citizen’ created new educational curriculums,
new spaces of social and political discourse, and new forms of participation
and social leadership that challenged the ulama’s standing. The marginali-
sation of the religious establishment thus extended well beyond the realm
of institutional reform, into competition for social, cultural and intellectual
capital, particularly with the rise of a reading public and a growing mar-
ketplace, literally and figuratively, for competing interpretations of Islamic
history, texts and traditions.97
As a result, political and social reformers often found themselves in
adversarial relationships with the religious establishment. As members
of the ulama found themselves divided between opponents and support-
ers of state-backed reforms, opposition to reforms on cultural and reli-
gious grounds created tensions between supporters and opponents of such
reforms concerning whether or not Islamic tradition and law would support
or resist new social and political ideals such as constitutionalism, increased
women’s rights, and legal equality of non-Muslims. Since the outset of politi-
cal reforms, advocates found themselves denounced as cultural westernisers
and accused of trampling Islamic political traditions and religious sensibili-
ties alike.
The institutional competition between reformers and their ulama
97
On the threat that new education and related concepts of authority posed to the
Iranian ulama, see Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in
Qajar Iran, ‘Negotiating Modernity: Ulama and the Discourse of Modernity’ and
‘The Discourse on Modernization’. See also Fortna, Imperial Classroom.
pponents spilled into the realm of deploying the authority of religious

o
sensibilities, definitions, history, text and traditions. Political reformers,
challenged in the name of religion and unable to compete in the battle
to shift religious definitions and understandings, often equated religion
with religious traditionalism, backwardness and ‘superstition’. Although
many reformers were interested in rethinking the premises of religious
tradition and of integrating religion into many of the reforms, the history
of nineteenth-century reform has by and large been cast as one of secular
progressive reformers resisted by religious traditionalists. This dynamic,
fuelled by the fierce competition over secularisation and the redefinition of
religion, led to a historiography of reform as one opposed by the religious
establishment. Reform was narrated as a story of progressive social and
political ideals aligned versus religious conservatism; of Islam battling the
forces of progress and civilisation. The connection of reform to European
imperialist and colonial penetration further enabled Islamic rhetoric to be
deployed to delegitimise reform as ‘inauthentic’ and to cast opposition as
coterminous with the protection of religious traditions and state sover-
eignty. This equation reinforced assumptions about the incompatibility of
Islam with modernity amongst proponents and opponents of reform alike,
both of whom were invested in sustaining this binary to justify their own
positions.
The powerful binary association of secularism with modernity and reli-
gion with backwardness was reinforced in the post-World War I Middle
East, which saw the entire area divided between the rule of European colo-
nial powers and the authoritarian secularising and westernising leaders
in Iran and Turkey. This dichotomy permeated the first generation of
historical work on the subject of reform, which strongly sided with the
secularising reformers and portrayed religion as inimical to efforts to
modernise cum westernise. Likewise, South Asian reform movements
have only recently emerged from the shadow of colonialist constructions.
The pioneers of the history of Middle Eastern and South Asian ‘mod-
ernization’ movements replicated the constructions and legitimisations of
westernising reforms, emphasising the purely instrumentalist nature of
Islamic language, and defined Islamic religious movements as ‘cultural’
or ‘traditionalist’ attempts to temper western ideas and institutions with
indigenous, religious-based traditions.98 The use of Islamic language to
oppose reformers and the various attempts to ground reforms in Islamic
tradition were certainly present in the pre-World War I period, but not to
the exclusion of genuine attempts at reforming religion which occurred
simultaneously. The unquestioned assumptions of ‘secularizing’ reforms’
98
For example, see Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1939; similarly,
Lewis argues that reform was equivalent to the acceptance of European civilisation:
Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. For a criticism of Hourani, see Hamzah,
‘Introduction’, in Hamzah (ed.), The Making of the Arab Intellectual (1880–1960).
own definitions were also, as Michelle Campos recently articulated, but-

tressed by the triumph of nationalism.99 The embrace of nationalism as
necessary and indeed inevitable permeated assumptions in European,
Middle Eastern and South Asian scholarship of modernity, and led to the
erasure of alternative possible trajectories and narratives. The teleology
of nationalism’s triumph and secularism’s association with the margin-
alisation of religion in the post-World War I period further marginalised
religion’s participatory role in reform, in modernity, and in a variety of
nationalisms and secularisms as well.
The assumption that religion is antithetical to modernity is not uniquely
an Islamic historiographical phenomenon. Historicism and the construc-
tion of modernity did, in fact, erode and destabilise traditions and force
long-standing religious certainties into defensive positions. The systematic
redefinition and relocation of religion that were fundamental to nineteenth-
century religious reform movements in the Middle East and elsewhere, did
threaten existing understandings and practices of religion. Efforts at the
internalisation of ethics, of the dismantlement of tradition, of the challenge
of dogma and the authority of the ulama appeared to be and, in some aspects,
were attacks on religious truth and pious practice. Religious spheres of
practice and authority gave way under state encroachment, as the domain of
the profane expanded at the expense of the sacred, even if this process was
understood by some religious reformers as a means of preserving religion’s
centrality in the modern project.
Islamic modernism, since it fundamentally challenged the construction of
‘modernity’ as anti-religious, was thus misread as a tactical attempt by some
reformers to recast religious language and idiom to make reforms more pal-
atable to ‘pious’ sensibilities. Islamic modernists are primarily characterised
as social and political reformers, reformers who successfully instrumental-
ised Islam as a rhetorical language. Their genuine theological innovations
are largely ignored and unappreciated. As I have argued elsewhere in the
context of Zoroastrian reform in India and Iran, the ‘privatization’ of religion
and the growth of the secular domain shifted religion into different places,
but did not marginalise it.100
Islamic modernist engagement with historicism broadly conceived should
not be seen simply as a response to European ideas; rather, these ideas had so
permeated the global intellectual landscape that all major religious traditions
were forced to recalibrate. They all wrestled with similar problems and went
through many of the same developmental processes– whether in rationalis-
ing administration, constructing national identities and popular sovereignty,
or historicising tradition.101
99
Campos, Ottoman Brothers.
100
Ringer, Pious Citizens.
101
For Zoroastrian and, to a lesser extent, Hindu modernist religious reform projects,
see Ringer, Pious Citizens.
We need to follow ways in which religion was redefined, reconceived and

relocated, without assuming that secularism is itself antithetical to religion,
even if it was an assault on the hegemony of the religious establishment. This
historical misconception was facilitated by the historicisation of religion, by
the emergence and reinforcement of the dichotomies of modern/traditional,
and by the attempt to internalise and rationalise religion, taking it out of
the communal, the publicly performed, the publicly visible realm. Even as
reformers sought to redefine ‘true’ religion, they were implicitly drawing
new lines between true/false as a way of legitimising/ delegitimising a
substantive redefinition of religion itself. Religion, as understood and as
practised, was denounced and substantiated by profound anti-clericalism.
Religious reformers challenged ulama authority to interpret and maintain
tradition, both in order to permit religious reformulation, but also to assert
their own authority in an emerging public sphere of journals and debate.102
The relocation of religious authority reinforced the idea of the ulama as
traditionalists opposed to modernity, even as it overlooked the theological
dimensions of Islamic modernism.
Embedding Islamic modernism within the narrative of modernising
reform also obscured its complex genealogy. Although Islamic modern-
ism was a central, and I argue, largely overlooked component of reform,
it emerged not as a result of reforms themselves, but from a more distant
and diffuse process of the adoption of the landscape of historicism. In other
words, the centrality of political reform in the narrative of Middle Eastern
modernisation movements privileges the focus on institutions and politi-
cal ideals as the sites of reform, with religious reform cast as a by-product,
an instrument of legitimation, rather than a site of change in-and-of itself.
Religious reform is thus ignored as participatory in the construction of a new
intellectual bedrock, cast instead into the role of responding to or of buttress-
ing new hegemonic norms of discourse. Religion moves then from being an
agent of modernity, to an unchanging un-modern site requiring dismantle-
ment, dismissal and rejection.
Islamic modernism has become denuded of intellectual and theologi-
cal content, cast instead as argumentation– a rebranding in the interests
of public relations. Yet while it is certainly true that Islamic modernists
wrote about the compatibility of Islam with constitutionalism, science and
women’s rights, their positions were the products of new modes of Islamic
thought premised on the epistemology and methodology of historicism. The
so-called ‘reconciliation of Islam with modernity’ was not simply a question
of realigning Islam with modern ‘values’, but a more fundamental shift in
ways of thinking, argumentation and the assumptions concerning the nature
102
On the rise of nineteenth-century ‘modern’ scientists and intellectuals, and their
attempts to assert and protect their own authority, see Yalçinkaya, Learned Patriots.
See also Asil, ‘The Tanzimat Novel in the Service of Science’. On the similar
phenomena in Iran, see Shayegh, Who is Knowledgeable is Strong.
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Introduction: Historicism, Modernity and Religion 1

Edward Tylor, in his seminal anthropological work, Primitive Culture, notes

Most of all, I am grateful for the collegiality and generosity of my fellow

Renan and Afghani, despite important differences, agreed on the same

to completely rethink the Enlightenment project. ‘Contrary to the secular

Along the same lines, Karen O’Brien proposes a refocusing on the

the eighteenth century, coalesced into a particular constellation­– a­ n inter-

Arnaldo Momigliano proposed that Edward Gibbon successfully navi-

Religious enlighteners championed ideas of reasonableness and natural reli-

For Sorkin, ‘the religious Enlightenment constituted a conscious search for

a­ doption of historicism in Europe, and the resulting claims to modernity, are

The Landscape of Historicism

emphasises its importance in the development of ‘political modernity’ yet

Syed Ameer Ali frequently referred to what he called the ‘circumstances

his History of England (1848–1861), advocated for the importance of imagina-

Other scholars vehemently disagreed. Leopold van Ranke (1795–1886), oft

­technology (military triumph, architecture) and religion.51 Language and

excavation of the trail of human civilisational progress. Philology could take

History emerged as the story of universal civilisational progress.

c­ ontemporaneous, did not necessarily belong to the same civilisational level.

Historicism and the Challenge to Religion

(1711–76) succinctly pronounced that ‘A miracle is a violation of the laws of

abandonment of formalism, ritual and tradition as inimical to reason and

A New Age of Discovery

and overlapping identities that forced new recalibrations of the criteria of

religion and language. History as a discipline involved the mapping of the

We might conceive of this interconnectedness as the existence of many

Thinking Beyond Europe

The Historiography of Erasure

­ pponents spilled into the realm of deploying the authority of religious

own definitions were also, as Michelle Campos recently articulated, but-

We need to follow ways in which religion was redefined, reconceived and

Tailless kites, easily made, 136-141

Waterproof silk, 130

Printed by Cassell & Company, Limited,

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START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

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the eighteenth century, coalesced into a particular constellation– a n inter-

a doption of historicism in Europe, and the resulting claims to modernity, are

technology (military triumph, architecture) and religion.51 Language and

c ontemporaneous, did not necessarily belong to the same civilisational level.

pponents spilled into the realm of deploying the authority of religious