The two great scholars of Islamic and Christian/Protestant traditions spoke about the state of religion in the 21st century and presented their vision of the future. Nasr is a world-renowned scholar of Islam and one of the most prominent Muslim thinkers of our age. Cox is a prominent philosopher and Protestant theologian known particularly for his book “The Secular City,” published in 1965 and considered to be one of the most influential books of the 20th century. In our panel in İstanbul, both scholars agreed that the age of modernism is over. A new page is being turned in history and religion will be an important part of this new period. The question is what kind of a future is in store for us.
The predictions for the demise of religion and rise of secular humanism have turned out to be simply wrong. Despite the intellectual and cultural marginalization of religion in the 19th and 20th centuries, religious identities and communities have not disappeared. Even in the most radically secularized countries of the world such as Western Europe, religion has persisted in one way or another. The failure of the modernist paradigm has initiated what Peter Berger has called the “de-secularization of the world.” While modern science and philosophy has presented us with a methodically disenchanted world, the process of secularization has failed to complete its mission and make the world a purely secular place. Hence many people talk about the “re-sacrilization of the world.”
Both Nasr and Cox refer to this as the beginning of something new, something that will shape the intellectual, cultural and even political landscape of our world in the years to come. But they disagree on what shape this new period will take. As the most prominent spokesperson of the Traditionalist school, Nasr sees the future in tradition and rejects both the hard and soft versions of modernism. By placing the human person rather than God at the center, modernism has created a myopic relationship between the Creator and the created as well as between humans and the natural environment.
An important point Nasr makes is that modernism was not a creation of the Muslim world. Its impact on Muslim societies has not been as deep and devastating as on Western societies. In many ways, modernism, even in its most aggressively anti-religious manifestations, has not shaken the faith of the vast majority of Muslims. But modernism has marginalized Islam as an intellectual force, limiting it to the “religious space.”
Cox also believes that the age of modernism is over. But he takes a softer approach toward modernity and rejects the argument that religion and modernity have to clash on all counts. Cox points to the American experience, where Western modernity has allowed room for religious expression. This is particularly true in the American context because the Enlightenment that came to America did not have a hostile attitude toward religion. The founding fathers were deists and their vision of “new Rome” had clear religious motifs. Today, the US is more religious than Western Europe and embraces religious and cultural pluralism better than many European countries.
But the paradox is that some of the most virulent and radical attacks on Islam and Muslims also come from the Christian Right, Christian Zionists and similar groups in the US. Cox admits this paradox and attributes it partly to a simplistic and misleading interpretation of the Bible and partly to the lack of direct contact between Muslims and American Christians. In his presentation, Cox also referred to his Harvard colleague Samuel Huntington and his criticism of Huntington’s erroneous views about civilizational identities and religious conflicts. Had Cox been able to convince Huntington, the clash of civilizations discourse would have taken a very different course.
Both Nasr and Cox agree that the problem of living together is one of the most pressing challenges of our age. Secular societies as well as traditional religious communities have to accept the reality of religious pluralism and nurture an ethics of coexistence. Muslims need to know more about Christians and their traditions just as Christians need to have a better understanding of Islam. Referring to the Common Word initiative launched in 2007, both scholars see Muslim-Christian relations as key for world peace and consider the tensions between the two as a sibling rivalry, a type of rivalry that tends to be more severe than others.
