Does Islam need enlightenment?

These are critical questions for the Muslim world and the world at large. But the calls for an “Islamic enlightenment” usually betray a Euro-centric bent and assume that the intellectual framework of the Enlightenment can be reproduced in other cultural contexts to create more rational, pluralistic and tolerant societies. The experience of the 18th-century European Enlightenment is deemed to be applicable to other cultures and societies. This essentially makes the 18th-century Enlightenment an ahistoric experience. This assumption goes against the critical spirit of the Enlightenment.

But there are other reasons that make the idea of an Islamic enlightenment questionable. The first is that the main thrust of the Enlightenment project has become largely defunct, obsolete and dysfunctional in the late modernity in which we live. The ideas of ideological rationalism, Promethean individual, autonomous reason, scientism, positivism, anthropomorphism and Eurocentrism have been mostly abandoned in favor of a more humane and humble concept of reality. Today, no one is so naïve as to believe in pure reason, absolute objectivity or equality with tacit racism. True, the critical spirit of the Enlightenment can certainly serve as an educational tool to prevent the ossification of tradition. But no society can live on criticism alone; one has to build a terra firma as well to dwell in a safe moral and philosophical space.

Secondly, if there is any sense of talking to the Muslim faith to induce it to develop a more tolerant and inclusive worldview, it will happen only by recovering these values from within the Islamic tradition, not from outside. Attempts at injecting overtly Western-capitalist cultural values under the guise of universal principles have failed and mostly backfired. Muslim societies have rejected not the universal values that they share with other cultures but what has been imposed upon them as the value system and political economy of global capitalism.

The Muslim world needs to recover its own intellectual tradition and moral compass to face up to the challenges of the modern world. The core values of the Enlightenment are too secular, convoluted and Eurocentric to provide a context of meaning and analysis for Muslim societies in the 21st century. It is a common mistake to think that the realities of the modern world require everyone to surrender to the moral demands of modernity. The phenomena of late modernity show that traditional ways are still relevant and continue to survive in the most hyper and post-modern realms of the modern world. In some cases, maintaining the tradition makes more sense in the face of numerous contemporary challenges.