Bunting: Enlighten me

Posted on 28th March, 2006 by

Comment is free: Enlighten me

Madeleine Bunting on how the “hard liberals” misuse the Enlightenment, and how many of their its key thinkers were in fact religious believers:

Something didn’t seem to be adding up to me when they waxed lyrical about the Enlightenment legacy of rationality, secularism, belief in progress, the rule of law and the basis of all we know and love in western democracy and individual human rights.

Then I began bumping into the subject with Muslim intellectuals who were acutely aware of how this legacy was being used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam. It was as if the debate had shifted from the Reformation - why hasn’t Islam had one? (it dawned on such questioners that a)the Christian Reformation led to several centuries of appalling bloodshed and b)there’s a good argument that Wahabi Islam is precisely Islam’s reformation) - to another tack: why hasn’t Islam had an Enlightenment?)

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  • Shamil

    I think people forget sometimes that for most of the twentieth century the middle east (and most muslim countries) were secular.

  • George Carty

    Are you arguing that the people in the Middle East were secular, but returned to religion due to the failure of their countries?

    Or are you arguing only that the regimes were secular, irrespective of how the people thought?

  • thabet

    Well, the Hobbes and Grotius were far more sceptical of Christianity (although Grotius was still a Christian), than people like Newton and Kant who came after them. So it’s not a linear path to our present day, as a lot of secular liberals like to assume when they prattle on about Progress.

    I think the point Shamil is making, George, is that many Muslim countries persued a path of ‘secularisation’, both in government and society. Isn’t it a point made by (for example) Egyptians and Pakistanis who grew up in the 1970s that, they lived in societies that were more ‘secular’ then the 1980s (although I guess this was limited to the wealthier members of their societies).

  • Shamil

    Are you arguing that the people in the Middle East were secular, but returned to religion due to the failure of their countries?

    Or are you arguing only that the regimes were secular, irrespective of how the people thought?

    The prior really.

    My point was that the question of when is the middle east going to go through an enlightenment shows ignorance of what it was actually like for most of the twentieth century. Remember the oft repeated slogan of iraqi secularists that Iraq was once the most developed nation in the middle east. Only now is it becoming more religious politically at the beginning of a new century.

    Likewise the question of a reformation in islam shows similar ignorance. Only institutions can be reformed. The catholic church can be reformed, Al-azhar can be reformed. Christianity and Islam can’t be reformed though.

  • UmmZaid

    Salaam ‘Alaikum

    LOL. We have an Enlightenment every century or so. I am not the only one awaiting the Mujaddid for our times.

  • Bikhair

    Umm Zaid,

    So Muhammed ibn Abdul Wahhab wouldnt count would he? If the reversion of Islam back to tauheed isnt essential than perhaps not.