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THE ISLAMIC ENLIGHTENMENT
The Struggle Betwixt Faith and Reason: 1798 to Modern Times
Past Christopher de Bellaigue
Illustrated. 398 pp. Liveright Publishing. $35.
In the endmost months of the 18th century a young Egyptian, Hassan al-Attar, plucked upward the backbone to visit the Constitute of Egypt, staffed by a battery of eminent French specialists in various branches of scientific discipline and linguistics. The constitute had been recently established by Napoleon, following his victory over the Egyptian Army in a battle lasting less than an hour, and although information technology stood in a good for you garden commune of Cairo, Attar was nervous considering he had heard of drunken fights in the expanse, where the French were billeted.
No doubt his mentor, a sheikh who had been invited to the institute along with other Egyptian bigwigs the previous year, had sought to put the young man off. Every bit Christopher de Ballaigue relates in "The Islamic Enlightenment," his fascinating and elegantly written account of the touch on of modernity on the Islamic world, Abdulrahman al-Jabarti had come up away from his run into with the savants struggling even to formulate a response to ideas similar bulk voting, judicial process and scientific experimentation or indeed to a copy of the Quran translated into French. In the finish, he had condemned much of it, ignored some of it and admired very petty. In Jabarti's earth, the purpose of schooling was to acquire the Quran by heart, restating the orthodox Muslim position that God alone was the cause of all earthly phenomena, cognition was finite and revelation, not reason, was the surest guide to living.
Yet centuries earlier, Western scholars had themselves trooped to Kingdom of spain to learn about science and Greek philosophy from the Arabs. While their attempt contributed to the Renaissance in the West, in the Muslim world the doors of interpretation were really closing, as traditions of speculative idea and inquiry that flourished in Islam's classical age were being snuffed out. If philosophy presented a full account of life, the clerics grumbled, what was left for revelation and the Prophet? Ijtihad, or independent reasoning, was a danger to the established order, and then the schools were filled with taqlid, or emulation. The Galata observatory of Istanbul, perhaps the last nifty scientific endeavour in the Islamic globe, was destroyed in 1580 through the opposition of the ulema, the clerics, who also banned the introduction of printing.
Hassan al-Attar, though, was disarmed by the enthusiasm of the French savants. Introduced to a young scholar who discussed literature with him in faultless Arabic, he left dazzled and inspired by the Frenchman's beloved of learning, his breadth of reference, his cognition of the literature and traditions of another culture — and, on subsequent visits, by the scientific, astronomical and applied science apparatus he was shown. Attar'southward admiration would pb to one of the offset of many attempts to reconcile Islamic teaching with Western enlightenment values.
Napoleon'southward brusque-lived occupation opened the mode to a new Egyptian ruler, an Albanian charlatan, to begin a radical reform of the Egyptian country. It was abundantly articulate to Muhammad Ali that Western know-how, trade and finance were the keys to power in the modernistic earth, and like Henry Eight he confiscated lands set bated in pious foundations. He as well introduced commercial tribunals, a public health part, telegraph offices, canals and cotton factories. Alexandria became a great port where a Russian observed every 24-hour interval "some fresh innovation in the European style destined for the improvement of the city or for public utility." Yet perhaps 20,000 men, women and children died in the digging of one culvert in 1819. Not for the first fourth dimension, Western advances did not bestow equal benefits.
De Bellaigue, a journalist and author, focuses on three Islamic cities in the first half of the book — Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran. In each, the rulers attempted to adopt elements of Western modernity. Egypt's nominal suzerains, the Ottoman sultans, had in fact begun reforms earlier the period covered by this book, just progress was slower in a sprawling multifaith empire in which at that place were many more involvement groups to reconcile than in Egypt alone. In Istanbul, the sultan succeeded in using French military advisers to reform the ground forces and destroy the reactionary Janissaries. The introduction in 1836 of quarantine and other preventive measures against plague, which had hitherto been treated with fatalism, changed people's life expectancy, and saw plague eradicated by the 1850s.
"The Islamic Enlightenment" introduces us to a fascinating gallery of individuals who would grapple with reform and modernization in theory and practice over the side by side two centuries. Efficient guns, training in modern drill, factories, machines and bank loans were tools for the entry of Muslim states into the modern world, merely they were non value-free. Rising levels of literacy, with the introduction of printing, allowed a press to flourish, in the European mold — but rulers in Istanbul establish the means to control them could also be imported. The offset censorship law was based on similar edicts issued by Napoleon Iii.
The growing complication and interdependence of society and economies changed the mode government was viewed, and the development of a literate suburbia created people who thought most such things, focusing attention on the need for constitutions. That they ofttimes fared badly was hardly a surprise — by the time the Ottoman sultan agreed to grant a constitution in 1876, France had already run through 12 of its ain.
Reactions were further complicated by the persistent pressure of the West on the resources of the Islamic globe. Autocrats saddled their countries with profligate loans. The shah of Iran actually sold the resources of his country to Baron Reuter in 1872, an human action of such egregious cocky-interest that information technology was undone past popular demand and international outcry, while the Ottomans were humiliated past the imposition of a strange-staffed debt administration and the British occupied Egypt, finer on behalf of European bondholders, in 1882. There were enough of people in the Islamic Eastward who could read Darwin and conclude, like the Egyptian feminist Qasim Amin, that natural selection impelled Europeans "powered by steam and electricity, to seize the wealth of any state weaker than them." And while many others felt that their values — Islamic values — were threatened past the soullessness of the machine age, a multifaceted and slippery Sunni cleric, Jamal al-Din Afghani, was able to articulate some Muslim responses to modernity in ways that were distinctly modern, involving wreaths of cigar smoke, opera seats, international travel and a message for the doctrine of Pan-Islamism called Firmest Bond, which was sent out, similar an email newsletter, costless of accuse to every influential ruler or opinion maker in the Center East. Islam, Jamal said, required its Luther.
One candidate for the office might accept been the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh, who proposed a return to attitudes from the fourth dimension of the salaf, the ancestors — not, every bit the term is used today to describe salafism, a fundamentalist religious outlook that denies the importance of reason, just as a artistic moment in which, in Abduh's view, any educated Muslim with the Quran could retrieve out his position for himself. Abduh, like Attar a century before, was swept aside by a concert of vilification.
Inherent contradictions and weaknesses, allied with competing international developments, persistently favored modernization imposed from above. Both Turkey and Islamic republic of iran, later on World War I, cleaved to narratives of militant nationalism, with varying degrees of success. It became increasingly possible to ignore Islam entirely, following, as de Bellaigue puts it, "a worldview that had formed around Max Weber'south thought of humankind moving away from the 'smashing enchanted garden' of traditional belief and culture." As he says, the 2 ideologies competing for support in the postwar Muslim world, capitalism and Communism, were agreed on i matter: the utter obsolescence of faith in public life.
A book like this can simply point to the sheer complexity of Muslim identities, loyalties and accommodations in the mod world, both among the hundreds of millions who lead lives of varying degrees of quiet and the troubled few. Far from spurning or avoiding modernity, Muslims are "drenched in it," equally de Bellaigue points out, and in tracking the sinews of enlightenment through the last ii centuries of Islamic thinking, this vivid and lively history deserves nothing but praise.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/books/review/the-islamic-enlightenment-christopher-de-bellaigue.html