Enlightened thinking
JERRY BROTTON applauds a pertinent corrective to western misconceptions of rationality in the Islamic world
The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason By Christopher de Bellaigue The Bodley Head, 377 pages, £25
It would be hard to imagine a more timely book than The Islamic Enlightenment. With Islamic belief routinely conflated with terrorist outrages notionally carried out in its name, and the Trump administration in the US imposing travel restrictions on some majority-Muslim countries, Christopher de Bellaigue’s book also comes out during the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. According to many narratives of western ascendancy, the Reformation paved the way for a separation of church and state that spawned the European Enlightenment’s triumph of reason over faith, which in turn begat western modernity. Many western thinkers – liberal and conservative – believe Islam has failed to embrace these narratives, generating civil wars in Syria and Libya, failed revolutions, and the rise of Al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State.
Not so, argues Bellaigue, a journalist and filmmaker with experience of living and working in the Islamic world. Westerners should stop demanding Muslims go through their own Reformation and Enlightenment because “an Islamic Enlightenment did indeed take place, under the influence of the west, but finding its own form”. This started with Muslim reactions to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, “a pained yet exhilarating transformation” combining elements of the Reformation and industrial revolution that continues down to our own day with the Arab Spring and Iranian Green Movement. It is the west’s problem, Bellaigue argues, that it has largely ignored the speed of such change.
This is a bold assertion, based primarily on historical case studies of Egyptian, Turkish and Iranian writers and thinkers who drew on enlightened western thought in attempts to introduce political constitutionalism, rational scientific enquiry, gender equality and other modern reforms in their respective societies. Many of Islam’s better-known political reformers feature in Bellaigue’s story, from the 19th-century Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali to the republican populism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. But what really animates Bellaigue is the story of lesser-known figures who struggled to initiate European reforms.
He begins with Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Jabarti, chronicler of Napoleon’s Egyptian invasion, who visited the French Institute of Egypt in 1798, and “was one of the first Arabs to realise the significance of the wave of modernity breaking onto the shore of Islam”. Later, Bellaigue moves on to describe the compromised national constitutional revolutions that swept Iran and Turkey in the early 20th century, where the Ottomans “realised that a world of nations was engulfing them and that
Westerners, he writes, should stop demanding Muslims go through their own Enlightenment
they hadn’t one of their own”.
These reforms may have been more progressive and enduring were it not for the disastrous political settlements that followed the First World War, as an Anglo-French “feeding frenzy” over imperial interests in the Islamic world “created nations that were too rebellious to be good clients and too divided to be good states”. The descent into a postwar ‘counter-Enlightenment’ of militarist nationalism and religious absolutism pushed back many modern reforms and has left us today with autocrats such as Erdogan in Turkey and Sisi in Egypt.
Bellaigue’s book is not without its problems. The underlying assumption that Islam has only one destiny – to replay a western narrative of the Enlightenment – has been challenged by many scholars as a chimera. This problem is compounded in Bellaigue’s writing by the apparent absence of any Arabic, Persian or Turkish sources. Producing an argument about Muslims’ debts to the European Enlightenment by using European vernacular translations of their words seems a troublingly self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are also omissions: hearing about Islamic south Asian and Pacific ‘enlightenments’ in places such as Indonesia (the largest Muslim country in the world) would have been fascinating. It is also surprising that the rise of Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia receive only one mention in passing.
This is not to deny the power of Bellaigue’s argument but it might have strengthened his important corrective to the popular western misconceptions of a timeless, static, blinkered Islam.
What animates the author are the lesserknown Muslims struggling to initiate European reforms