Abstract
Taking its point of departure in the conceptual debate about modernities in the plural, this article presents a heuristic framework based on an interpretative approach to modernity. The article draws on theories of multiple modernities, successive modernities and poststructuralist approaches to modern subjectivity formation. In combining conceptual tools from these strands of social theory, we argue that the emergence of multiple modernities should be understood as a historical result of idiosyncratic social constructions combining global social imaginaries with religious and other cultural traditions. In the second part of the article we illustrate this argument with three short excursions into the history of Islamic reform in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this way we interpret the modern history of Muslim societies as based on cultural conflicts between different forms of social order and individual identities similar to those present in European history. Contrary to the European experience, however, religious traditions gradually assumed an important role in defining ‘authentic’ Muslim modernities, leading to a relatively hegemonic role of so-called Islamic modernities toward the end of the 20th century.
Keywords
Contemporary sociologists remain preoccupied with their own societies. At least this is the impression we still get when browsing through the contents of leading European and US-American journals. In them, sociology almost appears to be a discipline exclusively concerned with the so-called West. This bias toward Western societies was not always the case. Going back to one of the founding fathers of the discipline, Max Weber, sociology was also the historically grounded comparative study of world cultures. Weber himself perceived The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism to be a contribution to cultural history (Scaff, 2011: 185). This Weberian tradition, a sociological approach to the study of cultural history in a global dimension, has been maintained by scholars who have been advocating ‘civilizational analyses’ as a model for studying social change from a transnational perspective. While this model has not yet been fully incorporated into mainstream sociology (Tiryakian, 2001: 283), it has increasingly been discussed in various branches of the humanities and social sciences under the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2000).
Originally coined by Shmuel Eisenstadt, this concept has been adopted in different ways and has generated an ongoing debate about modernities in the plural. Scholarly literature about modernity is meanwhile flooded by concepts such as alternative, entangled, multiple, successive or variations of modernities. 1 These modernities in the plural are attempts to avoid previous assertions that modernization is synonymous with Westernization. Today, most scholars agree with the assumption that there is no single paradigmatic path of modernization and that modernity historically appears with multiple faces. Even the idea of Western modernity has been dissolved into the multiple modernities of Europe and the Americas (Allardt, 2005). Yet, what is the common denominator of these multiple modernities? Does the concept of modernity still have any generic meaning? What are the analytical tools to understanding this multi-faceted culture of modernity?
With this article, we would like to address these questions from the theoretically vantage point of cultural sociology, defining culture as a complex of various orders of meaning and knowledge. 2 Taking our point of departure in the conceptual debate about modernities in the plural, we first elaborate a heuristic framework in selectively drawing on three theoretical sources: theories of multiple modernities, theories of successive modernities and poststructuralist approaches to modern subjectivity formation.
Although different in their theoretical premises and sources, these theories share an interpretative approach to the conceptualization of modernity and put the category of culture into the centre of their understanding of modern life. In building on these three strands of theory, we combine the critical view of poststructuralist thinking with elements of a ‘temporal and spatial plurality of modernity’ (Carleheden, 2010: 52). In the second part of the article, we apply these conceptual lenses to a specific case in the cultural history of Islam. More precisely, we look at influential ideas in the construction of specifically Islamic social imaginaries by leading representatives of the Islamic reform movement since the late 19th century. In particular we analyse the various ways in which this movement articulated specifically Islamic forms of social orders and meaningful Muslim selfhoods. Our focus will be on three paradigmatic figures of this movement from Egypt: Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), Hasan al-Banna (1906–49) and Amr Khaled (1967–). The impact of these reformers on the construction of modern Islamic social imaginaries has gone far beyond the confines of the Egyptian national state. Their thoughts have informed the discourse of Islamic modernities around the globe.
To be sure, the idea of specifically Islamic forms of modernity has not been without alternatives. In particular secular Arab nationalism, and socialist and fascist ideologies, as well as local nationalisms such as the Egyptianism of the inter-war period and Kemalism in Turkey, have been in fierce competition with concepts of Islamic modernities. For a large part of the 20th century, not Islamist ideologies but different forms of nationalisms dominated the discourse of modernity in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world. Yet the Islamic reform movement was instrumental in mobilizing religious semantics and social action around specific Islamic themes that became a fertile ground for the emergence of various forms of specifically Islamic social imaginaries in the course of the 20th century. Moreover, in a close interplay with the power structure of international politics and discursive interlacements with orientalist scholarship in Europe and the Americas, this discourse about Islamic modernities has achieved a relative hegemony in defining ‘Muslim authenticity’ toward the end of the 20th century (cf. Jung, 2011: ch. 6).
The purpose of this article is twofold. First of all, we want to contribute to the theoretical debate in providing a tentative synthesis of the concepts of multiple and successive modernities as once requested by Johann Arnason (2005: 436). Second, we want to underpin our claim that the historical emergence of multiple modernities should be understood as the interference of particular cultural traditions with more general and globally relevant modern social imaginaries. Consequently, multiple modernities are always ‘entangled modernities’ (Therborn, 2003), the result of both intercivilizational encounters and the interaction among different forms of modernity.
We will do so in applying ideal types derived from the abovementioned strands of social theory to the interpretation of central ideas of Islamic reformers. In looking at the interference of these deliberately religious modern imaginaries with non-religious visions about social order and the self, we add a comparative dimension to the predominantly secular narrative of Western modernity to which theories of successive modernities and modern subjectivity formation normally relate. In other words, in this article we focus on similarities within two historical narratives which often tend to be considered as two fundamentally different if not antagonistic cultural interpretations of the modern world. In addition, our case study is also about cultural conflicts among different imaginations of Islamic modernities. The analysis of the Islamic reform movement shows that multiple modernities are not only responses of different civilizational traditions to the challenges of modernity, but represent at the same time cultural conflicts within a civilizational complex. In short, this article is about the complex interplay between unity and difference, which in itself might be interpreted as reflecting the fundamental ambivalence of modernity.
We will unfold our argument in two parts. In the first part we address the relationship between modernity in the singular and modernities in the plural. We will argue that concepts of successive modernities can serve as conceptual tools to understand variations in the construction of multiple modernities within civilizational complexes. Then we shall combine this synthesis with Reckwitz’s three ideal types of subjectivity formation. In applying his poststructuralist perspective to modern subjectivity formation we deviate from the Western grant narrative of the liberal imaginary that has informed the modern subject as the emancipation of a reflexive, rational, self-interested and expressive individual. Instead, our analytical gaze emphasizes the hybrid nature of modern subjectivity, basing it on competing orders of social and discursive practices. Modern forms of subjectivity are, then, collectively shared but highly contested cultural types to which individual identity constructions refer in an idiosyncratic way. 3
In the second part we are going to employ these conceptual devices in our reading of the modern history of Islam. To be sure, in this brief case study we do not ‘test’ theories. The example of the Islamic reform movement serves illustrative and heuristic purposes. It provides a clarification of our theoretical arguments and tries to identify further relevant questions. We aim at showing the complex interlacement of global modern imaginaries with Islamic traditions in the construction of Islamic modernities by Islamic reformers. This part moves from the classical Islamic reform movement of the 19th century to the organized Islamist movements of the 20th century and ends with contemporary, more pluralistic constructions of Islamic orders and lifestyles. We conclude with brief reflections on the issue of unity versus diversity in the theoretical debate about multiple modernities in light of our heuristic framework and case study.
Modernity, modernities and modern subjectivities
The rise of concepts of modernity in the plural is intimately linked to the fundamental critique of the modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s as well as to dissatisfactions with postmodern theories (Lee, 2006; Knöbl, 2007). Furthermore, the criticism of postcolonial theories has ‘brought culture back in’ (Dirlik, 2003: 279). These critiques added a strong interpretative notion to contemporary theories of modernity. Following this interpretative trend, we suggest defining the modern condition not by a specific set of institutions but rather by a number of existential questions resulting from the all-penetrating experience of social contingency (cf. Wagner, 2001). In conceptual terms, contingency rests on a double negation: Nothing is impossible and nothing is necessary (Frick, 1988: 18; Luhmann, 1992: 96). This penetrating idea of ‘all that is could be otherwise’, however, does not exclude the existence of relatively durable historical structures. The resilience of historically different and path-dependent social institutions is a case in point. Specifically, ‘modern’ is, according to our definition, the principal belief in the contingent nature of social life. Consequently, modern individuals and collectives live in constant tension between order and uncertainty. At the macro-level this social contingency raises the question as to the way in which a man-made social order is possible; at the micro-level individuals are confronted with the task of constructing their own meaningful forms of subjectivity. Thus, questions about social order and identity are central features of global modernity and social actors must actively search for solutions to them (Wagner, 2008: 13). These solutions might be sought in a multiplicity of ways. However, at a more abstract level, according to Wagner’s interpretation, these answers oscillate between the twin concepts of freedom and discipline (Wagner, 1994), between claims for the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of the collective. In conceptual terms, defining modernity in this way does not presuppose any necessary linkage to the history of the West. Historically, however, the formation of multiple modernities has been closely knitted into the power relations of European imperialism.
Multiple and successive modernities
In adopting this interpretative perspective on modernity (Wagner, 2008: 10), we define modernization as a process in which the transformation of contingency into necessity became a central, heavily contested and autonomous task for collectives and individuals alike. We consider theories of multiple modernities to be one of the conceptual rationalizations of this universal struggle with modern contingency. They refute the idea of modernization as a convergence of societies, while retaining the premise of a number of common features of modernity such as autonomy, reflexivity, exploration, construction and the domination of nature (Eisenstadt, 2001: 323). The historical realization of multiple forms of modernity is understood as attempts to actively shape social orders and identities in drawing on different cultural programs as interpretative sources (Eisenstadt, 2000). Consequently, historical paths to modernity are not characterized by radical ruptures with the past. To a certain extent, the evolution of different forms of modernity is dependent on the civilizational legacies of religious and imperial traditions (Arnason, 2003).
While the concept of multiple modernities refutes the notion of a universal cultural form of modernity, theories of ‘successive modernities’ have replaced the linear developmental model of modernization theories by conceptualizing modernization in terms of ruptures and social breaks. From this theoretical perspective, modernity in itself is fragmented and appears as a patterned sequence of different forms of social orders. Theories of successive modernities thereby offer us conceptual tools to understand the appearance of different forms of modernity over time, while the civilizational approach of multiple modernities explains them with regard to different cultural spaces. From the poststructuralist perspective of Reckwitz, however, these temporal and spatial differentiations are themselves of a relatively contingent character.
With reference to the work of Peter Wagner, we discuss successive modernities in distinguishing among three types of modern social orders: restricted liberal modernity, organized modernity, and extended liberal modernity. 4 According to Wagner, the first form of restricted liberal modernity was characterized by an elitist top-down application of morally and rationally grounded liberal rules. While liberal rules applied to a distinguished bourgeois minority, the majority of the people were excluded from the liberal order. This peculiar blending of freedom with discipline was shaping national societies marred by massive social inequalities and impoverishment (Wagner, 2010: 14). In the second half of the 19th century, the inequalities of this liberal order of the excluded masses, together with the all-pervasive experience of contingency, were comprehended as a ‘first crisis of modernity’. Bourgeois societies in 19th-century Europe apprehended a deep social crisis demanding the establishment of new forms of a regulating social order. The solution for this crisis of restricted liberal modernity was eventually the invention of organized modernity with its core feature, the territorially confined and bureaucratically administered national state (Wagner, 1994).
In the 20th century, the major intellectual pillars of this state-centred modernity of the organized masses were a collectively shared belief in linear progress, instrumental rationality and the management of society. Revolving around the institutional containment of society in the territorially demarcated nation-state, this form of organized modernity represents the classical self-interpretation of Western modernity. However, this inclusive form of organized modernity built on ‘a strong standardization of practices and homogenization of life courses’ which, in the 1960s, resulted in a second crisis of modernity (Wagner, 2012: 37). Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens ascribed this second crisis of modernity to a reflexive process in which the systemic consequences of organized modernity have undermined the very basis on which it rests. In their reading, the well-ordered world of nationally integrated industrial societies has been gradually replaced by the ‘risk society’ of ‘second modernity’ (Beck, 1992, 1997; Giddens, 1991). The crisis of the previous model of organized modernity has led to a dissolution and reconfiguration of societal conventions, as well as to a pluralization of the social practices that have characterized organized forms of modernity. This transformation of social orders has been discernable in discursive shifts regarding the construction of state-society relations on a global scale. Discourses about duties and obligations to the state have gradually been superseded by an emphasis on individual rights. At the macro-level, the social order of extended liberal modernity is characterized by the disembedding of political and economic institutions from local contexts. From the micro-perspective, individual identity constructions are exposed to the continuous experience of doubt and multiple choices (Giddens, 1991). As such, imaginations of organized modernity with its focus on collectivity have gradually been challenged by the more individualist and pluralistic patterns of extended liberal modernity, often also referred to as postmodernity.
Poststructuralist social theory has further radicalized these ambiguous interpretations of modernity. Developing from within the modern paradigm, they put into question all the certainties of the classical modern worldview, replacing the stability of organized social structures by instabilities, contradictions and constantly changing meanings, which we can also observe in the discourses and social practices of everyday life (Reckwitz, 2008: 232). The regulated life of organized modernity appears from this perspective as nothing more than a passing fantasy. Similar to poststructuralist theories, most of postmodern critique does not represent a radical break with the modern paradigm. Rather, postmodern theories attempt a thorough revision of the grand narratives of organized modernity and defend cultural and religious particularities against tendencies toward global cultural homogenization. At first glance, this makes poststructuralist/postmodern reasoning and theories of multiple modernities akin. Contrary to theories of multiple modernities, however, postmodern and poststructuralist approaches do not assume the relative stability and homogeneity of major cultural programs. They reject assumptions that the symbolic borders of cultures are congruent with those of social collectivities, not to say with those of entire civilizations. From a poststructuralist angle multiple modernities represent fragile, fuzzy and shifting imaginations of historically particular and competing cultural orders.
Ideal types of modern subjectivity formation
In our approach, we apply this poststructuralist understanding of cultures and social imaginaries to theories of multiple and successive modernities. With respect to theories of multiple modernities, this approach can correct the tendency in Eisenstadt’s work to construct multiple modernities as coherent and bounded ‘cultural containers’ (Wagner, 2008: 12). Contrary to Eisenstadt, we analyse them as historically contingent and fragmented results of the ways in which social actors have imagined solutions to modern questions. Thereby social actors draw on various cultural resources and employ them together with civilizational traditions in idiosyncratic ways. Regarding the concept of successive modernities, poststructuralist reasoning helps us to refute the idea of considering them as an invariant and paradigmatic sequence of modern social orders (cf. Arnason, 2005: 436). We consider Wagner’s successive modernities as historical forms that in European history have subsequently achieved a certain hegemony. Yet these modern social orders have not simply replaced each other, but features of the previously hegemonic type live on in the later types. Together with new and alternative patterns they shape hybrid combinations, continuously challenging the dominance of the concrete hegemonic form in place. Consequently, we play down the temporal element of successive modernities and do not identify socio-cultural change by clear-cut ruptures with the past. Instead, we examine social transformations through the lenses of cultural conflicts, of conflicts among social actors employing different orders of meaning. These conflicts are about the opening and closure of contingency, expressing the competition among a variety of collectively acknowledged but historically particular social imaginaries to which social actors refer in their construction of social orders. From this perspective, Wagner’s successive modernities are viewed as three distinct and competing historical answers to the fundamental questions of modernity.
Likewise, this perspective applies to Andreas Reckwitz’s three types of modern subjectivity formation, which shows a strong affinity to Wagner’s three forms of successive modernities. In European history, Reckwitz discerned three formations of subject cultures that subsequently have claimed relative hegemony in the modern epoch: the classical bourgeois, the peer-group-oriented type of the salaried masses, and the postmodern creative worker and entrepreneur. Similar to Charles Taylor, Reckwitz grounds the formation of modern subjectivities in the practices of everyday life. Taylor defined the ‘affirmation of ordinary life’ (1989: 14) as one of the most powerful ideas in modern civilization. Ordinary life refers to ‘those aspects of human life concerned with production and reproduction, that is, labor, the making of things needed for life, and our life as sexual beings, including marriage and the family’ (1989: 211). In line with that, Reckwitz identifies three complexes of social practices in which the subjectification of the modern self takes place: as working subject, as subject of private and intimate relationships, and as subject of technologies of the self (2006: 53). In each complex we can observe networks of discourses and social practices. The discursive manifestation of specific cultural codes establishes explicit models of subjectivity, whereas social practices provide regulated forms of social action. Social practices are not necessarily interactive but can also be directed toward objects (material culture) or the self (technologies of the self). These different complexes, however, are not homogeneous in themselves, and they do not have clearly demarcated borders of meaning. Their discursive and social practices interfere in various and complex ways (Reckwitz, 2006: 51–3).
The first form of modern subjectivity Reckwitz defines as the bourgeois subject. The bourgeois gains autonomy as a morally sovereign individual and is predominantly a subject of work. The daily practices of disciplined work became the exemplary place at which bourgeois subjects find their moral formation. In terms of intimacy, marriage developed into the central moral institution, which was partly moulded by elements of Protestant culture. The major technologies of the self were related to literacy, thus writing and reading became central practices of self-formation. Diaries, letters, newspapers and books are media of this hermeneutical self-reflection of the bourgeois. Combining the liberal code of an autonomous reflexive subject with the more conservative values of moral regulation, bourgeois subjectivity formation took place in contradistinction to the cultural codes of both the previously dominant aristocracy and popular culture. In its hegemonic claim to universality, romanticist culture challenged the bourgeois in denigrating bourgeois behaviour as an un-authentic and artificial form of life. However, both bourgeois culture and its antagonistic romanticist challenger were not mass cultures, but expressions of the modern social configuration that Peter Wagner described as restricted liberal modernity (cf. Reckwitz, 2006: 97–274).
With the beginning of the 20th century, we can observe the gradual erosion of the hegemonic status of bourgeois culture in the West. This erosion was linked to Wagner’s first crisis of modernity and, according to Reckwitz, due to three developments turning the restricted liberal society of the 19th century into the mass society of the 20th century. First, the structural transformation of material culture and technology caused a reorganization of time and space, allowing the creation of new forms of mass collectivity. The discursive dissemination of new knowledge by the humanist sciences such as psychology and sociology complemented technological developments with ideas of the social engineering of society. Finally, aesthetic counter-movements discovered the human body as an object for technologies of the self and set creativity as a value against bourgeois morality. Reflecting the macro-structures of organized modernity, the hegemony of bourgeois subjectivity was replaced by the peer-group-oriented culture of the salaried masses. 5 Having its centre in the United States, this form of subjectivity was characterized by the generalization of behaviour. 6 In contradistinction to the rationalistic and introverted self of the bourgeois, now an extroverted consumption-oriented group type became the leading model. Bourgeois individual work ethics gave way to collectively binding practices of efficient work coordination of the managerial type. Private life was increasingly characterized by informality among peers and the erosion of the sharp distinction between private and public life of classical bourgeois culture. The culture of the salaried masses was also marked by a decisive change in the technologies of the self. The introverted literacy of bourgeois culture was superseded by new practices in which audiovisual media, modes of consumption, the body and public performances were of growing importance. While turning against the elitist bourgeois as the excluded Other, peer-group-oriented subjectivity nevertheless adopted the ideas of regulation and control of its predecessor, but in a different form. In line with core features of organized modernity, the subjectivity of the salaried masses combined formalized and efficient coordination of action with practices of consumption which took on the character of self-gratification. The hegemonic subject of organized modernity claimed to be all-inclusive, advocated social adaptation, and transferred the aesthetics of romanticist critique into a commodified field of consumption (Reckwitz, 2006: 275–440).
Parallel to the shift from organized to extended liberal modernity, Reckwitz observes the hegemonic rise of a third form of modern subjectivity now antagonizing the peer-group-oriented ‘average culture’ of organized modernity. This postmodern type of subjectivity formation advocates a self whose imaginary is related to individualized patterns of consumption and creative action. Postmodern subject culture combines the type of the creative worker with the entrepreneur, rejecting the tropes of rational calculability, bureaucratic organization and technical coordination that characterized the managerial imaginary of organized modernity. Similar to the shift from bourgeois culture to organized modernity, Reckwitz assigns the transformation of the means of communication an important role in the rise of postmodern subjectivity. While the printing press was revolutionized by the new audiovisual media during the first part of the 20th century, the post-Second World War period has experienced another technological revolution through digital media. They facilitate highly individualized forms of work that replace the bureaucratized working culture of organized modernity. In postmodern working culture, the model is the self-reliant, dynamic and creative entrepreneur who is engaged in a number of shifting projects. At the same time, digital technologies offer the creative subject of extended liberal modernity new means for the hermeneutics of the self which are characterized by their digital, individual-consumptive and body-oriented characters. Intimacy, finally, turns into a medium of expressive subjectivity. Intimate personal relationships are no longer confined to the nuclear family and become characterized by communicational, emotional and experimental practices to a growing extent (Reckwitz, 2006: 441–630).
Like the two other transformations in modern subjectivity formation, this ‘postmodern turn’ does not mark a radical break with previous forms of modern subjectivity either. Rather the postmodern self resembles an eclectic amalgam of the autonomous pretentions of the bourgeois with the counter-images propagated by romanticist and aesthetic movements of the 19th and early 20th century. Furthermore, this type of modern subjectivity maintains the consumer-orientation of the subjectivity formation of organized modernity, but giving it a new individualized and aestheticized face. Analysing contemporary social life, we can detect elements of all three cultural types. In fact, the three types of the modern – the classical bourgeois, the organized and the postmodern – are part of constant cultural conflicts about the adequate representation of modernity (Reckwitz, 2006: 635).
To sum up, we define modernity in the singular as a bundle of questions due to the experience of social contingency. Central to these questions is the modern task of the autonomous construction of social order and individual selfhoods. In this task, social actors employ different social imaginaries which refer at the same time to distinct cultural traditions and to hegemonic types of modern orders and forms of subjectivity. They combine civilizational legacies with global modern imaginaries in idiosyncratic ways, thereby realizing ever shifting and historically particular combinations of the ideas of freedom and discipline (cf. Carleheden, 2006: 62). In our analytical framework, Wagner’s three forms of successive modernities and Reckwitz’s three types of modern subjectivity formation represent both globally relevant social imaginaries and conceptual ideal types. As global social imaginaries, they appear to be abstract reference points, hegemonic cultural types, for the construction of historically concrete forms of social order and individual selfhoods. As ideal types, they serve us as heuristic instruments in observing the cultural conflicts that frame contemporary processes of social change. In the following section, we will apply these ideal types in an interpretative analytical sketch to the history of Islamic reform.
Islamic reform and the construction of Islamic modernities
In the Muslim world we can observe a broad variety of attitudes in reaction to the colonial and indigenous confrontation with modern institutions and ideas in the 19th century. These attitudes ranged from the straight rejection of modernity by religious traditionalists to the wholehearted affirmation by secularist modernists. In retrospect, however, the apologetic reaction of the Islamic reform movement probably made the strongest impact on the later development of ideas about specifically Islamic modernities. Since the second part of the 19th century, Islamic reformers have tried to reconcile modern culture with Islamic traditions, rejecting both the extreme poles of traditionalism and secularism. They have invented a historically specific and still enormously influential type of Islamic modernity according to which the authenticity of collective and individual modern Muslim identities has been constituted in close reference to Islamic traditions. 7
In initiating a thorough revision of the core vocabulary of Islam in light of modern questions, the 19th-century Islamic reformers created an intellectual reservoir from which subsequent Islamic thinkers have drawn. They imbued classical Islamic concepts with entirely new meanings. Transforming the language of religious traditions into the semantics of an authentically modern Islam, these religious reformers ‘liberated’ Islamic concepts from their classical context. They initiated a process undermining the authority of the traditional religious establishment and its monopoly over the interpretation of the Islamic tradition. In doing so, this reform movement developed a conceptual toolkit for the Islamization of modern institutions and ideas (cf. Al-Azmeh, 1996). It is this modern semantics of Islam which speaks to us through the various ideologies of Islamist movements and which has been used both consciously and unconsciously in the articulation of subsequent forms of modern Muslim subjectivities. The following three brief excursions illustrate in which ways we can interpret these changing forms of Islamic modernities with the help of the heuristic framework described in the previous sections of this article. Guided by our core question about the generic meaning of modernity, the following illustration will emphasize similarities rather than differences with regard to the European historical experience that has informed the conceptual apparatus of Reckwitz and Wagner.
The Islamic reform movement and Islamic bourgeois society
A key figure in the Islamic reform movement of the 19th century was the Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Abduh. The life ambition of this religious scholar (alim; pl. ulama) was directed toward the revitalization of Egyptian society through the means of religious and educational reforms (Livingston, 1995: 216). Abduh was convinced of the civilizing potential of Islamic traditions. Understanding them rationally as universal principles, he perceived them as perfectly compatible with the bodies of knowledge that were offered by the modern sciences. Combining his erudition in the Islamic sciences with his knowledge of European thought, Abduh propagated the harmony of Islam with modern science and education. In the educated and morally autonomous religious Muslim subject, he saw the solution to the social ills of Egyptian society (Sedgwick, 2010).
In giving answers to modern challenges, Abduh combined his call upon Muslims to return to the pristine Islamic principles (the salafi approach) with the bourgeois social imaginary of an educated, socially active and morally grounded individual. The personal autonomy of these modern Muslim subjects was characterized by a combination of work discipline with reflected-upon religious observance. For Abduh, Islam encouraged hard work and personal sacrifice in daily life (Ibrahim, 1999: 71). He perceived both the ritualistic following of religious traditions and the uncritical imitation of European culture as forms of blind imitation (taqlid) which would prevent Muslims from living authentic lives. From this perspective, every rationally thinking and educated Muslim subject should in principle be able to come to an adequate interpretation of the traditions. Therefore, education in Arabic and the use of writing and reading technologies were core concerns of his reformist agenda. In line with the ideal type of the bourgeois subject, Abduh’s modern Muslims were supposed to employ the means of literacy together with the reflected adherence to religious traditions in their hermeneutics of the self. A modern Muslim was self-disciplined, orderly, productive, rational and fundamentally a moral subject whose intimate relationships were anchored in marriage, family life and religious community (Haj, 2009: 118). In short, Abduh constructed modern Muslim subjectivities along the lines of the bourgeois subject, grounded in the affirmation of ordinary life yet with an emphasis on Islamic traditions as the central source for moral autonomy.
In achieving this moral autonomy based on religious traditions, however, Abduh did not advocate the indiscriminate interpretation of religious sources by every single Muslim. In his model of a modern Muslim, the intellectual elite might have had independent recourse to Islamic traditions as a means of a technology of the self, shaping a modern selfhood grounded in religious morality. Yet for ordinary Egyptians, Islam had to be first employed as a technology of domination transmitted through a religiously conscious and state-governed system of education. His type of a bourgeois Muslim subject was an elitist construction, fearful of the assumed lack of self-mastery of the masses. The liberal elements of Abduh’s Salafist reforms in the 19th century were restricted to a well-educated bourgeois class which should rule over a non-autonomous population. Apparently, Abduh’s imagined social order strongly resembled the social configuration of Wagner’s restricted liberal bourgeoisie in Europe (Wagner, 2004: 37). The social imaginary of the reform movement, therefore, contained an ambiguous combination of technologies of domination with technologies of the self, two dimensions that reappear in various combinations in later forms of Islamic modernities. However, this idea of a restricted bourgeois Islamic modernity could not achieve a position of cultural hegemony within the elite cultures of Muslim societies in the 19th century. Struggling simultaneously with the alternative imaginaries of traditionalist ulama, aristocratic rulers, secular modernists and the colonial administration, the religious reformers failed in establishing their form of an Islamic modernity as the dominant social imaginary of their times.
The Muslim Brotherhood and organized Islamic modernity
Before rising toward relative hegemony, the idea of an Islamic modernity first had to get rid of its elitist confines. This happened with the historical shift from the epoch of classical bourgeoisie to the social dominance of organized forms of modernity. In the modern history of Islam, this shift is best exemplified in the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood as a social movement and a distinct organization. Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood best reflects an Islamic version of the peer-group-oriented type of modern subjectivity associated with organized modernity. 8 Starting as a benevolent society, it soon became a transnational religio-political movement that eventually established itself at national levels in forming distinct organizations in various Muslim countries. Hasan al-Banna moved from rural to urban Egypt and studied at the modern educational institution of the dar al-ulum, the then newly established teacher training college in Cairo. His biography and educational background makes him a representative of the new Egyptian urban middle class, the so-called effendiyya (Commins, 2005: 129). In the Egyptian context, this new urban stratum was characterized by its modern education, nationalist sentiments, ambivalent attitudes to Europe, and activist stances regarding the social and political transformation of the country (Eppel, 2009). It was this new middle class together with workers and educated members of Egypt’s rural population that became the social carriers of the Brotherhood. They promoted an Islamic version of organized society that increasingly dominated the social imaginaries of religiously minded Muslims in the 20th century.
From Muhammad Abduh’s disciple and biographer Rashid Rida, Hasan al-Banna took the concept of the Islamic state and the preeminent role of the sharia in shaping an authentic Islamic order. As a socio-political movement, the Muslim Brotherhood further transformed the modern notion of the sharia from an independently used reference for the formation of an autonomous moral subject to a collectively binding set of norms and laws according to which society has to be organized. The Muslim Brotherhood clearly emphasized the role of Islamic traditions as a technology of domination by shifting its religious discourse from Abduh’s emphasis on morality toward the legal distinction between lawful and legally forbidden. For Banna, Islamic law was the prime symbol of moral integrity, cultural authenticity and national independence (Krämer, 2010: 114). The contingencies of modernity had to be managed by the implementation of an Islamic social order through coercive legal means. Hasan al-Banna emphasized the Salafi idea that it is necessary to return to the exemplary order of the ‘Golden Age of Islam’ in order to overcome the political subordination and social crisis of the Muslim world. For him, the Prophet and the first four caliphs truly represented Islam as a faith and a just social order (Mitchell, 1969: 210). Only the recourse to these exemplary figures of Islam can guarantee the authenticity of an Islamic present in the past. Consequently, Banna envisaged the excluded Other in the allegedly secularist culture of the West and in its indigenous representatives, the secular Muslim modernists. In spreading Banna’s message, the Brotherhood utilized the technological innovations that facilitated the emergence of the new subjectivity formation of the salaried masses.
The Muslim Brothers further addressed pressing political and economic questions, combined bureaucratic institutions with leadership structures reminiscent of Sufi sheikhs, and employed the organizational templates and forms of mass mobilization that characterized the popular political movements of the inter-war period in a global dimension. In using badges, implementing dress codes and conducting public ceremonies and prayers, the Brotherhood adopted the extroverted performing modes of peer group-oriented selfhood. Furthermore, it put new emphasis on the body, in particular with regard to the training of its paramilitary units and the prescription of religious garment. Hasan al-Banna’s ideal of a modern Muslim was the manly, virtuous, industrious, temperate, clean, punctual, self-confident, modest, polite, physically active, productive and spiritual Muslim firmly embedded in community life (Krämer, 2010: 111). He constructed a model of Islamic subjectivity that implied a modern form of governmentality in which state authorities organize society according to Islamic principles, serving the state in its technologies of domination and Muslim individuals as authoritatively prescribed technologies of the self. 9
From organized to pluralistic Islamic modernities
In recent years, a number of scholars have claimed to observe a move from Islamist to post-Islamist worldviews among Muslims. Asef Bayat, for instance, described this development as a departure from the Brotherhood’s universalist, exclusivist and obligation-oriented position to new modes of more inclusive thinking, acknowledging ambiguity, multiplicity and compromise in the performance of religious practices and the desired restructuring of society (Bayat, 2002: 13). The adherents of this new Islamic movement are more concerned with personal morality, individual improvement and community development than with issues of political reform by means of formal politics. They often take their inspiration from lay preachers such as Amr Khaled, an accountant who started preaching in mosques and private clubs in the early 1990s. His shows have been broadcast widely on a number of satellite channels, including Iqra, Dream TV and Orbit, and his speeches and programs are available on audio- and videotape, as well as being disseminated through his extensive website. 10 To a certain extent resembling the ideal type of the postmodern creative entrepreneur, Amr Khaled reaches with his message millions of young Muslims all over the Middle East, as well as in Europe and North America (Wise, 2003).
Rather than representing an isolated phenomenon, it seems that Amr Khaled has become the catalyst for a much broader trend facilitated by new media such as the internet and satellite TV. From our theoretical perspective, we interpret this growing number of preachers with a similar style and message as an element of modern religious re-organization in the context of the technological revolution by digital media closely associated with extended liberal modernity. This new movement is spearheaded by spokespersons who are religious lay people, transmitting their messages in an easily understandable colloquial Arabic rather than employing the classical high standard Arabic spoken by traditional sheikhs. Contrary to them, these lay preachers do not have religious authority because they are hierarchically different from their audience, representing the religiously educated Islamic establishment, but because they closely resemble those lay people who listen to their message (Moll, 2010: 13). They clearly differ from both the bourgeois intellectuals of the elitist 19th-century Islamic reform movement and the collectivist and state-centred representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood. This new Islamic movement combines social awareness with faith and ethics packaged in ‘compelling and contemporary ways to young middle-class consumers’ (Peterson, 2011: 124). It allows its followers to assert their individuality by adherence to active piety (Bayat, 2002) and appeals to the creative and artistic values of extended liberal modernity (cf. Van Nieuwkerk, 2008).
Although still contested in substance and fuzzy in appearance, this movement might indicate that the imaginations of Islamic modernities are entering into a ‘postmodern phase’. According to our heuristic framework, the so far hegemonic model of organized society of 20th-century Islamism is seemingly contested by the self-reflexive and ambiguous character of a type of modernity whose uncertainties are increasingly managed on the individual instead of the collective level. The previous emphasis on Islam as a technology of domination is competing with the application of Islamic traditions as technologies of the self which shall bring about a form of the Islamic modern based on the religious and moral development of individuals. The ‘managerial’ approach of classical Islamist thinking, the rational organization of a universally defined Islamic society based on normative principles found in the legalistic interpretation of the sharia, is probably slowly losing its appeal.
Since the modern Salafist agitation against the interpretative monopoly of the ulama in the 19th century, we can observe a clear process of the erosion of religious authority in the discursive tradition of Islam. In the course of the 20th century, the Islamic signifier became more important in Muslim politics of defining authentic forms of modern subjectivities. However, this rise to relative hegemony has been accompanied by an increasing loss of its cohesive meaning. This transformation is also apparent in the puzzling ways in which the concept of Salafism is meanwhile applied. Academic definitions and Salafist self-descriptions hardly share a common denominator besides the ideal and authoritative status of the Prophet and the early community of Muslims in their otherwise heterogeneous religious constructions.
In the language of Ernest Laclau, Islam has turned into an empty signifier: References to Islamic traditions have meanwhile taken on a polysemic nature. This has also been apparent in Egyptian politics immediately after the so-called Arab spring. Stéphan Lacroix, for instance, talked about a ‘natural appeal’ of Islamist parties among Muslim voters. Many of his interviewees did not show an awareness regarding the differences among these parties but they insisted on the necessity ‘to vote for a party with Islamic reference’ (Lacroix, 2012: 1).
In light of modern contingencies, references to Islamic traditions seem to guarantee authenticity without necessarily providing any shared meaning. Authorized by the Islamic institution of jihad, to take just one example, contemporary Muslims can justify fighting with military means for pan-Islamic ideals in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq or Syria (Hegghammer, 2010); they can pursue their personal ‘women’s jihad’ for the religious, political and social betterment of their community (Deeb, 2006: 204–19), or they can advocate civil disobedience and non-violent actions against repressive Muslim rulers (Stephan, 2009). While Islamic traditions remain authoritative in defining Muslim authenticity, they tend to become almost entirely open in meaning. In constructing specifically Islamic identities, Muslim believers combine religious language, symbols and practices randomly with diverging political ideologies, self-styled Islamic imaginaries, digitalized technologies and consumptive practices (cf. Cooke and Lawrence, 2005). In the cultural conflict between imaginaries of organized and liberal Islamic modernities the figure of the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood is challenged by the televised charismatic preacher, and the pious dress code of the sisters of Islam must compete against various new forms of Islamic fashion (Haenni and Tammam, 2003).
Conclusions: Unity and diversity
In this article, we suggest understanding modernity in the singular first of all as an interpretative concept. Then modernity is about the cultural framing, rather than the concrete institutionalization of solutions to the specifically modern questions about social order and identity. This conceptual approach tries to avoid a rash identification of modernization with Westernization and opens up for the development of a concept of global modernity which might be able to tackle the puzzling empirical observation of both convergence and divergence in the historical rise of modernities.
Employing the three forms of Wagner’s successive modernities, we do not interpret them as a sequence of mere replacement. Rather, we understand them as different combinations of elements of freedom and discipline, of individual and collective autonomy, in constructing imaginaries of social order. Although we can observe successive historical phases of cultural hegemony, we consider these phases not to be irreversible or even necessary stages of modern developments. Reformulating these phases as conceptual ideal types, imaginations of organized modernity put their emphasis on the establishment of disciplined collectives in which individual autonomy is achieved by resembling most closely the identity construction of peers. The social imaginaries associated with extended liberalism, instead, construct meaningful selfhoods in a pluralistic setting with reference to the ideal type of the creative and individualized entrepreneur. There is no doubt that these two different imaginations of social orders are also reflected in discourses about institutions. Forms of organized society are more closely associated with authoritarian rule and restricted forms of democracy, whereas liberal democracy has been a central point of reference in the institutional realization of extended liberalism.
However, these affinities should not be confused with a synonymous relationship between discipline and organized society as such. Rather, we can observe in these types of social order different modes of social control. Behind the ideal type of the creative worker and entrepreneur of extended liberalism, for instance, we can discern the neoliberal discourse of the ‘organized proliferation of individual difference’ through the economic matrix of the market. Here, individual autonomy and freedom are at the ‘heart of disciplinary control’. The managerial means of organized society and its emphasis on the autonomy of the collective have been replaced by the means of ‘responsible self-management’, technologies of domination by those of the self (cf. McNay, 2009: 56). Consequently, discourses of democracy and global capitalism have played significant roles in the construction of modern social imaginaries and indicate necessary fields of further exploration.
This entanglement between freedom and discipline has also characterized the social imaginaries of Islamic reformers whose construction of Islamic social orders and successful Muslim subjectivities were the subject of the second part of our article. In this part we aimed to show that the emergence of specifically Islamic modernities has taken place with close reference to more general global imaginaries. In the modern history of Muslim societies we can observe conflicts among proponents of different types of social order and competing individual identity constructions similar to those Reckwitz and Wagner have discerned in European history. However, in the historical course of these conflicts among Muslims and their entanglement with Europe, references to religion and the combination of global social imaginaries with Islamic traditions have assumed a relative hegemony in defining the specific difference and therewith the ‘authentic’ character of Muslim modernities.
This combination of religious civilizational legacies with modern imaginaries has only gradually assumed a hegemonic role among the various forms of interpretation of modern Muslim life. Moreover, this rise to cultural hegemony was not a process of inner-civilizational developments, but strongly enhanced by Western stigmatizations of Islam. In this entanglement of European-Muslim history the dichotomy between Islam and the West represents the mutually excluded Other in Islamic and Western identity building. This became particularly visible in the imaginary of an organized Islamic society by the Muslim Brotherhood in which an Islamic order based on the sharia appeared to be the antithesis to Western societies. Theoretically speaking, references to the imagined entities of Islam and of the West play a central role in the mutual expression of total negativity. As ‘empty signifiers’, Islam and the West serve in Muslim and Western identity building as discursive nodal points which remain chronically underdetermined while simultaneously representing the imagined unity of self and other (cf. Laclau and Mouffe, 2001).
This function of Islam as an empty signifier indicates that there is not an Islamic modernity as such. We do not observe the combination of modernity with a stable cultural program of Islam as at least theories of multiple modernities with reference to Eisenstadt might suggest. Rather, we are witnessing various ways in which Islamic thinkers have tried to answer the questions of modernity and its relationship with Europe within the discursive traditions of Islam. In these answers, Islamic traditions are not applied as an undisputed and coherent cultural program. On the contrary, they serve as a pool of more or less authoritative religious concepts, symbols and practices in the construction of modern social imaginaries. They belong to a multiplicity of different orders of knowledge, on which Muslims rather randomly have drawn in their individual and collective identity constructions. The meanings of Islamic traditions are therefore subject to continuous processes of re-construction and re-interpretation linked to more globally relevant discourses and social imaginaries. Since its inception in the second part of the 19th century, the idea of a specifically Islamic modernity has been an inherent part of the social alterations that we have tried to grasp with our conceptual device of successive modernities and their related types of modern subjectivities.
Departing from an interpretative answer about the generic meaning of modernity, we developed a heuristic framework in order to understand the multi-faceted culture of modernity. In applying this framework to the example of Islamic reform, we could detect both unity and difference in the construction of Islamic modernities with the European experience. Due to our focus on similarities, our case study certainly poses the questions as to the origin of these observable elements of unity. Why do Islamic modernities share elements of other cultural imaginations of modernity? It is not possible to answer this question within the scope of this article. In the broader debate about modernity and multiple modernities there are different paths along which scholars might go in pursuing answers to this question. Depending on different theoretical perspectives these interpretations would refer to concepts such as evolutionary necessity, imitation, diffusion or imposition through historically established regimes of power. Eisenstadt (2001), for instance, discusses modernity as a form of new ‘global civilization’ that first crystallized in Western Europe and then expanded throughout the world.
While here is not the place to discuss these different approaches, we would like to hint to a perspective for future elaborations. Instead of perceiving modernity as a social arrangement with a definite origin in time and space, we would suggest conceptualizing it as an emerging complex of social problems which as a cognitive, normative and expressive matrix has assumed essential properties of its own such as forms of social imaginaries as discussed by Wagner and Reckwitz.
From this perspective, we might observe signs of modernity in different cultural realms and historical phases. That Wagner and Reckwitz build their ideal types on the historical experience of Europe does not rule out the emergence of these imaginaries at other places in time and space. Why should we deprive the Muslim thinkers of our case study from autonomous agency in assuming that their combinations of organized society or bourgeois subjectivity with Islamic traditions are the result of mere imitation? Does modern Islamic history not provide us with numerous examples of the intertwined struggle of social actors with regimes of freedom and discipline?
The historical realization of the emerging social matrix of modernity has been characterized by a process of the establishment of different answers to specifically modern questions – a process full of social conflict which has been characterized by the entanglement of social forces and cultural imaginations in the context of historical power configuration. The political, economic and cultural dominance of Europe, or better of certain parts of Europe, has led to the hegemony of a particular interpretation of the matrix of modernity. This historically conditioned hegemony, however, does not rule out the very existence of the fundamental questions of this matrix in other parts of the world. In a distinct historical epoch, indeed, modernization for some time might have been similar to Westernization due to the hegemonic role of a cluster of particular answers to modernity’s general questions. However, thereby the notion of the West has had shifting and never clearly demarcated meanings. Probably the West is, theoretically speaking, nothing more than a metaphor for the abstract, ambivalent and emerging challenges of modernity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article was first published in a Danish version in Dansk Sociologi 25(2). We would like to thank the editors of Dansk Sociologi and Thesis Eleven as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Also, we would like to thank for their constructive input the participants of a seminar at the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC; funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research), where a draft version of this article was discussed. Furthermore, we are grateful to the financial support of the Danish Research Council for Humanities and VELUX Foundation for the ‘Modern Muslim Subjectivities Project’ that is currently conducted at the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark. This article has been written on the basis of this ongoing research project.