In his celebrated treatise The Social Contract, published in 1762, Rousseau tried to harmonize individual liberty with governmental authority. The social contract was basically an agreement on the part of an entire society to be governed by its general will. If any individual wished to follow his own self-interest, he should be compelled to abide by the general will. “This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free,” said Rousseau, because the general will represented a community’s highest aspirations, whatever was best for the entire community. Thus, liberty was achieved through being forced to follow what was best for all people because, he believed, what was best for all was best for each individual. True freedom is adherence to laws that one has imposed on oneself. To Rousseau, because everybody was responsible for framing the general will, the creation of laws could never be delegated to a parliamentary institution.
MODERN ISLAM
1. What were the six options that occurred in Islam's encounter with modernity? Give historical examples of each from the reading (or as many as you can).
The Ottoman empire was known as the "sick man of Europe " in the nineteenth century, i.e. this Muslim power was sometimes seen as European, and of course, its territory did stretch into Europe: Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and so on -- although these would eventually break away from Ottoman control.
The Ottomans were conscious of their own decline and the rise of European strength. The Muslim world had conquered most of the Christian Roman empire back in the day; European ideas of rationalism (Averroism) and science (medicine, astronomy etc) had also been at their peak in Islamic lands. As elsewhere, Muslims offered different answers to explain the new power of the West, and we will look at some of them here. Six reactions to the new dilemma, or models for future behavior:
· The Aligargh model. In India, an India Muslim reformer founded a university in the town of Aligargh in the late 19th century. He was very positive about British science and politics, and he thought Muslims should be educated to emulate the best of British modernity.
· The Muslim Brotherhood model. This rejected Western modernity as corrupt, selfish and heretical. It wanted to create Islamic political structures to resist Western encroachment. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian and from 1936 onwards it aimed to mobilize Arab opinion against British rule and Zionist settlement in Palestine, using the rhetoric of the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition. Of course, the fact that Palestine was home to Jerusalem, the third most sacred site of Islam, gave the Brotherhood a natural focus for its ideology. al-Banna argued that jihad was a duty for Muslims just like five-daily prayer and fasting in Ramadan. Al-Banna was in effect saying that if you did not fight, e.g. the Zionists, you were not a true Muslim.
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· Muslim modernism. This reformist tendency aimed to combine the best of authentic Islam with the best of modernity to form a modern Islamic synthesis.Option number three is an option of synthesis. There are highly intelligent Muslim modernists (Fazlur Rahman, Khalid Abou el Fadl), but modernism cannot find a place as yet in the Muslim heartlands, i.e. the Middle East – due to conservative regimes that are fearful of it. They prefer instead to support conservatives; religious liberals, after all, have a tendency to support political liberalism as well.
· Conservatism. This was promoted by some ulema (traditional scholarly class) who resolutely ignored modernity and tried to go on as if nothing had changed. Conservatism is alive and well for this reason – and often conservatism can merge into Salafism and then more radical political Islam. However, it should be said that this is not an automatic process, and indeed many conservatives who are genuinely religious and know the depths, breadth and pluralism of the original Islamic tradition are some of the staunchest opponents of the simplistic platitudes of Salafism and political Islam.
· Personalism. This was an individualistic approach which emphasized individual mysticism and spirituality (Sufism) as way for Islam to survive in the modern world. It is also practiced by non-Muslims in the West, who turn to it rather as Westerners turn to something like Buddhism or New Age forms of spirituality. However, its role in shaping the Islamic world is still quite marginal. Indeed, individualistic Sufism can even help authoritarian regimes as it distracts people from engaging with social and political problems, and it offers no real critique of political Islamism.
· Radical secularism. This option saw Muslim identity as ethnic and national rather than religious: examples are extreme Kemalism in Turkey, Baathism in Syria and Iraq, and various aspects of Soviet Muslim ideology. (the best representor is Ataturk).