As its title suggests, Islamic Ethos and the Specter of Modernity seeks to show that 20th-century Muslim thinkers have appropriated modernity's “ethos,” defined as the expansion of human agency and subjectivity. Using a Hegelian analytical model, Farzin Vahdat argues that human “mediated subjectivity” grows as it gradually derives more autonomy from God's absolute omniscience and agency (pp. xiv–xv, 1). The book's real strength, however, is the author's systematic presentation of thinkers whose work is available only in Persian. This alone makes Islamic Ethos and the Specter of Modernity a valuable contribution to Islamic studies and comparative global intellectual history. The book is clearly written and well organized with each of its nine chapters devoted to a major figure. This review follows the book's structure, noting highlights of each chapter, and gauges the persuasiveness of its thesis on the Muslim intellectual appropriation of modernity's “ethos.”
Chapter 1 begins astutely with Mohammad Iqbal (1877–1938), whose pioneering modernist interpretation of Islam is an intellectual benchmark for almost all 20th-century Muslim thinkers. Iqbal focused on “selfhood” (khudi), reinterpreting a familiar notion in classical Persian Sufi poetry to mean something approaching modern individual self-awareness. The cultivation of individual selfhood, however, is possible only through its derivation from the Divine Self (pp. 17–21). According to Iqbal, the modern “West” has acquired a “predatory” nature due to assuming irreconcilable subject–object separations, a dichotomy that a properly modern Islamic worldview can overcome (pp. 34–35). Politically, Iqbal was an anticolonial but prenationalist thinker who initially saw Turkish Republicanism and even Bolshevism as compatible with Islam, while rejecting their secularism and/or atheism. Eventually, he accepted the emergence of Muslim nation-states, arguing for a Muslim “League of Nations” and a proper mix of politics and religion within individual Muslim countries without explaining exactly how this could be accomplished (pp. 46–51).
The first major blueprint for a modern Islamic state was drawn up by Abul ʿAla Maududi (1903–79). Breaking with Indian nationalism, Maududi founded Jamaʾat-i Islami (Islamic Association), a political movement working toward the establishment of Pakistan. His political philosophy started with the Qurʾan's designation of humanity as God's “vice-regent” on earth, but invested this capacity in a Muslim intellectual elite leading the community by force and violence when necessary. He advocated for a modern “Islamic Republic,” claiming Islam had originated as a “social revolution” against political corruption and class oppression. Maududi admitted his illiberal Islamic Republic resembled both communist and fascist states, but insisted it was not totalitarian or dictatorial (pp. 66, 69). His republic was also sternly patriarchal, denying women's right to political office and keeping them under male guardianship (pp. 78, 87–88). According to Vahdat, despite its illiberal character, Maududi's “proto-republicanism” validates the book's thesis on the progress of human agency, since it has “the potential of preparing a population for self-rule and republicanism” (p. 90).
The book's third Muslim thinker, Egypt's Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), stands much closer intellectually to Maududi than to Iqbal. Like Maududi, he upheld patriarchy, believing women's “nature” necessitated their staying at home to serve the family. From such “natural” harmony in the family, Qutb extrapolated his utopian model of a harmonious Muslim society. He believed “Western” societies were based on conflict among individuals and classes, requiring the modern state's repressive intervention. In contrast, his ideal Islamic government invests all power in an indivisible moral leadership, which can be one person or an assembly (pp. 106–9). Vahdat concedes human subjectivity in Qutb's “discourse is contingent, inchoate, and hostile to the individual as its carrier.” Nevertheless, he sees Qutb's “legacy” as yet another form of proto-republicanism, which could lead to the emergence of “a more developed individual self” and citizenship rights (pp. 113–14).
The book's argument about the unfolding emancipatory potential of Islamic modernism finds better support in the chapter on Moroccan feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi (1940–2015). During her Freudian Marxist intellectual phase, Mernissi proposed a radical feminist critique of the entire Islamic tradition. She later cast this critique in a Muslim perspective, claiming, as Christian feminists had done for Jesus, that the Prophet Muhammad's initially gender egalitarian teaching had been corrupted by the patriarchal impositions of his immediate successors. Vahdat observes how Mernissi's commitment to gender egalitarian “sovereign individuality” is rooted in her resolute attention to “the body and sexuality” (p. 137). More to the point, Mernissi wants to liberate women's bodies and sexuality, in glaring contrast to Maududi and Qutb, who are obsessed with controlling them. These thinkers hardly can be considered involved in the same project of expanding human agency.
The book's central argument becomes more convincing in its second half, which also is more coherent because it focuses on four Iranian thinkers, three of whom lend support to Vahdat's thesis on the expansion of Muslim “mediated subjectivity,” while the fourth is its antithesis. The first, Mehdi Haeri Yazdi (1923–99), is an ayatollah with a doctorate in theology from Tehran University and another in analytical philosophy from the University of Toronto. Predictably, Haeri tried to reconcile classical Islamic theology and modern philosophy. To do so, he resorted to familiar notions of God as the Supreme Necessary Being, sustaining a chain or “pyramid of existence” and encompassing humans and all other beings. Haeri's political philosophy was liberal, committed to individual subjectivity, and anchored in “natural rights” and “private proprietorship.” This, of course, led to his political marginalization in postrevolutionary Iran's clerically dominated Islamic Republic (pp. 145–46, 157–59).
Next comes Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari (b. 1936), whose traditional seminary training was followed by ten years of residence and study in Germany. Thus, Shabestari was able to systematically apply the German hermeneutic tradition to Qurʾanic interpretation (tafsīr). According to him: “Verses [of the Qurʾan] do not speak themselves. It is the interpreter (mofaser) who raises a question . . . His question contains basic assumptions that are not derived from the Qurʾan itself.” As might be expected, Shabestari's political philosophy is quite liberal, considering God as the inspiration of broad ethical principles and not of particular rules or forms of government (pp. 176–77). Vahdat acknowledges intellectual affinity with Shabestari, but is insufficiently attentive to the radicalism of his epistemological and political break with authoritarian modernists, such as Qutb and Maududi, as well as liberals such as Iqbal and Haeri.
Similarly assimilated to the book's overall argument is the modernism of Mohammad Khatami (b. 1943), Iran's “philosopher president,” whose discourse called for opening up the country's intellectual and political space. Khatami's critique of Islamic “despotism” and “tyranny,” however, lacked Shabestari's epistemological rigor, while he and his fellow “reformist” Muslim intellectuals could not explain how their reconciliation of Islam and liberal democracy was to be achieved under rigid clerical rule.
Still, Khatami's Islamic liberalism stands in sharp contrast to the decidedly antimodernist discourse of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933). Vahdat reserves his harshest criticism for Nasr, calling his intellectual project an “attempt to destroy or at least minimize the notion of human agency and subjectivity” (p. 231). Nasr identified with Traditionalism, a 20th-century theosophical movement, whose European founders were attracted to “traditional” and “Eastern” cultures, particularly Islam, which supposedly had preserved what the modern West had lost due to its embrace of secular humanism. The official leader of the worldwide Traditionalist movement, and earlier politically aligned with the Iranian monarchy, Nasr is the one intellectual categorically excluded from Vahdat's roster of “mediated subjectivity” proponents.
The book's final chapter is on Mohammad Arkoun (1928–2010), the Algerian-born scholarly advocate of opening up Islamic tradition to democratic reinterpretation. Basically, Arkoun saw the Qurʾan and the Prophetic tradition (hadith) as discursive formations whose meaning is contingent on the historical context of interpretation. Orthodox Muslims confine the range of interpretations to the limits of their own knowledge and interests. In contrast, Arkoun is interested in the Islamic “unthinkable” and “unthought,” arguing also that “factual” and given definitions of religion make it a handmaiden to political power (pp. 255–56, 238). Appreciative of Arkoun's epistemology, Vahdat nevertheless is critical of his “idealism” and “emphasis on intellectualism and culturalism” (pp. 263–64). This is a curious critique, since Vahdat's book is focused on individual thinkers and their ideas, largely abstracted from diverse historical and national backgrounds spanning from India to Algeria. To his credit, Vahdat distinguishes his own abstractions from the flattened universalism of “prodemocracy” scholars, such as Vali Nasr, who advocate “for the promotion of capitalism for the multitude to bring about modernity and democracy in the Muslim world” (p. 269). Still, he seems in agreement with Arkoun's dismissal of Islamic socialism, evinced by the absence in his book of left-leaning Muslim modernists such as Iran's Ali Shariati. In the end, and even if one disagrees with its overarching thesis, Islamic Ethos and the Specter of Modernity remains a remarkable and highly recommended book that systematically introduces us to a plethora of ideas articulated by some of the 20th century's most influential thinkers reflecting on Islam and modernity.
