Few subjects arouse more passion and debate among Muslims today than the encounter between Islam and modern thought.
When we use the term “modern”, we mean neither contemporary nor up-to-date nor successful in the conquest and domination of the natural world. Rather, for us “modern” means that which is cut off from the transcendent, from the immutable principles which in reality govern all things and which are made known to man through revelation in its most universal sense.
Modernism is thus contrasted with tradition (al-din); the latter implies all that which is of Divine Origin along with its manifestations and deployments on the human plane while the former by contrast implies all that is merely human and now ever more increasingly subhuman, and all that is divorced and cut off from the Divine Source.
Obviously, tradition has always accompanied and in fact characterized human existence whereas modernism is a very recent phenomenon. As long as man has lived on earth, he has buried his dead and believed in the after life and the world of the Spirit. During the “hundreds of thousands” of years of human life on earth, he has been traditional in outlook and has not “evolved” as far as his relation with God and nature seen as the creation and theophany of God are concerned.
Compared to this long history during which man has continuously celebrated the Divine and performed his function as God’s vicegerent (khalifah) on earth, the period of the domination of modernism stretching from the Renaissance in Western Europe in the 15th century to the present day appears as no more than the blinking of an eye.
All forms of mental activity which together comprise modern thought and which range from science to philosophy, psychology and even certain aspects of religion itself, possess certain common characteristics and traits which must be recognized and studied before the Islamic response to modern thought can be provided. Perhaps the first basic trait of modern thought to be noted is its anthropomorphic nature.
How can a form of thought which negates any principle higher than man be but anthropomorphic? It might of course be objected that modern science is certainly not anthropomorphic but that rather it is the pre-modern sciences which must be considered as man-centered.
It must not be forgotten that although modern man has created a science which excludes the reality of man from the general picture of the Universe, the criteria and instruments of knowledge which determine this science are merely and purely human.
It is the human reason and the human senses which determine modern science. The knowledge of even the farthest galaxies are held in the human mind. This scientific world from which man has been abstracted is, therefore, nevertheless based on an anthropomorphic foundation as far as the subjective pole of knowledge, the subject who knows and determines what science is, is concerned.
In contrast, the traditional sciences were profoundly non anthropomorphic in the sense that for them the locus and container of knowledge was not the human mind but ultimately the Divine Intellect.
Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, Seyyed Hossein Nasr is a pioneer who has bridged Islamic studies with the world of Western philosophy, science and religion.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
