@ @ Civilization or Political: The Reality of the Present Tension between the Muslim World and the West
and western. The constitutions they wrote, the schools and universities they built, the justice system they implemented, the programmes of development they introduced, were all derived from western models and ideas. Even the Islamic political trends should not be understood in terms of traditional versus modern but rather as a reflection of divisions within the modern itself. 26 Modernization and change, of course, could not obliterate the ‘ulama class. Yet, weakened and marginalized, the ‘ulama institution became hostage to the modern state and its rulers. This opened the arena to a new spokesman of Islam: the modern Islamic intellectual. The great majority of the rank and file of the Islamic political organization are products of modern education, from al-Banna and Mawdudi to al-Turabi and Ghannushi. 27 The organization they founded is modern, the language and idioms they speak are modern, and the Islamic state they imagined establishing is essentially modern. In every single aspect of its making and instrument of control, the Islamic Republic of Iran testifies to the influence of the modern on Islamic thinking and practice. In a penetrating insight into al-Qa‘ida and modernity, John Gray has written,
Like communism and Nazism, radical Islam is modern. Though it claims to be anti-Western, it is shaped as much by western ideology as by Islamic traditions. Like Marxists and neo-liberals, radical Islamists see history as prelude to a new world. All are convinced they can remake the human condition. If there is uniquely modern myth, this is it. 28
26 Roxanne L. Euben, “Premodern, Antimodern or Postmodern? Islamic and Western Critique of Modernity,” Review of Politics , 59, 3 (1997): 429-60. 27 Basheer M. Nafi and Suha Taji-Farouki, “Introduction.” In S. Taji-Farouki and B. M. Nafi, Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Tauris, 2002), 5-8. See also John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Makers of Contemporary Islam (New York: Oxford University, 2001). 28 John Gray, Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 3.
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