Muslims and Modernity: Current Debates (Comparative Islamic Studies) Paperback – May 15, 2005

Very useful for my studies.

Muslims and Modernity is a "cultural studies" attempt to introduce issues and debates in Islamic thought. His summaries of Muslim thinkers are usually incisive and demonstrate consider hard work. It sometimes shines, but is over ambitious and reaches too far to be consistently valuable. Like almost all treatments of "modernity" there is an overemphasis on lack of and presumed fear of modernity without assessment of Islam's capabilities and discounting the degree to which backwardness - while not exclusively the fault of colonialism or the west - is political, structural, derived from an economy extracting resources. None of these causes are particularly "Islamic" as most third and fourth world scholars would tell you.The basic "left-right" scale to categorize positions of Muslim thinkers examines major topics comparatively with some focus not possible by collecting summaries of different thinkers. Only late does the author mention what should have been a cautionary note - that thinkers are not consistently left or right regarding different issues. Many important writers are included although those from Indonesia (of considerable importance) and even Tariq Ramadan are ignored. (Tariq Ramadan is used briefly as a secondary source not subject to the same kind of analysis.) How practices fit in five categories from totally forbidden to absolutely required should have been noted with appropriate emphasis on how by far most matters are in the middle category of not regulated at all by law. The reader would benefit from a clearer idea of how every Muslim thinker refers to the early community, Prophet Muhammad, and the Qur'an - all predating the Shari'a. (Read Tariq Ramadan's new sudy of Prophet Muhammad for this.)Generally the assessments seem fair and concise although the one person I knew personally (two directed study and reading programs in Graduate School), Ismail al Faruqi, seems somehow harsher than the man I knew.The historical examples like Algeria, Bangladesh, and Palestine are summarized but in such a way as to provide inadequate basis for evaluation or integration into the studies of the thinkers. The literary examples are interesting but inadvertently exaggerate extremes because they are dramatic with considerable literary license.There are inevitably possible small errors with so many dates and names; sadly there is one major error that is surprising from an author who seems reasonably knowlegible. He mentions that Zakat is a percentage of "disposable income" when in fact it is much better described as based on about 2.5% of net worth. He does mention jizya paid by dhimmis but neglects to add that these people were excused from any military service as well as payment of zakat. Along these lines one can mention that he uses with little warning or comment two authors infamous as Islam phobic to a point that their scholarship is undermined: Bat Yo'er and Pipes. (A similar study of non Muslim authors would be informative.)A book of this kind also, perhaps unsurprisingly, lacks the sociological analysis and empathy to put things in useful perspective to make the historical case studies more useful.