Table Of ContentISLAMIC MODERNISM AND
THE RE-ENCHANTMENT
OF THE SACRED IN
THE AGE OF HISTORY
MONICA M. RINGER
ISLAMIC MODERNISM
AND
THE RE- ENCHANTMENT OF
THE SACRED
IN THE AGE OF HISTORY
ISLAMIC
MODERNISM
AND THE
RE- ENCHANTMENT
OF THE SACRED IN
THE AGE OF HISTORY
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MONICA M. RINGER
For my parents
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Historicism, Modernity and Religion 1
1. Locating Islam 44
2. Islam in History, Islamic History 67
3. The Islamic Origins of Modernity 111
4. The Quest for the Historical Prophet 140
Conclusion: God’s Intent – The Re- enchantment of the Sacred
in the Age of History 172
Bibliography 187
Index 202
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Edward Tylor, in his seminal anthropological work, Primitive Culture, notes
caustically that ‘If in this enquiry we should be obliged to end in the dark,
at any rate we need not begin there.’ Inversely, historians are notoriously
suspicious of origin stories. This project is the product of a long engagement
with a series of questions. Can religion be modern? What would modern
religion look like? And the elephant in the room: What is modernity? I begin
and end the book with Max Weber’s notion of ‘disenchantment’ as a way
of emphasising the ways in which these questions matter to us now no less
than they mattered in the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that Weber,
even as he characterised the modern project as one necessitating the embrace
of disenchantment (Entzauberung), literally, the ‘de-m agicification’ of the
world, articulated a vision of disenchanted scholarship as an ethical end in
and of itself. Weber concluded that in the age of disenchantment, we each
must ‘find and obey the demon who holds the fibers of his very life’.1 The
project of understanding the role of history in the generation of modernity
has certainly been my demon for as long as I can remember. I find myself at
the end of this project deeply convinced that history, defined by historicist
methodology and epistemology, is the quintessence of modernity.
Amherst College has been a very supportive place for me for the last
seventeen years. I have benefitted from the generous support of the Dean
of the Faculty and the Senior Sabbatical Fellowship, and have been con-
tinually encouraged by the interest and commitment of my students. In
particular, in the fall of 2016, I offered an advanced history seminar entitled
‘An Era of Translation: The Nineteenth-C entury Ottoman Empire’ to a very
special group of students. Those conversations we held in my office over tea
provided a welcome opportunity to think through some of the theories of
applying translation to modernity that appear in this book.
1 Max Weber, ‘The Disenchantment of Modern Life’, lecture given in 1917.
[ vi ]
Acknowledgements [ vii
Most of all, I am grateful for the collegiality and generosity of my fellow
faculty at Amherst, in the Five Colleges, and in the academy more gener-
ally. Heartfelt thanks to friends and colleagues who have commented on
draft chapters of this book, including: Michael Bessey, Andrew Dole, Tayeb
El- Hibri, Yasemin Gencer, Sergey Glebov, Adi Gordon, Margaret Hunt,
Melih Levi, Afshin Marashi and Suleiman Mourad. I have also benefitted
from conversations with Houri Berberian, Houchang Chehabi, Trent Maxey,
Yael Rice, Tariq Jaffer, Amina Steinfels and Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi.
Paul Rockwell and Sanam Nader- Esfahani graciously checked a number
of French translations. My research assistants, Shahruz Ghaemi, Yasmeen
Saeed and Julia Molin, helped enormously. Nicola Ramsey at Edinburgh
University Press has been wonderful, as have Kirsty Woods, Eddie Clark and
the entire production team. Thanks to them, and to the anonymous reviewer
for their careful read.
I enjoyed two stints away from Amherst at crucial moments, which in
some ways marked the beginning and end of this project. In the famously
cold winter term of 2014, I had the honour of teaching a graduate seminar
at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Thank you to my ‘home’
department of NELC and especially to A. Holly Shissler, Fred Donner,
Franklin Lewis and Richard Payne who gave me such a warm welcome. I
am forever grateful for the language tutoring of Melih Levi (Turkish) and
Ayşe Polat (Ottoman). I have fond memories of the U of C. I remember one
morning, as I was trudging to the campus in arctic temperatures wrapped
in absolutely every piece of winter clothing I owned, a young man sped by
wearing only a sweatshirt. It reminded me of a particularly funny scene at
the very end of A Short Walk in the Hindu-K ush, as Eric Newby and his travel
companion, inadequately outfitted, underprepared and having experienced
incredible deprivations, prepare for the night. As Newby recounts, ‘the
ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it’. As they begin
to blow up their air-m attresses, they were belittled for their weakness by
Wilfred Thesiger, the inveterate traveller, dressed only in ‘an old tweed
jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-
soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter’.
Several years later, in the fall of 2018, I spent a sabbatical semester as
an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. My hosts,
Eugene Rogan and Homa Katouzian, saw little of me as I was determined
to complete a first full draft of this manuscript. I will never forget my
daily routine that fall in Oxford: walking from Folly Bridge through Christ
Church Meadows on my way to Jericho Coffee on High Street; watching
the morning bustle against the backdrop of Brasenose College; waiting to
be let in to the Radcliffe Library just before it officially opened at 9:00 am
in order to get my favorite seat; lunching at the Vault and Gardens and, if
I needed a change of scene, spending the afternoon up in the coffee lounge
at Turl Street Kitchens. Oxford was an idyllic writing retreat. I am counting
the days until I return.
viii ] Islamic Modernism
Lastly, thanks to friends and family for your encouragement, and at critical
moments, your patience, as this project consumed me. You know who you
are. My daughter, Soraya, has always counted herself as ‘my biggest fan.’ I
trust she knows that I am hers as well.
Monica M. Ringer
May 2020
