Historical discontinuity in the Middle East

Tarek Osman in How to Innovate Islamic Thinking provides some good background consistent with The Historical Continuity Fallacy which I discussed last week. Osman observes:

Has the Islamic World regressed? In the 1930s, an Egyptian writer wrote a book called, Why I Am an Atheist. The response was not a fatwa against him, but rather a book titled Why I Am a Muslim, by an Islamic scholar. Political systems across the region were gradually moving from authoritarian monarchism toward plurality. Economies were slowly being industrialized. Creative artists were transforming Arab literature and music, and giving birth to Arab theatre and cinema. Across the region, there was a feeling of a historical rejuvenation. The Islamic world—North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, and Iran—seemed to be experimenting with different ideas, perspectives, and value systems. Translations of Western political constitutions, essays, novels, and plays abounded. During the Arab liberal age, from the mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, the general exposure to the West created an open, daring, and increasingly tolerant intellectual milieu.

This openness and intellectual confidence was the result of decades of broad-minded Islamic thinking. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jamal Al-Deen Al-Afghani and Mohamed Abdou, by far the most prominent Islamic scholars of their age, reflected on Islam’s historical trajectory. Both noted that, for centuries, backward-looking social and tribal contexts were imposed on the “rational religion.” Abdou advanced new understandings of the religion; he saw compatibility between Islam and the waves of modernity that the Arab and Islamic world experienced at the time. The school of thought that he founded was arguably the first real innovation in Sunni Islamic thinking in over seven hundred years—since the twelfth century, when religious and political powers had closed the gates of independent and creative reasoning. In the following few decades, several famous writers, from Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad to Ahmed Ameen, explained that the “dawn of Islam” and “its genius” materialized when its civilization interacted with and absorbed aspects of other traditions, whether Persian or Hellenic.

What happened to set back this flowering? Osman doesn't really discuss it but the consensus seems that the totalitarian strains of thinking from the West (Communism, National Socialism, Fascism), for whatever reasons, became the inspiration for a new generation of Arab leaders post World War II. To which Osman adds:

Religious institutions should realize and acknowledge that Islamic thinking and rhetoric needs to open up to different cultures. Since the end of the Arab liberal age in the early 1950s, Islamic discourse has been shaped by highly conservative religious disciplines, primarily the strict Sunni sect of Wahhabism, which anchors the political legitimacy of the Saudi ruling family. Wahhabism has been by far the most generous funder of Islamic educational institutions across the world, and, for over a century now, has controlled Islam’s two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Wahhabism and various literalist Islamic disciplines have gained prominence in the Islamic and especially Arab world in the last half century. They are products of desert-based, homogenous cultures that lacked plurality and exposure to the world, that were not enriched by the Arab and Islamic world’s liberal age. Today, a majority of Muslims live in non-Arab countries whose cultural heritages, especially in the twentieth century, have been far from homogenous. Islamic thinking and rhetoric has to transcend the insularity that has characterized it in the last half century. It is time to explore the richness that these Islamic communities offer it.