Has Islam Missed Its Enlightenment?
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Abstract
Reinforced by 9/11, Muslims find themselves increasingly accused of having failed their Enlightenment. The implication is that Islam, being a pre-Enlightenment religion, is archaically a-rational. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a partially unrepeatable European phenomenon (an overdue emancipation from stifling church domination). Part of its import was of a general nature. Its overall rule of rationality promoted a supreme confidence in human reasoning (humanity as the measure of all things), rejection of revelatory religion and metaphysics, separation of Church and State (secularism), belief in a noninterventionjst Deity and the law of nature, extreme "scientific" materialism, and the expectation of unlimited "progress."
While some of its fruits were positive (e.g., the rule of law, liberal democracy, and market economy), other elements led to disaster after Deism gave way to a pervasive agnosticism and atheism in the runeteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., colonialism, two world wars, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons, and fascism. !slam may be pre-Enlightenment, but it is an enlightened religion. Muslims never conceived of a categorical conflict between science and religion or religion and philosophy.