The paper takes its empirical departure point in the Islamic reform movement of the nineteenth century. Islamic reformers such as Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, Namik Kemal or Sayeed Ahmed Khan initiated an intellectual development based on the idea that an authentic form of modernity in the Muslim world must be closely linked to Islamic religious traditions. In the course of the twentieth century, these references to religion have gradually assumed a hegemonic status. In the Muslim discourse of modernity “Islam” became the dominant signifier in defining the authenticity of Muslim modernities. In this way, the Islamic reform movement anticipated the theoretical core assumption of contemporary theories of multiple modernities. Originally coined by the late sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, the concept of multiple modernities assigns religious traditions a general role in shaping different forms of modernity; traditions become a key variable in the understanding of the factual varieties of social orders we can observe in modern life. In combining the history of Islamic reform with contemporary discussions in social theory, this paper aims at a critical reflection upon the relationship between tradition and modernity. Instead of understanding modernization as the subsequent retreat of tradition, Eisenstadt brought religion back in. Theories of multiple modernities provide a theoretical framework that enables us to comparatively analyze the simultaneous and often conflictual existence of religious and secular modernities. Theories of multiple modernities, however, have a tendency to deal with civilizations as coherent and bounded “cultural containers.” They suggest a relative cultural homogeneity within civilizations. In sharp contrast to this idea of cultural homogeneity, the idea of an authentically Islamic modernity has historically evolved into a plurality of modern Islamic social imaginations. How to explain this multiplicity of forms of Islamic modernities? The paper answers this question in critically revising Eisenstadt’s theory by conceptual elements of successive and entangled modernities. It will sketch out a more comprehensive reading of multiple modernities and underpin these theoretical propositions with examples form the history of Islamic reform.

The 1929 Egyptian personal status law has withstood the dramatic changes of the twentieth and the twenty first century with modest changes to its definitions of the roles and the individual rights that men and women have in the family. Secular critics suggest that its traditional (Islamic) definitions of these roles and rights explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Islamist supporters see it as part of the defense of the Islamic traditions that modernization threatened. I wish to contest these binary secular and Islamist definitions of Islamic legal and religious traditions through a contextualized discussion of the law as part of the institutional and social history of Egyptian modernity. I will discuss how the law was part of the modernization of the legal system, which narrowed the construction of Islamic religious traditions to one legal school instead of the multiple ones available in the nineteenth century which men and women drew upon to maximize their rights providing them with greater legal flexibility. The modern legal system also institutionalized a split between public and private laws giving Islamic religious/legal traditions a role to play only in the family/personal status. Secondly, I will review 2 societal debates, that took place in the 1920s and highlighted male anxiety about the effects that modernity had on women including their participation in the 1919 revolution coupled with the expansion of their access to education and public work, providing a context for the 1929 law. The first debate centered on the murder of Ali Fahmy, the wealthy nephew of Egypt’s leading feminist Hoda Sha’rawi, by his French wife and the very public trial that followed in London in 1923 triggering a national defense of old definitions of Islamic masculinity and femininity. The second debate was connected to the first through the discussion of a “marriage crisis” that press reports attributed to the reluctance of young men to marry educated women who imitated Western women’s quest for equality. The law’s emphasis on legal and religious concepts, like obedience and the economic dependence of women, reinvented tradition as part of the construction of gendered definitions of the individual that underlined the protection of women from the negative social effects of education and work and nationalized a form of male privilege and definitions of masculinity and femininity to give modernity its Islamic character.

A network of “Neo-traditionalist” teachers and institutions, covering both the Muslim world and the West, is increasingly visible. In the Muslim world it encompasses the Dar al-Mustafa in the Hadramawt, Habib Ali al-Jifri in the UAE, and the now-closed Dar al-Imad in Cairo. In the West, it encompasses Hamza Yusuf and Zaytuna in Berkeley, California, and the Abdal Hakim Winter and the Cambridge Muslim College in England. There are also similar teachers and institutions in North Africa, France and Italy. The aim of the paper is to describe this network and analyze its relationship with modernity. This appears paradoxical, as all the teachers and institutions involved stress that they represent traditional Islam and distance themselves from other contemporary forms of Islam, which they condemn as inauthentic. These teachers and institutions, however, are not simply survivals of an earlier age. Their critiques of modernity are often informed by very modern or even postmodern understandings of modernity, their sphere of activity is global rather than local, and their visibility depends on the skillful use of media, especially new media. The paper argues that, for these reasons, the network in question is better described as Neo-traditionalist than as traditionalist. The paper also draws on theories of multiple modernities to argue that Neo-traditionalism is a form of postmodernism. Like Western postmodernism, it is skeptical of grand narratives and ideologies, and appreciates the significance of systems of discourse and interpretation. The grand narrative and ideologies of which Neo-traditionalism is skeptical, however, are not only those of Western modernity, but also those of Islamic modernity, especially Islamism and Islamic modernism. In this sense, Neo-traditionalism can also be seen as a form of post-Islamism, as Islamism can be understood as one of many multiple forms of modernity. The paper draws on fieldwork and interviews in the Neo-traditionalist milieu, and also on textual sources and videos generated by teachers within that milieu.

In Cambridge, UK, and California, US, Islamic colleges offer students educational programmes bridging a long list of apparent dichotomies: tradition/modernity, West/non-West, Islam/non-Islam, science/Quran, liberal arts/religion. The essential bridge building tool is authentic Islam aiming at enabling future graduates to function as modern working and moral subjects. The aim of this paper is to discuss how these two Islamic universities draw on Islamic tradition, scripture and practice when educating young Muslims in minority settings. The paper takes as its point of departure a case study of Cambridge Muslim College (CMC) in the UK and Zaytuna College (Zaytuna) in Berkeley, California, with a particular interest in the role of the founding fathers, Shaykhs Abdal Hakim Murad and Hamza Yusuf. The study is based on ethnographic field work, observations and interviews with faculty members and students as well as written material produced by the two institutions explaining aims, curricula etc. Also, discussions with Danish Muslim and non-Muslim students on the matter have contributed valuables perspectives. Both CMC and Zaytuna point to authentic Islam as the basis of their academic credibility and the basis for graduates’ ability to balance professional lives as Muslims in minority settings. But to the students, seemingly, it is sufficient to see the founding father and Shaykh as role model creating this balance Thus, it seems that the Shaykh himself establishes the link between the students, Muslim minority identity and the wider Muslim communities, and the continued success of the institutions depends on the ability of these remarkable individuals to confer authority from themselves to their institutions. This makes it relevant to study the connection between the Shaykh, the institution and questions of mediation of authority and authenticity. The central question posed in the paper is: How is Islamic authority understood and mediated at CMC and Zaytuna, and what role do tradition, the idea of authentic Islam and the role of the Shaykh play in this regard? (333 Words)