To Be Radical Is To Be Muslim: Rejecting The Cult Of Progress

Developing a framework for the present that doesn't betray the past

This is the third and final part of a series on exposing the Western frameworks that guide our thinking. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Your conception of your own self, the society you inhabit, and the history it stands upon is not neutral. You’re imbued with a framework which guides and shapes the way you think. That framework is not neutral.

Where does this framework come from? For some of us, we can clearly identify experiences, mentors, courses, and books that have shaped how we think of ourselves and the world around us. For others, we’ve never really thought deeply about why we think the way that we do. In both cases, there are forces that shape how we think, whether we recognize and acknowledge them or not.

These frameworks affect the way we view the past. Is it something to cherish, celebrate, and look to for guidance? Or is it backwards, regressive, and something to reject? Chances are, you never had a teacher stand in front of a classroom and instruct you to hate the past and view it in a negative light. Intellectual frameworks aren’t developed through such explicit means.

But what you likely did have was an education in history that was undergirded by certain philosophical assumptions that did argue exactly that. It was subtle, not necessarily verbalized, but certainly ever-present. Its end result was to mold the way you think about yourself, your history, and your role within it. This way of thinking is inherently Western and modern. It’s antithetical not only to a “Muslim” framework, but arguably antithetical to a human framework in general.

Philosophical Foundations

If your education was anything like mine, you read basically zero philosophy throughout most of your schooling. I have distinct memories of my 10th grade world history teacher mentioning names like Locke, Descartes, Voltaire, and Kant. I don’t recall how deeply we addressed any of their philosophies in class, but I can say with certainty we never read any of their works directly. Even in undergrad, my humanities education skimmed over them. I studied engineering and history. My engineering classes of course never touched philosophy and even my history classes barely mentioned them.

But even a cursory look at their writings shows how integral they are to the modern mindset. Without them, we don’t have the modern approach of looking down on the past and rebellion against it.

The 18th century French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet wrote perhaps the most famous and direct work on the idea of a progressive notion of history in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. If the title wasn’t enough to tell you where he stands, here he tells you all you need to know about history and its relationship to human development:

“No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us. The course of this progress may doubtless be more or less rapid, but it can never be retrograde".”

Progress is for the most part linear, according to Condorcet. Man marches along a path towards perfection that can never be turned back. He is necessarily more advanced, more intelligent, more civilized today than he was 10 years ago, 100 years ago, and 1000 years ago. For Condorcet to write these words in 1794, while in hiding from the destruction and anarchy of the French Revolution is ironic. Or perhaps it was necessary. Surely the experience of the country you know falling into a reign of terror can cause a philosopher to hope, or insist, that there must be a brighter future ahead.

Condorcet is relatively literal. He’s telling you that the past is backwards and the future will be better. Other philosophers of that era were more theoretical. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a contemporary of Condorcet, spoke of the Spirit: an evolving collective self-consciousness of humanity and the world. It drives humanity towards ever-greater freedom and self-awareness:

“The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom; a progress whose development according to the necessity of its nature, it is our business to investigate. The general statement given above, of the various grades in the consciousness of Freedom — and which we applied in the first instance to the fact that the Eastern nations knew only that one is free; the Greek and Roman world only that some are free; whilst we know that all men absolutely (man as man) are free, — supplies us with the natural division of Universal History, and suggests the mode of its discussion.”

Hegel can perhaps be excused for having such a self-centered view of civilization, considering his historical context. After all, when he stated this in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History in the early 19th century, Europe was actively conquering the remainder of the world. Europe must have been doing something right and the rest of the world doing something wrong. For Hegel, Europe is better because it embraces and leads the march of the Spirit: from despotism towards enlightenment.

Let’s take a look at one more philosopher of that era, one who modern people either insist they abhor and would never adopt his framework or insist that they are devotees of his conception of society, economics, and history: Karl Marx.

Famously, Marx stated that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Humanity has been held back by the scheming of the bourgeois who constantly act to preserve their ability to exploit the proletariat and maintain control over the means of production. In his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he states:

“In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.”

Marx, being the most materialist of these philosophers, uses economic development to argue the same point as the above-cited thinkers: the past is an era of backwardness that must be rebelled against if mankind is to ever live more equitably and fairly in the future. The theme of a progressive understanding of human development and history is consistent.

You don’t have to have studied any of these philosophers (and many others I don’t have space to mention here) to have been affected by them. They inaugurated a new era of Western history and thought in which the past is conceived of as necessarily backwards and regressive. The past does not speak for itself. History, at its core, is nothing more than a compilation of events and people. It’s data. That data needs a conceptual framework to make sense. Modern European philosophy provided that framework. It gave the data meaning. The data was put into a framework of linear, progressive history. The past was bad. The present, better. The future will be even greater still.

Problematizing European Philosophy of History

But are these philosophers wrong? Should we, as modern men and women in the 21st century, yearn for the past just to spite European philosophers? Speaking only for myself, I certainly appreciate that modernity has allowed me the means to access unlimited texts and information through the internet. It has allowed for the creation of a country that ostensibly believes in unrestricted freedom where I can write and teach as I see fit. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live in Western society 100, 500, or 1000 years ago. I prefer the 21st century.

None of us would deny that the modern world is more technologically advanced than the past. The modern world (in most places) allows more personal freedom to individuals than the past did. We all take advantage of this. We see it as proof that the present is ontologically greater than the past. And if history continues to march forward in this fashion, the future will have even greater technology that makes our lives even better and greater freedom that will fulfill even more of our base desires.

But is technological progress and personal freedom the ultimate arbiter of “good”? All things considered, is the technological advancement worth the corresponding decline in other realms that came with modernity?

Has morality progressed with time? Certainly not. Even during my own lifetime the kinds of things that were considered taboo and entirely unspeakable in the 90s have now become ubiquitous. In fact, you can be considered the immoral one for not embracing and celebrating the ever-accelerating changes in morally acceptable behavior.

Has social cohesion progressed? Also no. It’s cliche to talk about, but in the past people knew their neighbors, trusted them, and had no problem letting their kids roam unwatched for hours until sundown. You’d be hard-pressed to find parents today who would be comfortable allowing their children to wander around their neighborhood without a GPS tracker and regular check-ins. People would leave their car and home doors unlocked. Now, almost every home has a wifi doorbell to surveil and scare away any potential threats.

The number of arenas in which modernity has brought about objective regress is countless. Modern food is significantly less nutritious and is designed to keep consumers addicted and unhealthy. Technology has gutted students’ attention spans and reading habits, replacing curious readers with mindless iPad-addled drones. Architecture and aesthetics have gone from aiming for a Platonic ideal of beauty to a capitalism-driven search for efficiency, leading to the plain, boring modernism of IKEA furniture and grey-painted drywall. Relationships at all levels have suffered, with divorce and infidelity at rates unheard of in the past. Even simple friendship has been hollowed out and replaced with “networking” aimed at maximizing economic value. Privacy no longer exists and is not even a topic of discussion, with the last gasp of personal autonomy smothered by the growth of the surveillance state in the name of “security” in the post-9/11 world.

Put all together, anxiety, depression, suicide, and mental illness are the glaring symptoms of this civilizational decline. Is this the “progress towards perfectibility” that Condorcet envisioned? Are we any closer to the self-realization and freedom of Spirit than we were in Hegel’s time? Has modernity delivered Marx’s utopian community, or only deepened the social and economic alienation he diagnosed?

Islamic Frameworks as a Solution

“The best people are those of my generation, and then those who will come after them, and then those who will come after them.” This Prophetic narration is one of the most well known and oft-cited among Muslims. I doubt that any serious Muslim would deny its significance. To deny that the Prophet ﷺ was the greatest of mankind and that his generation, trained by him, is the greatest of generations would lead to a crisis of creed, to say the least.

But it is one thing to simply cite and recognize this Hadith and something else entirely to bring it into conversation with our own underlying assumptions about history and progress. As stated in the first part of this series, we are all Westerners, whether we like to admit it or not. We are burdened with the weight of the assumptions of Condorcet, Hegel, Marx, and others. We simultaneously affirm the above-cited Hadith explicitly while implicitly looking down on the past as something to be disdained. We are Westerners with a Western lens through which we view history, society, and ourselves.

What is the solution? It is simple. Deceptively simple to the point that you may not take it seriously as a real solution at all: education.

First, you cannot begin to deconstruct the Western, modern framework that guides you without knowing it’s there in the first place. You must understand the history of Western society. Know who Condorcet, Hegel, Marx, Locke, Descartes, Kant, and the rest of the Western canon are. Know why they wrote what they wrote. You will quickly realize the reactionary nature of their thought.

Was Condorcet speaking about universal rules about humanity? Or was he reacting to the terror of the French Revolution and constructing a view of history that could explain why he was seeing such destruction?

Was Hegel's grand narrative of Spirit's unfolding liberation an objective analysis of history? Or was it a philosophical justification for the emerging European nation-state and its perceived rational order that resulted in Europe’s decimation and domination of much of the rest of the world?

Was Marx’s analysis of class struggle a law of human existence? Or was it a response to the immense inequality and injustice that came with the industrial revolution across Europe?

These thinkers and others were products of their times. They were reactionaries. They claimed universality but their writings and solutions for humanity were based on a tiny sliver of human existence: a rapidly developing and inherently unstable 18th and 19th century Europe.

Once that Western framework of history is identified, understood, and deconstructed, a new framework can be constructed in its place. One based on universality and humanity as it relates to a larger cosmological order. Man has a place, he has a narrative. He is not at the mercy of ever-changing social, political, and economic conditions to determine who he is and how he views his past. He has authority (wilaya) and with that comes corresponding responsibility (taklif).

The exact form of this framework can vary. Various writers throughout Muslim history have addressed aspects of it. Cyclical theories of social decline and development as expressed by Ibn Khaldun and his later Ottoman interpreters are a particularly notable one. Ibn ‘Arabi and his commentators spoke of existence as being a series of emanations, within which man has a religious, social, and political role as part of a larger cosmological system. Shah Waliullah constructed a framework that united it all together, with cosmology and jurisprudence as part of a consistent whole that can bring about renewal of Muslim society. The need of our time is for a new articulation of the framework for a modern context.

This is not a call to abandon modern advancement and embrace being a destitute Luddite. With regards to modern technology, the train has left the station and it’s not coming back. Just as the very existence of paper irreovcably revolutionized Islamic learning in the 8th century, the modern technology we all use and appreciate is here to stay and there’s no point in hoping for a reversion back to a pre-modern past.

But the framework, developed by European modernity, within which that technology operates needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. The new framework cannot view the past as a burden to be abandoned. It must be based on an understanding of humanity that centers universal truths, learned from revelation, and then places the present appropriately in relation to those truths. An Islamic framework doesn’t reject history or development but orders it through a different telos: the preservation of divine guidance rather than material or political emancipation.

Constructing a Future Based on Universality

When looking at Islamic intellectualism, from which this new framework must be developed, we have to recognize the existence of an Islamic content and the historical and social contexts of various times and places. Differentiating the two and understanding the relationship between them is central to this entire task. The Islamic content is universal. It’s not subject to being reactionary and based on the circumstances of any particular historical or social context. It’s based on revelation - both in the form of revealed books, namely the Qur’an, and in the form of lived experience, namely the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.

Europe, with its abandonment of the very idea of a revelation-based content in the early modern world, left itself with only context. It began to assume that whatever context it was experiencing in any particular moment was universal. The West thus developed a mindset in which the present is the only thing that exists. It was un-anchored by any semblance of universal content and could only react, not build.

So today, we react to the past. Negatively. We look down on it and assume it was worse than the present. We hyper-fixate on examples of injustice and evil that existed in the past: slavery, inequality, lower standards of living, and lower levels of individual freedom. These issues fit neatly into the Western framework of history developed by modern philosophy. They are data, given meaning.

As a result of this framing, we’re in constant conflict with the past, trying to remove whatever vestiges of it remain. For as much as the modern world looks down on the past, it remains obsessed with it. Modernity only understands the present as conflict with the past. It is whatever the past wasn’t.

A proper universal framework is not in conflict with the past. It looks to the past for a particular content that guides how it engages with the present context. It’s more stable. It allows for the development of a society that learns from its past and uses it build a future. Recognizing that the Prophet’s ﷺ generation was the best of generations is not an invitation towards apathy and stagnation. It’s an invitation towards universality and stability. Technological progress is not only possible, but necessary if we are to exist in the modern world. But it must not become and end to itself. It is one part of a larger social and political puzzle.

To be Muslim is to be radical. It is to reject the West’s reactionary thinking and embrace universality. It is to fully deconstruct our thinking about history and civilization. It is to build for the present and the future based on the past, not in spite of it.