Reforming Modernity

Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha is another chapter in the ambitious and interlinked project that Wael Hallaq has undertaken over the last decade. After rising to prominence on the basis of his comprehensive reevaluation of Islamic legal traditions, his recent works have turned more explicitly to critiquing the political and ontological ventures of modernity and their attendant knowledge projects. He has sought to limn the faulty epistemologies that, he argues, were produced in Europe and disseminated throughout the world via (neo-)colonialism, causing the malignancy that is found in much of modernity, including in “the Muslim world.” Hallaq’s works, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia, 2012) and Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (Columbia, 2018), are not, however, mere diagnoses; they also seek a palliative to the modern malaise. In the same vein, Reforming Modernity is suffused with awareness of just how deep our modern malady runs and of how urgently we need an antidote. Hallaq is precise when he writes of the ruin caused by coloniality and capital as well as the regime of individualism they perpetuate. This time, he advances his analysis and solution by reading another prolific scholar of Islam, Abdurrahman Taha (b. 1944). Taha is a Moroccan intellectual who has produced a formidable body of work, most of which remains untranslated from Arabic. Hallaq and Taha are not in lockstep. The author critiques his subject where he deems appropriate, and the book ends with an Arabic-language appendix that is Taha’s reply to these critiques. But their differences are not the point. In Taha, Hallaq finds an ally, one who shares his project of diagnosing and remedying modernity. In slightly different ways, both thinkers read premodern Islamic sources with an eye to how humanity and the planet have been and could be otherwise, how various bodies (e.g., bodies of thought, governing bodies, civilizational blocs, or our psychosomatic bodies) could be healthier than they are. The medicalized language here is Hallaq’s. Though I share Hallaq’s and Taha’s conviction that a “love of mastery” (267) stands at the root of the devastation wrought by colonialism, modern warfare, and global capitalism (to which I would add racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism), the work is flawed in a key sense: it proposes a cure derived from a sphere of action or praxis that is uncontaminated by historical contingency and cultural or civilizational mixing. Although both authors sometimes disclaim the multiple and genealogically hybridized sources of their thinking, these mixed bodies of thought remain insuppressible, showing up throughout their texts. Their inability to entirely separate works they deem to be “eastern” from “western” and “secular” from “religious” shows that such a pure place does not exist, even in their own writings. From a methodological standpoint, then, their cure ought to take stock of the ways in which we are already materially bound together.

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