Social Science Research Council

2008 DPDF Research Field:
Muslim Modernities

Islamic fundamentalists and Western Orientalists often emphasize pre-modern resonances in contemporary Muslim communities. Over the past generation, by contrast, an interdisciplinary set of scholars has come to emphasize the ways in which Islamic historical heritages are extruded, redefined, or invented through modern processes. We label this emerging field “Muslim Modernities.”

The idea of modernity was invented in Western Europe to distinguish the region from the rest of the world, including Muslim societies. Scholars disagreed about what modernity consisted of -- capitalism, division of labor, rationalization, reflexivity, etc. -- but broadly agreed that these were characteristics of the West and not of other societies. Increasingly, however, the study of Muslim communities has contributed to a re-thinking of the West’s monopolistic claims to modernity. Instead of measuring modernization as the adoption of Western institutions and norms, these studies have explored the development of alternative forms of modernity. These alternative forms are modern in three potentially distinct ways: their proponents claim that they are modern; they are recent, not found in “tradition,” though sometimes imposed retroactively on tradition; and they exhibit characteristics frequently associated with Western modernity, such as universalism, rationalization, and reflexivity.

Prominent approaches to the concept of multiple modernities include, but are not limited to, the study of Islamic and other fundamentalisms; the formation of religious subjectivities; the conditions of post-coloniality; the operations of disciplinary power; the construction of communal, national, regional, and gender identities; discourses of democracy and rights; migration and post-migration; and global markets and responses to them. In each of these areas, Muslim modernities provide a counterpoint to analyses that view contemporary Muslim societies through the prism of premodern recrudescences.

We invite students from throughout the humanities and social sciences to consider participation in this workshop if their research plans include Muslim communities anywhere in the world, including Europe and North America. Special preference will be given to projects that consider interconnections across regional and communal boundaries. The workshop is open to a variety of methodologies, from ethnography and interviews to textual, archival, and data analyses. As Islamist movements and the global war on terror have moved the study of Muslim societies closer to the center of academic debates, the workshop will encourage a new generation of scholars with language skills and fieldwork experience to break out of the area studies framework, paying particular attention to the interplay between place-based empirical research and discipline-based intellectual questions about modern processes and institutions.