Has anyone read this book?
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Peace fellow members,
Has anyone read the book "Reformist voices of Islam?" If anyone has read this book, I'd like to hear your thoughts.
The book can be downloaded from this link.
https//www.booksfree.org/reformist-voices-of-islam-mediating-islam-and-modernity-pdf/
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Peace Euphoric,
I am grateful for your reply. But perhaps you can consider to reread the book. Because the book is not your average intellectual pandering to western colonialism. This is evident by a few excerpts from page 288 in the book. Please read these excerpts from the book.
At a more fundamental level—and nearly two centuries after Muslims’ encounter with modernity and its carriers, the European powers—today’s reformist thinkers are still grappling with the same basic conundrum, namely the causes of the Muslim world’s decline, which led to its domination by the European powers; and its current state of stagnation compared not only to Western societies but also to non-European countries such as Japan and China. Just as early reformists asked what had made Muslims “colonizable,” today’s reformist thinkers are asking what has kept them dependent and vulnerable. Like their predecessors, they are keenly aware of Muslim governments’ continued economic and political dependency on the great powers, even after decades of official independence, and Muslim societies’ increased vulnerability to external pressures and attacks. Moreover, they know very well that, because of the advent of globalization and the communications revolution, the nature of these pressures has become more complex and opaque and hence more difficult to deal with.
They see Muslims’ current predicament as a direct consequence of economic and political underdevelopment; the lack of basic civil and political freedoms, leading to a closed and stagnant intellectual environment inimical to any kind of progress; the lack of serious religious thinking and ijtihad, which has left the religious field in the hands of conservatives and radical Muslims; the instrumentalization of religion by both governments and opposition groups for political purposes and repression; and the lack of sufficient popular legitimacy of the ruling elites, and hence their vulnerability to external influences.
Muslim reformists favor open and multidimensional interaction between Muslim societies and the outside world. At the same time they are concerned that, given vast disparities between their respective countries’ capacities at every level and in every field of human activity and those of global economic and political actors, such interaction would occur within the confines of an uneven playing field. They fear that the outcome of such interaction could be either total absorption into a dominant global culture and the loss of indigenous cultural identity and/or the reactive strengthening of destructive nativist trends of a religious or secular variety.