Epilogue: What Reforms for Today?

Abstract

The term “Conclusion” would be inappropriate for this set of reflections relating to Islamic Reformism. However, two strong ideas deserve to be highlighted at the end of a critical history of the “Reformation” in Islam as these pages have tried to sketch (We have deliberately limited our investigation to the Sunni Muslim world, because Shi’ism, another great tradition of Islam, has important peculiarities that call for separate analysis). First, the dominant image of Islamic fundamentalism as a continuation of tradition, as the original and incarnate message of Islam from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to Hassan al-Banna, or as the awakening of the Muslim nation, is an unfounded picture from the point of view of an archeology of modern Islamic thought. It is simply a belated projection to give historical and political legitimacy to more generally Muslim fundamentalism and more particularly to a “re-shaped” Islamism that emerged in the 1980s and that is advancing today in the Muslim World and in Muslim circles in the West by proposing it as a protective bulwark against a more radical current known as jihadism.