Introduction: The Missing Reform

Abstract

The analysis of Islam in the modern world continues to be colored by Hegel’s “confused conscious of history.” The confusion expresses itself in two ways, like two faces of a coin: by analogy and through denigration. The wave of Islamist terror unleashed on 9/11 presented another opportunity to expose this confusion. For some, Islam is in no way responsible for the violence that has spread over the entire world, just as it is in no way responsible for the setbacks of free thought in the Medieval Age or for the difficulties of current Muslim societies to modernize. According to this point of view, the responsibility falls exclusively on misguided minorities who pervert the essence of Islam and alter its radiant face. For others, who are at times nostalgic for plans to exterminate religions (or men and women of religion), it has been convenient to make Islam the shorthand for what is really a complex socio-historical situation. Islam is presented as the source of all the evils of Muslims and of the problems of our time. We are thus prisoners of two inadequate schemas: unapologetic proponents of fideism, on the one hand, and the “eradicators” who entertain the illusion that one can somehow just get rid of one of the world’s great religions, on the other.