In 1883, Ernest Renan delivered his famous lecture “Islam and Science” at the Sorbonne, a lecture that would continue to be debated throughout the following century. In this controversial speech, Renan argued that Islam, or more precisely orthodox Islam, which he described as “far removed from anything that could be called rationalism or science,” had made no contribution to humanity in the name of science and knowledge. For Renan, whatever was produced during the period corresponding to the Islamic Golden Age and considered worthy of praise was not the product of Islam, which he called “the reign of dogma” and “the heaviest chain that humankind has ever borne.” Rather, it was “entirely the work of Persians, Christians, Jews, Ḥarrānians, Ismāʿīlīs, Muslims internally rebelling against their own religion.” Indeed, for Renan, who believed that “from orthodox Muslims [rational discourse] received nothing but curses” and “to honor the Islam of Avicenna, Avenzoar, Averroes, is like honoring the Catholicism of Galileo.”
Why, then, might this lecture still matter for debates on Islam and democracy? Contemporary readers may find Renan’s take to be sweeping, radical, scientifically groundless, and even Islamophobic, despite all our assumptions, modernist imaginaries, and dominant Western-centered forms of knowledge production. Nonetheless, the lecture matters for two interconnected reasons. The first can be addressed through the relationship between Orientalism and normative secular liberal democracy; the second, through the discourses on Islam and democracy produced by Muslim actors within a modern framework.
Orientalist Prescriptions of Secular Liberal Democracy
First, Renan’s text is important because it claimed to open an academic(!) window onto the Islamic world, a world that had previously been described through the exotic accounts of travelers, envoys, and merchants. Academic, that is, “logical” and “rational.” Yet Renan, who thought he was carrying the cultural debates and religious polemics of earlier periods into a supposedly “scientific” arena, was in fact constructing an Orientalist structure of knowledge. More importantly, with reference to Edward Said, these narratives, which reinforced certain perceptions of the East in general and the Islamic world in particular, were built not upon objective realities but upon political and cultural discursive superiority.
Renan did not hesitate, for instance, to attribute intellectual laziness and a lack of inquiry to all Muslims through a brief reference to a conversation between the qadi of Mosul (an Ottoman Islamic legal and administrative official) and the British traveler and diplomat Layard. According to the narrative, during one of his travels, Layard asked the qadi of Mosul questions about the city’s demographics, sources of livelihood, and so on. The qadi replied that it was meaningless to inquire into such matters and that the idea of calculating the number of households or people in the city had never occurred to him. The problem is that Renan, who presents this situation as an inherited problem of Muslims, never engages in critical reasoning about the scene he selectively quotes in his lecture. He does not seek verification. For instance, he does not consider that the Ottoman administration, which collected at least fifty different types of taxes from its peasants, might have been aware of the demographic structure of a provincial center such as Mosul. Nor does he include the contrary views of local or foreign historians of the period. Yet, despite all this, Renan does not hesitate to describe Layard as a “lucid thinker” and the qadi with whom he spoke as “intellectually lazy.”
Narratives similar to Renan’s example, taking different forms and reaching into the present, have in fact appeared as intellectual and political narratives written on the basis of the West’s economic and military superiority. These discourses, more political than scholarly, unfortunately tend to nourish the status quo rather than reason and inquiry. Likewise, the current progeny of Orientalism, or neo-Orientalism, often rests upon an imagined relationship established between the civilized and the savage, the rational and the irrational, the capable and the incapable, the democratic and the dictator, the self and the other. Thus, we encounter a language that recommends superiority rather than dialogue, accusation and preaching rather than understanding and inquiry. This orientation is fundamentally undemocratic. Under a deliberative understanding, democracy is a practice of collective reasoning, mutual listening, and public negotiation over shared principles of justice; it cannot begin by assuming that only one historical model of democracy is legitimate. A genuinely democratic approach should neither elevate a single dominant model of democracy as universal nor regard the coercive export of “ideal” democratic forms as a democratic practice.
While Renan’s lecture appears to focus on Islam and science or reason, it actually corresponds to an early form of arguments, widespread today, to the effect that Islam is incompatible with freedom, modern political progress, and democracy. Indeed, when it comes to democracy and Islam, Renan’s emphasis on the scientific and intellectual sterility of Islam is replaced by an emphasis on “rational-critical thinking” as the indispensable condition of the public sphere and on the inevitable alliance between modern democracies and secular liberalism. In a manner reminiscent of Renan’s prejudgments, such approaches glorify democracy’s liberal secular nature, supposedly rooted in the rational foundations of the West, while ignoring different rationalities and diverse forms of knowledge production. When Islam is at stake, foundational questions concerning truisms about what legitimizes democracy are deemed off limits for critical reflection and democratic deliberation.
For this reason, the belief that democracy, that is, the ground of collective consultation, can emerge only in a single ideal form, the Western form, and more importantly the firm conviction that Muslims cannot build such a form because of democracy’s liberal secular Western past, contains its own impasses. The widespread discourse linking Muslims’ capacity to establish a democratic order worthy of human dignity to their becoming “good Muslims,” by which is meant secular, liberal, capitalist, and Westernized, is a good example of how Renan’s Eurocentric presuppositions remain in force. This narrative, which Saba Mahmood calls secular hermeneutics, “is aimed at creating the conditions for the emergence of a normative religious subject who understands religion—its scriptures and its ritual forms—as a congeries of symbols to be flexibly interpreted in a manner consonant with the imperatives of secular liberal political rule.”
The notion that the influence of Islam in Muslim societies makes democratic politics impossible can be seen in Samuel Huntington’s example of the clash of civilizations, expressed in the phrase “In Islam, God is Caesar.” Here too, the Western secular form of democracy is taken as normative. In a sense, through the opposition constructed around religion in general and Islam in particular, normative secularities or secular theologies are produced. This approach, which preaches democracy without thinking democratically, rests upon an Orientalist foundation that assumes Muslims lack the ability to build their own distinctive “democracies. As such it is caught in a modernist trap of thought: it undemocratically defends, in non-Western and Western contexts alike, the unique and exclusive validity of Western approaches to democracy, in which democratic experience of non-secular actors is possible only if they become secular public figures, holding fast to a firm belief that religion cannot shape public discourse for the good.
Muslim Responses and Modern Reaction
Just as the approach of non-Muslim actors is problematic insofar as it aims to export a hegemonic, Western form of democracy in ways incompatible with democratic thought itself, refusing to submit that form to democratic deliberation, the stance adopted by many Muslim actors in response to this situation is also worth questioning. When it comes to the neo-Orientalist discourse briefly discussed above, we see that many Muslim actors also produce answers from within the modernist trap of thought. Instead of improving the “local” appearance of democracy through negotiation, they reactively try to explain themselves within the boundaries of Orientalist language.
If we continue with the example of Renan, immediately after the aforementioned lecture, voices rose against him from the Muslim world, and Muslim thinkers from different corners of the Islamic geography wrote responses. Despite differences in the content of their works, intellectuals such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Namık Kemal, İbnu’r-Reşad Ali Ferruh, and Celal Nuri seem to have converged on two points. First, of course, in the face of their interlocutor’s provocative and accusatory language, these figures adopted a reactionist stance. More importantly, and relatedly, it is striking that all of them addressed Renan’s provocative speech by answering the question, “Is Islam an obstacle to progress?” Still more interesting, however, is that they did not engage in a comprehensive inquiry into what ‘progress’ actually meant. In other words, many Muslim intellectuals implicitly accepted the concept of progress upon which the entire Enlightenment-modernist narrative had been built. It was clear, in fact, that progress did not refer merely to scientific and technical advancement; it also carried political baggage. This concept brought with it the idea of linear progress, the direction of that progress, and more importantly a map of how one should progress. Its implicit adoption by Muslim actors pushed them into the modernist trap of thought. In their existing situation, despite their strong opposition to Renan and their valuable historical reflections on Islam as a religion that in fact encouraged knowledge, Muslim actors were not really putting forward something “Islamic.”
Building on the above discussion, when it comes to democracy, we see that intellectuals who can often make their voices heard only by agreeing upon modern concepts unintentionally frame Islam as something that can be “accommodated” within the modern nation-state. Under the roof of the nation-state, which is extremely jealous about sharing the power it monopolizes, we observe that the Islamic inevitably becomes secularized; in other words, it turns into a modern ideology, namely Islamism. Indeed, despite all their originality, when we look from Afghani, among the first to respond to Renan and was a critical figure in the emergence of Islamist movements in Egypt, to Sayyid Qutb and from there to contemporary Islamist political movements, we see an Islamism integrated into the nation-state with its institutions and practices, and therefore moving within modern thought. In other words, Islam is political. Yet Islamism, often called political Islam, which emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an ideological instrument within the framework of modern nation-states, is less Islamic than it is a reactionary modern ideology. For this reason, it is problematic to treat debates centered on movements such as Islamism, which historically emerged within the walls of modernist thought, as the sole interlocutor when discussing Islam and democracy. Contemporary democracies need alternative intellectual instruments that can read Islam’s political and transformative nature outside the modern molds of political Islam. For Muslim actors, moving beyond this reactive frame is equally essential: a deliberative understanding of democracy requires not merely answering Orientalist accusations, but producing alternative questions, concepts, and vocabularies through which Islamic political thought can participate in public negotiation on its own terms.
Recommended other reading from Democracy Seminar: A Reliable Ally? Catholicism and Democracy Under Pope Leo XIV, by Patrick Gilger.
