Hermeneutics against Instrumental Reason: national and post-national Islam in the 20th century

Mohammed Bamyeh

Third World Quarterly, 2008, vol. 29, issue 3, 555-574

Abstract: Islamic identity and secular anti-colonial nationalism implied initially similar approaches to modernity in the Middle East. Islamic currents of the time reinterpreted Islam in an ‘instrumental’ fashion as an accompaniment to developmental nationalisms, elaborating their cultural aspects. However, new Islamic currents of recent decades reject secularism in favour not of instrumental Islam but of a hermeneutic one. Unlike instrumental Islam, in which the project was to organise society, the goal in the emerging hermeneutic movement is to organise knowledge. While instrumental Islam mirrored the nationalism of the time, articulating many of its themes in spiritual format, the hermeneutic movement seems to be moving away from it. Therefore it does not easily fit the concept of cultural nationalism, appearing to go beyond the nation towards a post-national and postmodern world-view in which questions of development and cultural identity are subordinated to questions of universality, human existence and the possibility of knowledge.

Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1080/01436590801931512

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