Tradition & the Modern World

Many times I hear the labels "traditionalist" and "modernist" thrown out sometimes when people try to define themselves or try to put others in boxes (many times negatively). I think it's useful to have a definition of tradition (and modernity) to proceed. This might not the usage or definition everyone has in mind when they use the word "tradition," but this definition and explanation stuck out for me.

This is from Zareena Grewal's 2006 University of Michigan PhD dissertation called "Imagined Cartographies: Crisis, Displacement, and Islam in America" which I'm trying to finish read and is so far absolutely amazing, hitting on so many of the most important issues in the crisis of authority today especially for Muslims in the United States (more on this in a later post in sha Allah)

Talal Asad, quoted below, teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and is the son of Muhammad Asad, the author of the beloved Road to Mecca:

The following quote is from pg. 24:

"Tradition is not merely the inheritance of the past nor is it in opposition to modernity. In fact, tradition itself is a modern concept that emerges out of Enlightenment (Scott 1999).

Historical anthropologist Talal Asad best articulates the importance of resisting the binary opposition of tradition and modernity in the study of Islam in his now classic and oft-cited literature review "The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam" (1986)."

another quote from a few pages later on pg 29 of the dissertation

"Following MacIntre, Asad defines the Islamic tradition as a set of discourses connected to an exemplary past and to interpretations of foundational texts that Muslims draw on in their ordinary lives.

"A tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regrading the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history.

These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions).

An Islamic discursive tradition is simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present...

[Tradition is not] necessarily imitative of what was done in the past. For even where traditional practices appear to the anthropologist to be imitative of what has gone before, it will be the practitioners' concepts of what is apt performance, and of how the past is related to present practices, that will be crucial for tradition, not the apparent repetition of an old form. (Asad 1986: 14-5)"

[end of quote from Zareena Grewal's thesis]

Abdal Hakim Murad as quoted in in this article on the Cambridge Muslim College initiative "What Muslims acknowledge, whether traditionalists or modernists, is that most of ulemaa (scholars) in the west really need to know what the modern world is."

Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his book "A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World"

"What needs to be remembered in conclusion is that Islam is a living reality while the modern world is, also for the moment and despite its falling apart from within, still a powerful force to be reckoned with in the arena of history. Muslims, therefore, whether they are among the youth or of the older generation, have no possibility of surviving as Muslims, individually or as members of a great civilization and the ummah of the Prophet, without being able to respond to the challenges which the modern world poses for them. They must understand the modern world in depth and intelligently and respond to its challenges not simply emotionally but on the basis of authentic knowledge of that world by relying upon knowledge of the Islamic tradition its fullness." -pg. 251

Perhaps Abdal-Hakim Murad said it best when he wrote, in # 93 of Contentions 13:

"Traditional Islam is not the replication of the positions of the ancients; it is to seek what they sought."