"Despite brave talk of a 'dialogue of civilizations'

proposed by the United Nations and the Iranian ex-president Khatami, not a single Islamic civilization remains. Individual Muslims may frequently be embedded in neighborhoods or congregations whose values are substantially pre-Enlightenment, but nowhere do those social modules remain part of a functioning civilization. Our larger embeddedness lies always within political and economic structures borrowed from the values and administrative methods of the West. Even modern Islamism, which claims to be the Third World's great revolt against the imposition of the West's monoculture, typically defines itself in solidly Western terms as a "vanguard" (tali'a), "movement" (haraka), or, when finally ensconced in the palace of a fallen tyrant, as an "Islamic Republic." Hence John Gray's diagnosis: "The ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel."(1) Islamic civilization as such did not long outlive the Ottoman tanzimat reforms, Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, and Clive's destruction of Mogul India.

Muslim thinkers therefore tend to contemplate the Enlightenment from within. Whether we adopt liberal readings of our scriptures, or fundamentalist or conservative positions, we admit that our civilization has been profoundly defeated, and that our role, whether as revolutionaries, collaborators, or academics, is at root a subaltern one. It is true that the rapid spread of Islamism is not always considered by outside observers to be proof of a Muslim willingness to adapt to modernity; in fact, modern Islamic movements are typically presented as symptoms of the sole remaining Other's desperate resistance to the universal march of reason and science. But a broader perspective will readily reject this. Islamism is far from the liberal entailments of the Enlightenment, but it is closely allied to the more totalitarian possibilities which the Enlightenment unleashed. (2)

-Tim Winter, ‘Ishmael and the Enlightenment’s crise de coeur: a response to Koshul and Kepnes,’ in Basit Bilal Koshul and Stephen Kepnes (eds.), Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter: Studying the ‘Other’, Understanding the ‘Self’ (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 150.