Local Modernity: Agency, Entanglement, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Current critical scholarship tends to cast the colonial West as the prime actor in shaping the non-Western world, ‘producing’ types of knowledge specific to itself and alien to others, ‘inventing’ not just tradition(s) but entire religions, and imposing boundaries premised on colonial knowledge and interest. The insight gained from this scholarship is deeply important. But it also carries the risk of overrating the power of imperial world-making. In large parts of the non-Western world, the formation of modern subjectivity and statehood drew on concepts, practices, and institutions that predated the colonial era and informed what was understood as articulations of local, or rather alternative, modernity. A look at the Middle East reveals that these processes of creation and contestation were driven by a complex interplay of political, socio-cultural, and religious factors which did not revolve exclusively around the colonial Other. The project of Islamic modernity, based on the education of the modern Muslim subject and the establishment of an Islamic state and society, as propagated by Hasan al-Banna and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and 1940s, exemplifies these processes. The project was specifically Islamic in form and outcome, yet the combination of ideas, mechanisms, and institutions understood as either part of the ‘authentic’ tradition or European in origin is characteristic of attempts to create an alternative, non-colonial modernity in general. For this reason, these endeavours invite comparison well beyond the Middle East and Islam at large.