Bloomsbury Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Islam of the Global West)

Sayyid Ahmad Khan lived in a time of great tribulation for Muslim India. By examining Khans work as a critical expression of modernity through Muslim experience, Islam as Critique of Modernity? argues that Khan is essential to understanding the problematics of modern Islam and its relationship to the West. The book re-imagines Islam as an interpretive strategy for investigating the modern condition, as an alternative to Western thought. Using the life and work of 19th century Indian Muslim polymath Khan (1817-1898), it identifies Muslims as a viable resource for both critical intervention in important ethical debates and as legitimate participants in discourses to underpin a just global order. Islam as Critique of Modernity? locates Khan within a broader strain in modern Islamic thought that is neither a rejection of the West, nor a wholesale acceptance of liberal or conservative principles, which the author calls Critical Islam. The book offers accounts and evaluations of modernity that are often in conflict with dominant Western interpretations but are also always an engaged response to these interpretations. By bringing Khans critical engagement with modernity into conversation with similar critical analyses of the modern by Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre, the author shows how Islam can be read as critique.