At the structural level...

At the structural level, Western societies long maintained a high level of social coherence and solidarity. Family values, far from being an empty social slogan remembered during election days, were a concrete social reality. But things changed. It might be useful, in this context, to conceive of secularism not as a fixed paradigm, but rather as a dynamic paradigmatic sequence that unfolds progressively in time and space.

One can say that by the end of the nineteenth century, many of the links that make up this sequence had not yet materialized. Man’s private life and many aspects of his public life were still beyond the reach of the processes of secularization.

In other words, Western man was a secularist only in some aspects of his public life, but in his private life as well as in many aspects of his public life, he was committed to moral and human values, and, more often than not, to Christian religious values and code of ethics.

When the first generation of Islamic reformists, the bearers of the old Islamic discourse, encountered this modern cultural formation, they did not interact with a comprehensive secular civilization but rather with a partially secular one. Whereas partial secularism recognizes the validity and importance of values on the moral level, and of the idea of totality on the epistemological level, comprehensive secularism denies them as well as the very idea of transcendence.

Many of the negative aspects of Western modernity, which later became more or less a recurrent pattern and central phenomena, were isolated events and marginal incidents that could be easily overlooked. Furthermore, the Western critique of modernity and the Enlightenment had not yet been crystallized, in spite of the fact that the voices of protest were becoming stronger. Western romantic literature, for instance, is in essence a protest against the negative aspects of Western modernity.

The writings of some conservative Western thinkers, such as Edmund Burke, include references to many topics that were later developed by the Western critical discourse on modernity. Nevertheless, the shortcomings of modern Western civilization, whether at the level of theory or at the level of practice, were not yet obvious to those who observed or studied it. As for the bearers of the new Islamic discourse, the situation is quite different.

Most had their intellectual formative years in the 1950s and had their first encounter with modern Western civilization in the 1960s.