Using Husserl’s analysis of Selbstverstandnis ...

Using Husserl’s analysis of Selbstverstandnis , a key term in Husserl’s anthropology of ‘Western man’, von Grunebaum takes the reception of modern science to be a turning point in the self-view of the traditional Islamic civilization and its approach to history.[^3] One of the recurring themes of this epochal even, viz., the incompatibility of traditional beliefs with the dicta of modern science, is forcefully stated in a speech by Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who was as much aware of the practical urgencies of the post-independence war Turkey as he was passionately engaged in creating a new identity for Turkish people: ‘We shall take science and knowledge from wherever they may be, and put them in the mind of every member of the nation.

For science and for knowledge, there are no restrictions and no conditions. For a nation that insists on preserving a host of traditions and beliefs that rest on no logical proof, progress is very difficult, perhaps even impossible’.[^4] On a relatively smaller scale, the revealing clash between the secular premises of modern science and the traditional Islamic worldview was brought home to many Muslim intellectuals with the publication of Renan's famous lecture L'Islamisme et la science given in Sorbonne in 1883, in which he strongly argued for the irrationality and inability of Muslim peoples to produce science.

For us today, Renan's quasi-racist attack on the Islamic faith and crude promulgation of positivism as the new religion of the modern world makes little sense. Nevertheless, it was an eye opener for the Muslim intelligentsia of the time about the way the achievements of modern Western science were presented.

Spearheaded by Jamal al-Din Afghani in Persia and Namik Kemal in the Ottoman empire, the Muslim men of letters took upon themselves the task of responding to what they considered to be the distortion of modern science at the hands of some anti-religious philosophers, and produced a sizable discourse on modern science with all the fervor and confusion of their tumultuous times.[^5] As we shall see below, Afghani, inter alia , came to epitomize the mindset of his time when he based his historical apology against Renan on the assumption that there could be no clash between religion and science, be it traditional or modern, and that modern Western science was nothing other than the original true Islamic science shipped back, via the Renaissance and Enlightenment, to the Islamic world.