Examining a post-colonial neo-traditionalist response to modernity: the case of Abu Bakr Al-Mashhūr (1947-2022)

Saad, Ahmed Mohamed Elsayed (2024). Examining a post-colonial neo-traditionalist response to modernity: the case of Abu Bakr Al-Mashhūr (1947-2022). University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis challenges the long running trend within academia to characterise traditional Muslim responses to modernity as rejectionist, obstructive, or revanchist, and as such are overlooked. In correcting this characterisation, I examine the intellectual response to modernity of Yemeni traditionalist scholar Abu Bakr Al-Mashhūr as a significant representative of this hitherto neglected trend. Though heavily critiquing European modernity as a colonial tool responsible for corroding communal, moral, philosophical and political arrangements, he proposes an edited modernity that rejects the need for Eurocentrism in the Muslim world. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of Al-Mashhūr's writings, this study sheds light on how traditionalist Muslim scholars engage with and respond to the complex phenomenon of modernity. The analysis presented here reveals an emergence of a decolonial narrative within traditional Muslim scholarship; one that adopts conservative pragmatism and a negotiating tone to offer another way of thinking about modernity; neither rejecting or embracing it wholesale. In this new way a deconstructive and constructive engagement with modernity goes beyond the question of 'what went wrong with Muslims?'. Confidence in tradition underpins this narrative, expanding its constituent sciences and showing its dynamic ability to engage without reverting to Islamism or compromise with other forms of modernism. These original findings correct our understanding of traditional responses and reveal an alternative modernity within the ranks of traditional scholars; one that is neither binary nor Eurocentric.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):