Abstract

With the dawn of modernity and hubris of science and technology, Europe came to believe that reality is that carries in its folds an irrefutable evidence of its existence. So, religion on account of the lack of an empirical truth stayed untenable to the Cartesian mindset of Europe. Modernity to him was a departure from the age of mythos to the age of logos. Reason stayed sole arbiter of truth with Descartes’ proposition that “reason can stand on its own without Revelation”. Thus Europe either said goodbye to the religion or relegated it to the private life. Though this approach descended into secular educational institutions of the Muslim World via colonial rule with its peculiar approach to knowledge and succeeded in sowing the seeds of skepticism about religion, yet with the inspirational leadership of Syed Jamal al-Din Afghani religion became a potent force against European imperialism in the Muslim world. Following the legacy of Afghani Iqbal took the plunge to formulate the restatement of Islam as a pragmatic social proposition responsive to modernity. In Western epistemology no idea was more foreign to Modernity and Enlightenment than the idea of Revelation. Iqbal presented the case of religion in terms of the current stock of philosophical ideas with the plea that knowledge-scientific or religious- seldom can afford independence from concrete experience. In fact religious man stands in greater need of eliminating the alloy of illusions from his experience than the scientist, the mystic seeker who too if not ceases his quest is bound to hug the Ultimate Reality. This paper is based on qualitative research and tends not only to bring into bold relief the objective validity of religion but establishes that in face of modernity- when life has become so complex and problems have multiplied manifolds, modern man stands in greater need of religion than the man of primitive society or medieval era.

Key words: Islam; modernity; West, Enlightenment; Peace of Westphalia; Protestant Reformation; Knowledge; Epistemology; Mysticism; Science; Nationalism; Secularism; Revelation; Atheism; Medievalism; Islamic Modernism; Revivalism; traditionalism; Obscurantism; Normative Islam;