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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Modernity has been working since the sixteenth century in western Europe at what Mr. Gauchet has described as the “exit from religion,” adding that Christianity alone has been able to gain the historical position of “the religion of the exit from religion.” It is indeed the case that the other great religions have not felt, as Christianity has, the intellectual, political and legal necessity to revise their theological foundations radically. Islam in particular has not only been shielded from the fundamental criticisms of intellectual and scientific modernity, but the managers of the sacred have formed alliances with nationalist movements engaged in the anti-colonialist struggle to legitimize wars of liberation and post-independence one-party states. It is true that Islam's mechanisms of state control first came into play in the period of prose-lytism of the new religion, chiefly between 622 and 632; but state control turned into the complete takeover of the irreducible autonomy of the religious domain (the spiritual sphere) by all the states that emerged after the 1920s (Ataturk's radical experiment) and even more so after the post-1945 liberations.
1. This text is the written version of a paper presented to the Seminar on the contribution of religions to a culture of peace, held at Granada between 5 and 9 May 998 by the Commissions of Catalonia and Andalusia for UNESCO.
2. See my contribution to the questionnaire sent in 1970 by the late lamented Father Y. Moubarak to seven Muslim intellectuals, in Les Musulmans (Beauch esne, 1970).
3. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1996.
4. See “Croire en modernité: aspects du fait religieux contemporain en Europe,” in Encyclopédie des religions (Paris, 1997)., vol. 2, p. 2050-2077. This encyclope dia deserves a detailed review that would make explicit the epistemological postures governing the entire work and those of each of the authors who have written a total of 228 articles. I note already, in support of the relevance of my observations, that Christianity and the religious phenomenon in Europe are the subject of the densest contributions and the most critical ones in the sense of a theoretical advance in the knowledge of the religious phenomenon. In volume 2, devoted entirely to the thematics of the religious phenomenon, the examples taken from Islam remain very limited and are generally dealt with in the framework of a narrativist and descriptivist historiography that is indifferent to the problematics of a critique of religious reason through the example of Islam.
5. See “Le Coran et les pratiques critiques contemporaines,” in Encyclopédie du Coran (Leiden, 1998).
6. “Apocryphes et canon: leurs rapports et leur statut respectif. Un question nement théologique,” in Apocrypha (1996), p. 7.
7. See my old but still relevant analyses on the same subject, dealt with on the basis of the Islamic example, in “Religion et société d'après l'exemple de l'is lam,” in Pour une critique de la raison islamique (Paris, 1984). See too “Din, Dunyâ, Dawla,” in L'Islam, religion et politique (Paris, 1986).
8. See my “Logocentrisme et vérité rekigieuse dans la pensée islamique,” in Essais sur la pensée islamique (Paris, 1984).
9. Gilles Képel, La Revanche de Dieu, translated into twenty languages six months after its publication.
