Islam & the Modern World · How the West Changed
From Christendom to autonomy
In short
- 1.The moral centre moved from "what God commands" to "what I choose", roughly over three centuries.
- 2.That shift solved real abuses of church power, and created a new problem: no shared standard when choices collide.
- 3.Islam honours the human being highly, but locates freedom in serving the Creator rather than the self.
The claim being examined
For most of European history the good was defined by God through the Church. In the modern West the good is increasingly defined by the individual for themselves.
The Islamic position
Islam teaches that the human being is honoured (Q 17:70) but not sovereign. Real freedom is freedom from serving one's own desires, which the Qur'an describes as a god a person can take for himself (Q 45:23).
Analysis
Historians of ideas trace a long arc: the Reformation's emphasis on individual conscience, the Enlightenment's confidence in autonomous reason (Kant's 1784 essay "What is Enlightenment?" defines it as the courage to use one's own understanding), nineteenth-century Romanticism's elevation of authentic feeling, and finally what the sociologist Robert Bellah and the philosopher Charles Taylor call expressive individualism: the belief that each person discovers their own truth from within. Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) argued that this left modern moral debate interminable — people argue past one another because the shared framework that made moral claims intelligible has gone. Note carefully what is being said and not said. The Islamic critique is not that individual conscience is worthless; the Qur'an addresses the individual directly and holds each soul responsible (Q 6:164). The critique is that a self with no authority above it has no way to arbitrate between one person's desire and another's, and no reason to restrain desire when restraint is costly.
From the Qur'an
أَفَرَأَيْتَ مَنِ اتَّخَذَ إِلَٰهَهُ هَوَاهُ
Have you seen the one who takes his own desire as his god?
وَلَقَدْ كَرَّمْنَا بَنِي آدَمَ
We have certainly honoured the children of Adam.
Sources
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989) · Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981) · Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (1985) · Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)
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