Islam & the Modern World · How the West Changed
Progress: the word doing the work
In short
- 1.Calling a position old is not an argument against it; philosophers call this the appeal to novelty.
- 2.The same "wrong side of history" argument was used to defend eugenics in the 1920s and colonial rule before that.
- 3.Islam invites judgement by evidence and outcome, and is willing to be judged that way itself.
The claim being examined
A common conversation-stopper is that a moral position is "outdated", "medieval" or "on the wrong side of history".
The Islamic position
Islam holds that truth is not decided by date. A moral claim is judged by evidence and by consequence, not by whether it is fashionable this decade.
Analysis
The rhetorical move — this belief belongs to the past, therefore it is false — is a recognised informal fallacy (argumentum ad novitatem, the mirror of the appeal to tradition). Its weakness is easiest to show historically. Eugenics was, in the 1910s and 1920s, the position of the scientific and progressive establishment in Britain and the United States; compulsory sterilisation laws were upheld by the US Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927) and only widely repudiated after the Second World War. Colonial administration was likewise defended as the forward-looking, civilising position. This is not an argument that the present is always wrong — it is an argument that "the direction of travel" is not evidence. Islam's claim is that revelation gives a fixed reference point precisely so that a society can notice when it is drifting. The Qur'an repeatedly puts the burden of proof on the claimant: bring your evidence if you are truthful (Q 2:111).
From the Qur'an
قُلْ هَاتُوا بُرْهَانَكُمْ إِن كُنتُمْ صَادِقِينَ
Say: bring your proof, if you are truthful.
وَمَا يَتَّبِعُ أَكْثَرُهُمْ إِلَّا ظَنًّا ۚ إِنَّ الظَّنَّ لَا يُغْنِي مِنَ الْحَقِّ شَيْئًا
Most of them follow nothing but assumption, and assumption avails nothing against the truth.
Sources
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) · Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (1985) · Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (Knopf, 1985)
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