TASTE OF MODERNITY pdf download

TASTE OF MODERNITY: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus 

TASTE OF MODERNITY

Modern Islamic movements in the Arab world generally subscribe to the idea of a return to the way of the pious forefathers ( al salaf al-Salih). 

This Salafi ideal, though it has always been part of the Muslim creed, became the hallmark of religious reform in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a reaction to the growing challenge of modernity. 

Through it, the reformist men of the religion of that time sought to dissociate themselves from latter-day traditions, which they had come to regard as the main cause of the decline of Muslim civilization and of the failure to establish clear criteria for the introduction of useful Western innovations.

 The Salafi trend thus employed the model of the forefathers as a means to sharply criticize 

both the rigid scholarship of the ‘ulama within the established jurisprudential and theological schools 

and, even more so, the theosophical meditations and ecstatic popular rituals of the Sufis within their various mystical orders.

 The political aspect of this model likewise served to ensure the subservience of the ‘ulama and the Sufis to the rulers, which facilitated the drift of the Muslim states towards the path of uncontrolled Westernization and obstructed the reassertion of the unique role of the Arabs in Islam. 

Yet despite the increasing rigidity of religious learning, and the immense spread of popular mystic practices, in the later centuries, the degeneration of Islam had never been universal. Moreover, with the political decline o