Continuation of my Contentions Series
6. Postmodernism is Jahiliyya. Each tribe has its own story.
Keywords:
Postmodernism – I’ve linked the word to a few google definitions. I like the following definition:
A belief that individuals are merely constructs of social forces, that there is no transcendent truth that can be known; a rejection of any one world view or explanation of reality as well as a rejection of the reality of objective truth.
Jahilyya – Pre-islamic period of ignorance which prevailed over Arabia.
My interpretation:
To equate anything to Jahilliya is often taken as an outright insult; “Jahil” being the term for the ignorant. My first, and incorrect, interpretation of the Contention involved some equation of modernity to ignorance. But then again, of all things to compare to the period of Jahilliya, post-modernism seemed quite specific to me.
By reading the above definition of post-modernism, we can come to the conclusion that, although it is referred often to architecture and art, postmodernism is actually an outlook on life, a philosophy. It is a means by which the West resolves its need to incorporate multiple cultures and perspectives into its own without firmly adhering to a particular one.
But to truly understand why the Shaykh chose to use post-modernism, I had to understand what came before it, modernism.
Modernism – the optimistic view that human reason and science are sufficient to understand the world and solve its problems.
Modernism seems to a be a specific outlook on life, a scientific based one. It became plain to me now as to why the Shaykh singled out postmodernism in his comparison to the Jahilliya.
Let us look at the state of people during the Jahiliyya: Arabia was split into tribes, each having its own religion, its own idol, coming together now and then to trade for mutual benefit.
The philosophy of post-modernism is the very idea that different tribes (or cultures) should be able to co-exist without a single universal way to interpret the world. In this way, “each tribe has it’s own story”. I take this contention to mean that post-modernism is literally a synonym for Jahilyya since it describes the way that the Arabs lived in the time of Jahilliya.
Another analogy to summarize this concept is that the post-modern West is the Makkah and Kabaa’ of the modern day Jahiliyya, where every culture/tribe write its own story with its own religions/beliefs/idols.
Post-modernism is essentially a multiple-faceted way to look at the world, versus modernism which is a single, well-defined way. If post-modernism is Jahilliya, then modernism is simply another false religion.