Islam, Modernity, Theatre Ambivalent Tensions in the Muslim World

Abstract

This article seeks to revisit, perchance re-ignite, the debate around the nature of both Islam and modernity, as well as the role theatre played in disseminating Modernist discourses in contemporary Muslim cultures. In the Muslim World, the debate is locked in a time warp or at best stimulated by secular paradigms that do not seem to budge despite their unruly discordancy with Islamic views of life at a time when Islam seems to be strongly making a comeback to the world arena. The question why and how Muslim cultures embraced theatre and modernity is competing indeed; yet the debate it prompted is misplaced and unguarded, and in some respects misplacing, if not totally misguiding. To remove this misleading misplacement and give the debate a new (im)pulse, the article deems it needful to revisit Constantine the Great’s and Darwin’s modernist project. Seen from the Islamic perspective, modernity comes out as a jahili way of life brought to contemporary Muslim cultures by theatrical emissaries from the White World, which has bilged and infected the Muslim World with a strange existential duality. Thanks to these emissaries, which convinced their avid-for-reform-and-modernity victims of the need to climb on the bandwagon of modernity, this world is now Muslim in the heart and the mosque and secular in life and conduct, which is not only schizophrenic and psychosistic, but also absurd and futilitarian.