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Mark Sedgwick, Islamic Modernities in World Society: The Rise, Spread, and Fragmentation of a Hegemonic Idea By Dietrich Jung, Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 36, Issue 2, May 2025, Pages 324–326, https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etae066
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Extract
In this book, Dietrich Jung deals with the question of Islam and modernity. In recent years he has established himself as one of the major scholarly participants in a series of overlapping debates on this question. One classic debate, taking various understandings of modernity as its point of departure, has concerned itself with the extent to which Islam and modernity are compatible. Other equally classic debates, judging modernity by the standards of Islam rather than Islam by the standards of modernity, have asked how and when particular aspects of modernity are acceptable in Islamic terms, and whether modernity can be authentically Islamic. Jung’s answer is that Islam today is modern, like it or not, and in different ways. There is not just one modernity, but a plurality, as argued by Shmuel Eisenstadt (Multiple Modernities [Taylor &Francis, 2002]). This is important, and why the title of the book refers to ‘modernities’ in the plural.
