Can Islam have its Enlightenment?

• Olivier Hanne traces fourteen centuries of Muslim humanism and demonstrates that Islam is not a fixed essence, but a tradition crossed by permanent debates between reason and faith.

• From the Koran to Averroes, from Sufism to the reformers of the 19th century, the author offers a rigorous intellectual history which rejects both Islamophobic reductionism and the idealization of multicultural Andalusia.

• At a time when the French debate is saturated with a priori, this book comes at the right time to considerably broaden the field of possibility.

The title first. The Islam of Enlightenment (Tallandier, 2026) is a formula that its own author deconstructs from the first pages. Olivier Hanne takes care to point out that the expression is recent, contested, and that it risks placing on Islam categories specific to European history. The notion was coined in 2004 by the Algerian anthropologist Malek Chebel, taken up by Emmanuel Macron in 2020, and it carries with it the implication that only an Islam that becomes Westernized would be compatible with modernity. It is precisely this reduction that Olivier Hanne refuses, while showing that the question itself is legitimate, and that the history of Islamic thought gives it infinitely richer and more nuanced answers than what the public debate suggests.

The book is an ambitious synthesis: fourteen centuries of intellectual history of the Islamic world, from the Koran to contemporary reformers, including the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, Averroes, Ibn Arabi, Rumi, the Ottomans, the Safavids and the thinkers of the 19th century. It’s a history book and that’s precisely what makes it useful.

An open Quran

The first contribution of the book is a rigorous historical reading of the Quran itself, which will surprise those who reduce it to a monolithic and closed text. Hanne shows that the Koranic text is the product of a progressive elaboration, of an oral transmission prior to writing, and that it includes multiple layers. Its final format cannot date from before the end of the 7th century, and several variants of reading – the qirâ’ât — coexisted for centuries, sometimes as late as the 11th century. The Prophet himself is said to have declared that the Quran was revealed according to seven possible readings, allowing latitude in the recitation as long as the general meaning was not modified.

More importantly for the book’s thesis: the Koran is not hostile to reason. Hanne identifies ten of the nineteen forms of Aristotelian syllogisms, polemical dialogues based on logical argumentation, and even around twenty Greek terms. The first Quranic commandment – iqrâ’“read, recite, gather” – can be understood as an injunction to rational discernment as much as to pious recitation. As for the political question often asked, does Islam found a theocratic state?, Olivier Hanne responds with the texts: the Koran is not a text political, its rare allusions to government do not allow the design of an Islamic state, and the famous “verse of the emirs” demands obedience to leaders without setting any applicable framework.

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Baghdad, I’m just curious

The best known part of the book is that devoted to the Abbasid age (750-900). The author revisits what is commonly called the “golden age of Islam” by placing it in its real historical conditions: the influx of scholars of all origins to Baghdad, the caliphal patronage which finances translations not out of love of science but to compete with Byzantium, the House of Wisdom of al-Mamun whose contours exact remains uncertain but whose role as an intellectual crucible is undeniable.

What is striking when reading is the diversity of the actors. The main translators are Christians: Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Nestorian in charge of the translation office, refused to convert to Islam despite pressure and translated one hundred and twenty-nine medical treatises while developing an Arabic philosophical lexicon from Greek forms: philosophy becomes the philosophy. Doctors, astronomers, Jewish mathematicians, Persian Zoroastrians, Sabeans from Harran, all contributed to this ferment that the religious authorities viewed with growing suspicion.

This is one of the permanent tensions of the book, which structures the entire intellectual history of Islam: on one side, the thinkers who believe that reason and faith can and must dialogue; on the other, the jurists and ulama who see in Greek philosophy a danger for orthodoxy. This conflict is never completely resolved, and it is precisely for this reason that it is fruitful.

“On the one hand, thinkers who believe that reason and faith can and must dialogue; on the other, the jurists and ulama who see in Greek philosophy a danger for orthodoxy. This conflict is never completely resolved, and it is precisely for this reason that it is fruitful. HAS”

Averroes, Al-Ghazali and the great quarrel

The most dramatic moment of this tension took place in the 12th century, with the confrontation between Al-Ghazali and Averroes – one of the most important episodes in world intellectual history, often poorly understood in public debate.

Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) rédige son Inconsistency of philosophersindictment against the use of Aristotelian philosophy in Islam. His criticism is not a rejection of reason as such, but a warning against a philosophy which claims to explain everything and encroaches on the prerogatives of revelation. A century later, Averroès responds with his Incohérence de l’Incohérencedefending the fundamental compatibility of philosophy and faith, provided that each remains in its own domain. His thesis of the double truth, philosophical and religious, will profoundly influence Latin scholasticism, notably Thomas Aquinas. It was through Averroes that the West rediscovered Aristotle in the 12th century. Hanne recalls this strange paradox: the work of the Andalusian philosopher was better received by the medieval Catholic Church than by the Sunni ulama, and his Arabic texts have sometimes reached us only in Latin translations of the 12th-13th centuries.

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Sufism, a crossroads

One of the most innovative aspects of the book is the place it gives to Sufism as a humanist movement in its own right, often poorly known and reduced to its ecstatic dimension. Olivier Hanne shows that Sufism constitutes a crossing path throughout Islamic history: where legalism fixes norms and where political power instrumentalizes religion, mystics open a space of interior freedom which allows faith to breathe.

Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) pushed mystical thought to its limits with his concept of “Oneness of Being” (wahdat al-wujûd): God is the only absolute reality, of which all creatures are emanations. Provocative and condemned during his lifetime, his work will nevertheless be read and commented on for centuries throughout the Islamic world. Jalal al-Din Rumi, in the 13th century, constructed a spirituality of divine love which transcends confessional borders. In the 14th century, the poet Hafez weaves in Persian a work where wine, love and mysticism intertwine to the point of making the sacred and the profane indistinguishable – what the book calls a “poetry of sacred transgression”.

In modern empires, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Sufism occupies a central and official place. In India, Emperor Akbar opened the House of Worship in Fatehpur Sikri in 1575, where Sufis, Brahmins, Jesuits, Zoroastrians and Buddhists debated freely. His great-grandson Dara Shikoh seeks the correspondences between Sufism and the Hindu Upanishads in a treatise entitled The Confluence of the two Oceans. He will be executed by his brother in 1659, and his executioner will ascend the throne, inaugurating a policy of religious intransigence which will devastate the Mughal empire.

“The work of Averroes was better received by the medieval Catholic Church than by the Sunni ulama, and his Arabic texts have sometimes reached us only in Latin translations of the 12th-13th centuries.”

Why there was no Islamic Renaissance

One of the most stimulating questions in the book is asked directly by Olivier Hanne: why was there no Islamic Renaissance in the 16th century? The answer is neither simple nor complacent. The religious explanation – “fatalism” or the authoritarianism of the ulama – is insufficient. Hanne completes it with a socio-economic analysis: the Muslim city was not a place of accumulation of reinvestable capital like the European city; the merchant bourgeoisie had no access to political power; THE waqf immobilized vast properties without the ulama, who benefited from them, agreeing to reform them; international trade became Atlantic from the 16th century, turning away from the Middle East.

There is also a deep intellectual reason. European thought, after the Renaissance, separated spiritual experience from scientific experimentation. Islamic thought, on the contrary, sought to maintain unity between the sensible world, the intelligible world and the divine, what the Shiite philosophers of Isfahan called the “imaginal world”. These two intellectual projects were not hierarchical in terms of value; they were simply different, and produced distinct trajectories. Hanne prefers to speak of “absence of Renaissance” rather than “decline”, a term which insinuates an unjustified moral decadence.

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Modern reformers and the contemporary impasse

The last chapter, devoted to the 19th and 20th centuries, is perhaps the densest and the most useful for understanding current events. Olivier Hanne maps five Islamic responses to European modernity: purifying Islam to resist imported modernity (Wahhabism, Salafism); Islamize modernity by adopting its technical attributes without the principles (the Young Turks before Kemal); imitate Europe while preserving the Muslim framework (Arab nationalisms); modernize Islam at the risk of secularism (Atatürk, Bourguiba); or awaken a liberal Islam by venturing outside of known doctrines (Mohammed Abduh, Mohammed Iqbal, Malek Chebel).

None of these paths are simple, and Hanne cannot choose between them. It shows how the liberal reformers of the 19th century – Mohammed Abduh in Egypt, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani between Iran and Egypt – opened real intellectual perspectives, but without managing to articulate them with popular religiosity.

“Islam is not an immutable essence, but a living tradition, crossed by permanent debates, and these debates have a history that contemporary actors know little about. HAS”

What the book brings to the French debate

The Islam of Enlightenment arrives at a time when the debate on Islam in France is saturated with preconceptions. On the one hand, a vision which reduces Islam to a fixed norm, incompatible with modernity; on the other, a discourse that idealizes multicultural Andalusia without analyzing the contradictions of the time. Hanne refuses both.

The most important lesson of the book is perhaps this: Islam is not an immutable essence, but a living tradition, crossed by permanent debates, and these debates have a history that contemporary actors know little about. Knowing that there existed in the 8th century “murdjites” who suspended judgment on the sinning believer in the name of his inner faith, that jurists of the 11th century defended free will against divine determinism, that a Moroccan Sufi of the 17th century responded to his censors that “Science is in itself food for the intelligence and a joy for the spirit” — all of this does not suddenly change the political situation, but it considerably broadens the field of possibility.

This is precisely what the debate needs.

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Olivier Hanne, The Islam of Enlightenment. History of Muslim humanism (7th-21st century)Tallandier, 2026.