Challenges of eclecticism and ways to fight it

Can the Islamic society be a modern society? A religious society is one in which the religious thought naturally reflects itself in the behavior rationalism. Modernity is a question related to man’s agency and postmodernism involves going beyond the borders of modernity. In the Islamic society man has always been seeking the answer to the questions Who is he? Where is he going? Why is he going? In the west, the domination of liberal thinking in the last three centuries has naturally resulted in a technical rationalism. They dismiss the question of roots as irrelevant or meaningless. There are two definitions of modernity. First, there is a widespread definition of modernity in which using advanced technology is a sign of modernity, regardless of man’s behavior. Also, modernity has been defined as technical rationalism which is a more advanced stage of the first definition. The latter definition considers both the action of the individual and rationalism as a criterion for evaluating the action. Modernity may also be defined based on pure rationalism, which is a more advanced definition because it regards action as the basis of modernity and the criterion for the evaluation of action is also real. The Islamic society is inconsistent with the second definition of modernity and the first definition is a shallow one. But what is based on pure rationalism, which we may call post-modernity, is consistent with the Islamic society.