Modernist Reformers in Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism, 1865-1935: Peripheral Geoculture in the Modern World-System.

• Author: Khan, Zeba

Modernist Reformers in Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism, 1865-1935: Peripheral Geoculture in the Modern World-System

By Christian Lekon

New York: Routledge, 2019, 221 pages, [pounds sterling] 96,00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9781138187719

The history of religious reform movements across the world represent the specific socio-political requirements of different time and space. Christian Lekon's Modernist Reformers takes the reader on a deep journey into the makings of the various realities of present day religious understandings of Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism with the help of concepts such as the Weberian Ideal type and Immanuel Wallerstein's notion of geocultures in Modern World Systems (MWS).

This book delves into the lives and experiences of seven activists-cum-reformers from the 19th-20th century in bringing major world religion into compliance with global modernity through the reinterpretation and reformation of traditions. In particular, Lekon focuses on three main figures: Jamal ad-Din Afghani (1838-1897), Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1883) and K'ang Yu-wei (1858-1927) who are, respectively, the 19th century religious reformers of Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism, and examines the process of the making of their worldviews through the Quran, the Vedas and the Confucian classics.

Others personalities include, for Islam, Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935), for Hinduism, Swami Shraddhananda (1857-1926), and for Confucianism, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (1873-1929). While accounting for the similarities in the ideas of these reformers, Lekon expounds their rationale as the expression of peripheral geocultures (centrist liberalism, anti-systemic movements, positivism) in coherence with MWSs. The book also finds a subtle link between these geocultures and their present-day fundamentalist successors.

The first three chapters provide separate, chronological narratives of the lives, times and ideas of the seven reformers. Each of these chapters begins with a brief overview of the religion in question and ends with short accounts of the respective reformers' spiritual inheritors from the 1920s until today. This section is followed by a coda chapter that presents the Weberian ideal type of the late 19th and early 20th century religious reformer (p. 13). The book indulges in developing a prototype toward a comparative study of religions in order to arrive at a cosmopolitan ideal type. Though the author takes inspiration from Weber...