Politics of Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Islam, Youth, and Social Activism in the Middle East.

• Author: Osman, Amr
• Position: Book review

Politics of Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Islam, Youth, and Social Activism in the Middle East

By Dietrich Yung, Marie Juul Petersen and Sara Lei Sparre

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 213 pages, $34, ISBN 9781137380630.

Yung, Petersen, and Sparre's Politics of Modern Muslim Subjectivities presents an interesting case-study of the extent to which the use of modern social theory can be useful in studying societies at various levels of conceptualization, but also of the risks involved in this process. The book is divided neatly into three parts. Part I is theoretical. It tackles the definitions of "modernity" and "religion," and the "formation of the modern subject" Rather than looking at modernity as a single phenomenon, it proposes regarding it as a series of "multiple" or "successive" modernities, each with characteristic features that have produced certain "technologies of domination" and "technologies of the self." Additionally, the authors sketch the history of modern forms of Islam, which manifest the "continuing processes of the reframing and reinvention of Islamic traditions conditioned by cognitive and institutional patterns of modernity" (p. 27). The next two parts deal with "politics of Muslim subjectivities" in both Jordan and Egypt respectively. Each part begins with an overview of the development of the relationship between the "state" in both countries, on the one hand, and charity and social welfare organizations, on the other hand.

One can easily see a symmetry that is being presented in the book among three forms of modernities (which succeeded each other in the West but seem to co-exist and compete in all societies to varying degrees), and three corresponding forms of institutions and organizations. Individuals belonging to these organizations all seek to be "modern" in their own, idiosyncratic way by making use of the available cultural and religious tools to develop technologies of the self by which they can construct their own modern subjectivities in an intricate and complex process. Discussing this symmetry begins with presenting three forms of successive modernities. The first form, "restricted liberal modernity," a bourgeois social order that alienated the masses, led to a social crisis in the second half of the 19th century, resulting in the emergence of a first, organized form of modernity that is more focused on stable societal organization and institutional collectivity. In the 20th century, this second form...