"Becoming European While Remaining Muslim": Muslim Responses to Modern Ideas of Progress and Rationalism

precis: This essay examines how modern Muslim thinkers—particularly Muḥammad 'Abduh, 'Abdülahad Dâvûd, and other late Ottoman intellectuals who were deeply influenced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century European thought—reinterpreted the history of Islamic revelation and the role of prophetic miracles through the combined lenses of Enlightenment notions of linear progress, modern rationalism, and positivism. While the qurʾānic worldview and classical Islamic tradition often emphasized cyclical or chronologically nonprogressive conceptions of history, these scholars selectively engaged with Western philosophies of evolution, morality, human development, and empirical science. By integrating these frameworks, they recast prophetic history into a linearly progressive schema and explained miracles in ways consistent with modern scientific and rationalist principles. The study situates this theological transformation within the broader cultural ambition of the late Ottoman and Arab modernist contexts, achieving civilizational modernity without abandoning Islamic identity, encapsulated in the ideal of "remaining Muslim while becoming European."