Is Islam Compatible with Modern Values?

Someone anonymously asked me recently whether Islam is compatible with modernity or “modern values.”

When someone asks that question, the honest response is this: compatible with which values, and who decided they are universal?

The question already assumes Western liberalism as the endpoint of history. Islam does not exist to validate modernity. It exists to form an ethical life, with its own moral grammar, commitments, and limits.

This kind of question is almost never neutral. It is usually a projection question wrapped in polite language. It carries several assumptions without naming them directly.

First, it assumes that “modern values” are coherent, stable, and broadly agreed upon. They are not. Modernity contains liberal human rights discourse alongside racial capitalism, colonial borders, surveillance states, genocide denial, carceral punishment, and market morality. Asking Islam to be compatible with that bundle of contradictions is already incoherent.

Second, it assumes that Western modernity is the moral finish line of history. This is the classic end of history assumption, where Europe, the UK, and former colonial powers and settler colonies quietly position themselves as judges of everyone else’s ethics. Islam predates modernity, critiques it, and exposes its internal fractures. Islam is not trying to graduate into modernity or seek its approval.

Third, the question assumes that religion exists to adapt itself to power rather than to challenge it. Christianity in the West was reshaped to serve empire, state authority, and colonial administration. Because of that history, many people assume Islam should undergo the same domestication. When it does not, it gets labelled incompatible.

I have never defended Christianity more fiercely than when I was helping a revert friend deconstruct the Western Christian doctrine she still carried into Islam without realising it. That experience made clear how deeply liberal and Christian assumptions linger beneath the surface, even after conversion. I have a lot more to say about this part, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

So when someone asks whether Islam is compatible with modern values or modernity, what they are often really asking is something else, even if they never say it directly.

• Will Islam stop making me uncomfortable?
• Will Muslims accept liberal norms without questioning them?
• Will Islam stop criticising my society’s violence if I call it progress?
• Can Islam be domesticated?

That is why answering “yes” or “no” almost always goes nowhere. The question is not looking for understanding, but looking for reassurance.

Islam is compatible with justice, dignity, accountability, care for the vulnerable, limits on power, and moral restraint. If those are the values being named as modern, then there is real ground for conversation.

If “modern values” means endless consumption, moral relativism when it is convenient, state violence wrapped in the language of security, and pretending colonialism is finished, then no. Islam was never meant to be compatible with that.

In Islam, the more honest question is not “Is Islam compatible with modernity?” but “Is modernity humane?”

That reversal matters because it recentres ethics, exposes power, and reminds us that moral legitimacy is not decided by empire, markets, or historical dominance.

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