Many scholars of modernity, including Jürgen Habermas, have conceptualized the foundation of modernity in terms of the notions of human empowerment, agency and subjectivity. The transformation of humans from a state of passivity and subservience to a state of action and agency has been responsible for the emergence of modernity in the West, as well as other parts of the world. Without active and self-assertive individuals, there cannot be a democracy, a modern economy or human rights and women's rights. Only when a large segment of the population acquires agency and subjectivity as individuals can these fruits of modernity become attainable.

A vision of human agency constitutes one of the major themes of the Qur'an. In the Qur'anic tradition, the notion of humans as God's vicegerent (khalifah) on earth contains the seeds of human subjectivity, notwithstanding its retardation during the Islamic medieval period. In a similar vein, in contemporary Islamic thought, human agency is chiefly conceptualized in terms of a vicarious and indirect notion of subjectivity and agency, mediated through the Divine Agency. I call this the paradigm of mediated subjectivity, since human agency is believed to be circuitous and indirect.

Most of the Islamic thinkers I analyzed in this book have broached this notion of indirect human agency as the cornerstone of their responses to modernity. This approach, however, often entails contradictions on issues such as human rights, citizenship and individual rights and freedoms, fundamentally because human agency and subjectivity can easily be perceived as annulling God's subjectivity and supremacy. Despite their vast differences, a majority of the thinkers discussed in this book exhibit this aporia as a common thread connecting their discourses. In their formulations of new visions for Muslims, they frequently envision a new Islamic person who is empowered and who possesses agency, but they very often simultaneously deny these building blocks of the modern world. This approach to the understanding of Muslim consciousness in relation to modernity explains the vacillations and contradictions of modernist Muslim thinkers on the main markers of the modern world that were elaborately discussed in the chapters of this study.