Ferment within

A clutch of books looking at traditions of intellectual debate in Islam and locating them in the modern context.

"We have revealed unto you a blessed Book so that people may ponder over its messages and that those who are endowed with insight may take them to heart." - Quran 38:29.

THE intellectual life of Muslims of the subcontinent has been none too inspiring since they were divided in Partition on Independence, in 1947, and further divided 25 years later in 1971. In each of three states - secular India, Islamic Pakistan and stridently Muslim Bangladesh - their intellectual freedom has been threatened by an aggressive orthodoxy that holds the populace under siege. Political life is no better. Emancipation is all the more difficult because free thought is frowned upon and a siege mentality grips Muslims in all three states, albeit for altogether different reasons.

In Pakistan, the state began to cave in to bigotry from the early 1950s and itself became a repressive promoter of bigotry under Zia-ul-Haq. In India, hostile discrimination in many walks of life, communal riots and the rise of the Sangh Parivar combined to drive Muslims into a shell. A besieged minority is a conservative minority, clinging to time-worn perversions of the sharia (Muslim law), exploded myths and dogmas. Parasites and political and other thugs prospered. The `Sarkari Musalman' and the demagogue vied with each other in feasting off the sorry plight of the community. In the last decade and more there appeared signs of stirrings, of doubt and challenge, of rethinking and, most reassuringly, a desire to learn. In this quest, the Indian Muslim will find a good guide and companion in the Muslim scholar abroad whose devotion to Islam is as deep as his own but whose scholarship, moral courage and integrity have few parallels in India today.

In a brilliant article in Dawn, Dr. Tariq Rahman has sketched briefly why, and the stages by which, intellectual life stagnated and decayed. One wishes there were similar retrospection and introspection in India.

One warning is in order. It will not do to denounce madrassas en bloc or the highly respected institutions of Islamic learning like the Nadwat-ul-ulema in Lucknow or the Darul Uloom at Deoband, which stood for Indian nationalism even when the Muslim League was at its height, as Dr. Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi has documented (The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan; 1963). Barbara Daly Metcalf's classic Islamic Revival in British India, 1860-1900, published in 1982, is more than a brilliant description of Deoband's contribution to Muslim thought; it is a brilliant evocation of the intellectual life of Muslims in India from the 18th to the 20th century.

Yet, it is this very institution that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime at the Centre singled out for reprisal, as Deoband's venerable 90-year-old rector Maulana Marghoob-ur-Rehman told Firoz Bakht Ahmed: "Despite the fact that we receive no government grant, New Delhi has in recent years virtually stopped giving visas to people to come and study at Darul Uloom. As a result, a seminary that attracted students from all over the world, including Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, now houses a small number from Burma and Bangladesh. It's very sad as those who studied here would go back to their own countries and speak about India's greatness and diversity. Now they go to Pakistan. The government has not bothered to provide proper roads and other civic amenities in Deoband, a city symbolic of communal harmony" (The Times of India; March 24, 2003). This, to an institution that has existed for 140 years and produced nearly 80,000 graduates.

India had a glorious tradition of creative thinking on Islam. But in the 20th century, Gandhi's opportunistic support to the Khilafat movement and, both the Congress and League's enlistment of the ulema (clergy) for political campaigning and, later, by India and Pakistan for political support, disrupted that tradition.

Professor Abdullah Saeed, Director of Study of Contemporary Islam at the University of Melbourne, recalls: "Modern trends in the interpretation of the Quran may be traced to Shah Waliullah of India [d. 1762] ... In the course of Shah Waliullah's life, several monarchs occupied the throne in Delhi. The Mughal Empire continued to decline and break up until it was replaced by a Western power in the form of the British Raj... Shah Waliullah reacted to this changed situation for Muslims in India by initiating his reform movement. He rejected taqlid (blind imitation of early scholars) and advocated ijtihad (independent judgment) and the application of fresh ideas in interpreting the Quran. In emphasising a move away from the blind following of tradition, Shah Waliullah rejected some accepted views related to the principles of exegesis (usually al-tafsir)...

"Though Shah Waliullah's reformist ideas about interpretation are not radical from the perspective of the twenty-first century, they seemed so at the time. They became quite influential, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Baljon, from the end of the nineteenth century: `Shah Waliullah was loudly acclaimed in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent as the man who discerned the signs of his times. And when at present an Urdu-writing modernist is looking for arguments from Muslim lore, he weighs in with opinions of the Shah.'"

Perhaps one of the most radical attempts to reinterpret the Quran in the modern period was by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan of India (d. 1898), who published a six-volume work on the Quran from 1879. He believed that Muslims needed to reassess their tradition, heritage and ways of thinking in line with newly emerging knowledge, values and institutions. The gulf between Western and Islamic modes of thought was vast, and Muslims who had been educated in the West or influenced by Western education were no longer able to comprehend the religious discourse of the ulema of the time. "This widening gap threatened the very relevance of Islam as a religion for many Muslims."

That is very true today; let us face it honestly and boldly. The "gap" cannot be bridged by hearkening to a mythical past, or by apologetics or fundamentalism, which is so alien to Islam. It can be bridged, indeed removed, by creative thought. That will not weaken the faith, as dogmatists fear, but strengthen it, instead.

Abdullah Saeed's book is about the interpretation of one particular type of Quranic texts: namely, those that are ethico-legal in nature. He pleads for abandonment of the literalist approach in both exegesis (tafsir) and law (fiqh) based on the sharia; in sum, a "contextualist" approach.

The world has changed a lot and bids fair to change with greater speed. The emergence of nationalism, concepts of human rights and gender equality; the dignity of the human person; migration, globalisation and greater inter-faith interaction pose new questions and challenges. The Quran is the word of God. It is the fallible mind of men that seeks to understand its meaning. The Quran itself enjoins Muslims to use reason while studying the revelation.

"I am writing this as a Muslim - as a person who believes that the Quran is the revelation of the will of God to Prophet Muhammad. I also take the view that the Quran we have today is a historically authentic text that contains the revelations that Prophet Muhammad received over a 22-year period, collected by Muslims who were witnesses to these revelations in the immediate aftermath of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632. My argument in this book should not be taken to mean that I am rejecting the heritage of tafsir or fiqh. I believe that we need to respect that heritage, learn from it and use what is relevant and beneficial to our contemporary concerns. I do not accept the idea that somehow Muslims in the past reached the zenith of intellectual achievement in the area of tafsir or fiqh. In my view, Muslims are engaged in a continuous process of refinement, improvement, change and addition to the existing body of knowledge."

The author divides Muslims into three broad categories. The first sees no need to change 14 centuries of tradition and regards any `modernisation' of the understanding of religion as tantamount to a mortal blow against Islam. The second feels that opposition to change is unwise and counterproductive if Muslims are to be active participants in the modern world. They present Islam in a way that suits people living in the modern period, but do not go as far as significantly altering traditionally held Islamic ideas. The third category wants to represent Islam by questioning key aspects of the tradition, ignoring what is not relevant to the modern period, while emphasising what is relevant and attempting to remain faithful to the immutable Quranic ethos, objectives and values.

The thesis is developed with learning and rigorous analysis. A number of Quranic ethico-legal instructions were "primarily" intended for a specific people, at a specific time and in a specific situation. Others are of eternal relevance. Significantly, Muslim feminists like the Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi and the Black American Amina Wadud, who leads the prayers in a mosque, use Quranic verses in support of their claims to equality and do so with impressive erudition.

The hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) which constitute sunnah (his precepts and practices) also constitute a source of the law. Their infirmities have been exposed by modern scholarship. "The methods developed by leading figures such as Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 875) were considered to be the pinnacle of hadith criticism. No significant refinement or reinvestigation was felt by the ulema to be necessary. Modern Western critical scholarship on hadith has, until recently, been largely ignored in the Muslim world because of its questioning of the authenticity of hadith, and because of its methodology. To date there have been few signs of the rethinking of methodological aspects of hadith criticism within Islamic scholarship" (emphasis added, throughout).

There is a whole chapter on interpretation (of the Quran) based on reason. "The Philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) [Averros to the West] argued that tafsir based on reason (which he called ta'wil) is essential for communicating the message of the Quran. He maintained that the sharia addresses people of different intellectual and psychological capabilities. Some people are more reliant on rational evidence, others more comfortable with simple explanations or statements. For Ibn Rushd, this human diversity necessitates dealing with the Quranic text at different levels. If only one level, the literal, for example, is accepted, then other people may be excluded. On the question of the ta'wil of texts, Ibn Rushd believed there are two types of sharr'ah texts: texts that do not contradict what reason demands; and texts in which there is a contradiction between text and reason. While the first type does not pose problems, the second does and therefore should be subjected to ta'wil (interpretation). The need for tafsir based on reason is also evident linguistically. It cannot be assumed that all Arabic speakers will find the Quranic text accessible simply because it is written in their own language.

Several Muslim scholars argue that a careful reading reveals that relatively few verses in the Quran could be considered strictly legal in nature. "The Quran by its nature is not meant to be a legal text, which is demonstrated by its lack of interest in the minutiae of legal matters. Verses with a legal import tend to be incidental or in response to particular situations that the Muslim community or an individual had to address during the 22 years of the Prophet's mission (610-632): The scarcity of strictly legal verses in the Quran was obvious to many early Muslims, even the first generations." Hence, the need for analysis.

There is need for flexibility in interpretation and for closer attention to the socio-historical context. There is need for rigorous questioning of the hadith. "There are at least three approaches to the question of tradition; a traditionalist position, which essentially argues for unquestioning continuation of the tradition as it is; a continuation of the tradition but with an increasing degree of flexibility; and a rejection of key aspects of tradition in favour of a fresh start. There are scholars today who argue for rethinking of this tradition. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, for example, who sought to rethink some aspects of tafsir methodology, faced many difficulties. In fact, partly because of his views (and of course, his clash with the religious establishment on several issues in Egypt), he was branded an apostate and forced into exile in the Netherlands. Earlier, Fazlur Rahman experienced a somewhat similar fate. In the 1960s, Rahman came under pressure from his fellow Pakistanis, scholars and laity alike, because of his views on the Quran, tafsir and Islamic tradition. He, too, was forced into exile and went to the United States where he remained until his death in 1988. The disturbing message from these examples is that those who argue for change and for rethinking established views can expect to survive mainly outside the Islamic world, often in academic institutions in the West, where they have a relatively high degree of intellectual freedom. A further repercussion of this is that such scholars are usually writing for an international audience in a language not commonly used by the majority of Muslims (English or French, for instance). Thus the impact of their works in the Islamic world remains limited."

Sir Syed's work on the Quran has not been translated into English to this day.

Abdullah Saeed does not profess to provide definitive answers; only to provoke reasoned, informed discourse. His work proposes "a framework for anchoring a society in the Quranic text" and, indeed, to emphasise "the dynamism that has withered since the post-formative period of Islamic disciplines".

The Prophet of Islam said that the ink of the scholar is more precious than the blood of the martyr. Karen Armstrong, an advocate of inter-faith understanding, writes another excellent biography of Prophet Muhammad with the significant sub-title "A Prophet for Our Time".

"Paradoxically, Muhammad became a timeless personality because he was so rooted in his own period. We cannot understand his achievement unless we appreciate what he was up against. In order to see what he can contribute to our own predicament, we must enter the tragic world that made him a prophet nearly fourteen hundred years ago, on a lonely mountain top just outside the holy city of Mecca."

The author traces his career in a style the lay reader can enjoy. Muslims were divided on Muhammad's death. "They all took the Quranic vision into entirely new directions, and showed that the original revelations had the flexibility to respond to unprecedented circumstances that is essential to any great world movement. From the very start, Muslims used their Prophet as a yardstick by which to challenge their politicians and to measure the spiritual health of the ummah. This critical spirit is needed today. Some Muslim thinkers regard the jihad against Mecca as the climax of Muhammad's career and fail to note that he eventually abjured warfare and adopted a non-violent policy. Western critics also persist in viewing the Prophet of Islam as a man of war, and fail to see that from the very first he was opposed to the jahili (ignorant) arrogance and egotism that not only fuelled the aggression of his time but is much in evidence in some leaders, Western and Muslim alike, today."

Armstrong has written this book because in her view understanding the personality of Muhammad is essential to a rapprochement between the faiths. It is in this spirit that three scholars edited a volume of essays that analyse the history of intellectuals in the Islamic world from the 19th century to the present day - Stephane A. Dudoignon of the National Centre for Scientific Research at Paris; Prof. Komatsu Hisao of the University of Tokyo; and Prof. Kosugi Yasushi of the Kysto University. They go beyond the Arab world.

The first section concentrates on a journal, al Manar (The Lighthouse), founded by the legendary Rashid Rida and published between 1895 and 1935 and read by a wide audience of intellectuals. Its range and impact were enormous. The second part is focussed on the formation and transmission of learning from West Asia to Central and South Asia through the last century. High praise for this is due to the Islamic Area Studies Project, which was implemented by the Ministry of Education of the Government of Japan. It has remarkable essays on Muslim intellectuals in Republican China and on "the mediator" between the Islamic world and Japan, Abuurieshid Ebrahim, who was born in a Tartar family in western Siberia.

Prof. Mehran Kamrava of the California State University, Northridge, has produced a timely and telling collection of writings by creative Muslim thinkers whose views were neglected by those obsessed with the utterances of the fundamentalists. "Over the past two decades or so, at a time when the forces of `Islamic fundamentalism' have emerged as the dominant face of Islam in the West, a vibrant and highly influential discourse by a number of prominent Muslim thinkers is seeking to reform and reformulate some of the main premises of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Throughout the Muslim world, from Indonesia and Malaysia in Southeast Asia to Algeria and Morocco in North Africa, there has emerged a group of highly articulate and influential public intellectuals whose ideas are inspired by reformist interpretations of Islam. Their voices might be faint and difficult to hear, drowned by the boisterous violence of self-righteous fundamentalists whose claims of exclusivity leave no room for discourse and debate."

His book attempts to bring their voices to a wider, Western audience. Their writings form "part of a proud tradition of reformist Muslim thought that dates back to at least the late eighteenth century and even before". Today's reformists do not represent a novel or new phenomenon in Islam. What they do represent is a vision of Islam and its role in the human polity that is radically different from that advocated by orthodoxy. Included are 13 of the most renowned and influential Muslim reformist thinkers alive today: Leila Ahmed (Egypt and the United States), Nasr Abu Zaid (Egypt), Mohammed Arkoun (Algeria and France), Hasna Hanafi (Egypt), Fethullah Gulen (Turkey), Mohsen Kadivar (Iran), Fatima Mernissi (Morocco), Chandra Muzaffar (Malaysia), Tariq Ramadan (Switzerland), Muhammad Shahrour (Syria), Abdolkarim Soroush (Iran), Mohamed Talbi (Tunisia), and Amina Wadud (United States).

Not included because of space limitations are Huseyn Atay (Turkey), Rachid Ghannouchi (Tunisia), Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari (Iran), Anwar Ibrahim (Malaysia), and Abdurrahman Wahid (Indonesia), among others. The editor's neglect of Indian thinkers is hard to understand, especially in his introductory essay on reform. He writes: "Pervasive authoritarianism in the Muslim world and global American heavy-handedness may keep fundamentalist varieties of Islam alive as a political force for some time to come. On a deeper, jurisprudential level, however, the future prospects of Islamic fundamentalism do not seem terribly bright. Fundamentalist Islam's increasing turn to violence bespeaks of its theoretical and jurisprudential bankruptcy in face of the realities of the modern world. It suffers from a basic inability to present viable solutions to the complex social, economic and political problems arising out of processes of modernity. Instead, it advocates either jurisprudential retrenchment in archaic notions of religiosity, or physically and militarily lashing out at the symbols and manifestations of modernity, or both. It offers neither new ideas nor new solutions, calling on believers to instead regress into some utopian ideal that is found only in a mythical past.

"In the short turn, Islamic fundamentalism may have captured the hearts of many of the dispossessed and oppressed masses in the Muslim world. But, given the competition it faces from another, more learned variety of the religion, it is doubtful whether it can also capture the minds of most Muslims in the long run. Intellectual Islam has been a historically salient feature of the religion dating as far back as the earliest years of its appearance. Intellectual debate and discourse among the learned elite have never been absent from Islam."

Abdulaziz Sachedina argues that the Quranic provisions about civil society allow "a legitimate juridical judgment concerning inclusive political, civil, and social participation in the political community". He holds that the challenge for Muslims today, as ever, is to tap the Quranic tradition of pluralism to develop a culture of restoration, of just intra-religious and inter-religious relationships in a world of cultural and religious diversity. "Without restoring the principle of coexistence, Muslims will not be able to recapture the spirit of early civil society under the Prophet."

The editor notes: "Despite the best efforts of many authoritarian states throughout the Muslim world to combat these trends - to suppress the voices of dissent and democracy, limit access to international communications and global cultural trends, dictate and control educational curricula, and enhance their own fragile and artificial sources of legitimacy - none can be easily reversed. Moreover, beginning in the final decades of the nineteenth century and picking up pace throughout the twentieth century, the powers and authority of the old-style ulama eroded as educational opportunities spread to new social classes on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as the ulama failed to provide viable political, social, and cultural alternatives to the most pressing needs of the urban masses. Conversely, devout, self-taught Muslim intellectuals - responsible for a spectacularly wild growth of interpretations - steadily emerged as the primary force behind a deepening discourse of religious reformism. By the time the twentieth century drew to a close, reformist Islam, articulated by thinkers and intellectuals with mostly secular educational backgrounds, had emerged as a formidable force to be reckoned with." The Internet has now emerged as a powerful medium for voicing dissent. Reformist Islam is here to stay. The future belongs to it.

Particularly interesting are the essays on democracy and freedom of religion in Islam, the rights of non-Muslims and gender equality.

The scholars Donohue and Esposito's volume, now in its second edition in 2007, is a compilation with a difference. It contains excerpts from significant writings by the early heroes - Jamal-al-Din Afghani, Shaikh Muhammad Abdul, Syed Ahmed Khan of Aligarh and Rashid Rida. One is at a loss to understand why Sir Syed's far bolder contemporary Chiragh Ali is constantly ignored.

Coming to the present day, we have well-known names like Abul Ala Moududi, Rachid Ghannouchi, Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khatemi, and Syed Hassein Nasr on the one hand and Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden, on the other.

It is surely misleading to publish Hamas' initial covenant without informing the reader of its recent departures from the original Islamist theme. The three fatwas included are none too representative. But they are interesting. It is altogether an invaluable work of reference, so wide is the range of scholars it covers - from Indonesia to Morocco - and careful the selection of their writings.

One contribution merits particular praise. It is one of the ablest expositions on reason and individual reasoning. The writer is Muqtedar Khan. Born in India in 1966, where he earned a degree in engineering and an MBA, he received his doctorate in government from Georgetown University and is now on the faculty of the University of Delaware. His forthcoming book on Islamic democratic theory should be thought-provoking, judging by his essay. Read this: "Reason, as Imam Shafii himself suggests, is Allah's greatest gift to humanity. Without reason the human agent is nothing but a beast incapable of conceiving or realising his/her divine purpose. Reason is the singular element that constitutes the human and enables everything else. Even the Quran needs reason to make itself available to us. The limitation of reason in the theory of ijtihad has had an adverse effect on the very theory of knowledge in Islam. The epistemological dilemma of using reason for practical and other purposes such as medicine, while circumscribing it in Islamic studies in order to conserve legal thinking, has led Muslims to reach and maintain mutually contradictory positions. For example, nearly all Muslim thinkers, particularly those grounded in the Islamic traditions and genre, maintain the unity of knowledge as a fundamental epistemological truth. These same Muslims continue to maintain a stated or implicit boundary between secular and sacred knowledges. Reason reigns in the former while the latter is supposed to be ruled by revelation. Indeed, traditions and metaphorical thinking masquerade as revelation in the realm of sacred knowledge. The most significant consequence of this double-think has led to the decline of both forms of knowledges in the Muslim world. There is no doubt in my mind that the decline or rather stagnation of Islamic thought in all realms is due to the leash that the fuqaha (jurists) have placed on reason."

Very many, perhaps most, of the creative writers are ones steeped in Western learning. Muslims in Europe face the same problems as do Muslims in other non-Muslim states. Islam in the European Union, a collection of insightful essays edited by Yunus Samad and Kasturi Sen (Oxford University Press, Karachi, pages 251, Rs.595) highlights the challenges faced by the youth particularly - in a crime of terror and discrimination.

But what of Islamic law? Mathias Rohe, a high-ranking academic in Germany, considers the formation of a European sharia, the application of Islamic family law in German courts, and the scope and the limits for the application of Islamic rules in European countries. He records that in 1997, the European Council for Expert Opinions and Studies (al-majlis al-urubi li-l-ifta' wa al-bubut) was founded by 15 Muslim scholars in London. By publishing its expert opinions, the Council aims to provide Muslim migrants far from home (Mughtarab) with advice regarding problems they face in everyday life and to standardise the confusing variety of opinions. Furthermore the Council offers itself as a reliable source for local authorities wanting information concerning religious issues.

"The Council, however, does not intend to compete with institutions of the Islamic world such as the Azhar; the Council sees itself as a supplementary institution specialising in issues concerning the Muslim minorities. Apart from issuing expert opinions and studies the Council also makes decisions concerning such matters as the date of the beginning and end of Ramadan, the time of the main prayer on Friday or the collection and distribution of the zakat [alms] by charities."

The members are described as excellent Islamic scholars who have themselves experienced the situation of the Muslim emigrant or who are particularly interested in this situation. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent and well-known lawyer, chairs this Council. Compare the erudition of these Muslims with the ignorance of those religious leaders who profess to lead Muslims in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This and much more we learn from Rohe's documented work Muslim Minorities and the Law in Europe (Global Media Publications; Jamia Nagar, New Delhi; pages 173, Rs.445). There is a section of clergy in Europe that is an embarrassment.

In short, there is a wealth of scholarship on Islam, produced by Muslims and non-Muslims abroad, which is of enormous relevance to the Indian situation. It deserves to be translated into Indian languages, especially Urdu.