Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur'an (Qur'anic Studies Series)

Worth the cost and the time spent reading it will be a fruitful investment.

Important introduction to some key Islamic Thinkers
Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur'an by Suha Taji-Farouki (Qur'anic Studies: Oxford University Press/ The Institute of Ismaili Studies) This volume examines the writings of ten Muslim intellectuals, working throughout the Muslim world and the West, who employ contemporary critical methods to understand the Qur'an. Their work points to the emergence of a new trend in Muslim interpretation, characterised by direct engagement with the Word of God while embracing intellectual modernity in an increasingly globalised context. The volume situates and evaluates their thought, and assesses responses to it among Muslim and non-Muslim audiences. The ten chapters highlight the diverse arenas in which such intellectuals draw on the Qur'anic text, through their fresh readings of its verses.
SUHA TAJI-FAROUKI is Lecturer in Modern Islam, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and Research Associate, Department of Academic Research and Publications, The Institute of Ismaili Studies.
Her publications include A Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate (1996); Muslim -Jewish Encounters: Intellectual Traditions and
Modern Politics (co-edited, 1998); and Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century (co-edited, I B. Tarus).
Like those of the Islamists with which many such appeals to tradition take issue, they can ultimately be interpreted as responses to the ongoing failure in the Muslim world to create a culturally viable, successful modern state. The Islamist reaction to the failure of cultural modernisation and secularisation processes launched by the post-colonial elites is to invoke the self-past, re - imagined in terms of culturally authentic and `pure' models, and motivated by perceptions of the West (with its agents within the Muslim world) as a threat. In contrast, some of those surveyed in this volume uphold the very same processes of modernisation and secularisation, while dismissing, denying or refuting the issue of their `alien' cultural provenance and their compatibility with an Islamic commitment to transcendence, through a re-imagining of `Islam' that itself rivals the Islamist one. This advocating of `modern' values via a re-imagined Islam nonetheless sets their posture apart from that of the secular intellectuals.
The structure of the volume presents a clustering of some chapters, reflecting certain features or tendencies loosely held in common among some of the thinkers consid¬ered. The first chapter discusses the project of the late Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman, a towering figure of twentieth-century Islamic reform. Although he spent most of his academic life in the West, as Abdullah Saeed points out, Rahman remained firmly committed to an Islamic process of knowledge, while at the same time subjecting traditional Islamic thought and methodologies to a profound critique. Rahman emphasised areas that have been neglected in Muslim understandings of the Qur'an, and it is from this that his importance largely derives. Such areas include the socio-historical context of the revelation, the spirit of its message as a whole, and the retrieval of its moral elan, as a basis for elabo¬rating a Qur'an-centred ethics. Rahman's wide-ranging influ¬ence is evident in the work of such thinkers as those who form the subject of the two following chapters. These are his former student Nurcholish Madjid, a prominent Indonesian public figure, and the American scholar Amina Wadud.
As Anthony H. Johns and Abdullah Saeed demonstrate, Madjid has endeavoured to achieve a pragmatic realisation of Qur'anic values in a manner appropriate to the distinctive character and needs of the Indonesian state. His aim in this is to safeguard Indonesia's integration as a religiously and ethnically plural entity, and to enhance the role of the Pancasila in its capacity as the ideological cornerstone of national unity. His `contextualist' approach to understanding the Qur'an is informed by a recogni¬tion of the pressing need for inter-religious harmony in Indonesia. It is equally motivated by his consciousness of the historically divisive impact of fiqh among Muslims there. Also inspired by Rahman and in contrast with Madjid, Amina Wadud's concern, as described by Asma Barias, is with the problematic of Qur'anic interpretation and the marginalisation of women's full human agency within society. Wadud is a pioneer among a growing cluster of Muslim women scholars who are developing a feminist reading of the Islamic tradition and foundational texts. As Barias, herself a member of this cluster, demonstrates, Wadud highlights the connections between traditional tafsir (exegesis) and the means of its production, explaining the genre's masculinist nature, and its resultant biases against women. She calls for a more egalitarian tafsir, inclusive of women's voices,and reflecting new, holistic modes of understanding and partici¬pation in Muslim religious life. The claim that it upholds the ontological equality of the sexes stands at the core of her own reading of the Qur'an, which thus serves the project of Muslim women's emancipation.
It has been suggested that Rahman never consciously intro¬duced analytic procedures derived from Western thinkers in a major manner, and was not attracted to the ongoing debate in Western intellectual circles, even in those areas that influenced his methodology. In contrast, in the assessment of one scholar, in his employment of `the categories of post-modernity' to call for a rethinking of the whole Islamic tradition, the Algerian-French scholar Mohammed Arkoun, seems to be using the Islamic tradition as a text upon which to continue a debate about Western epistemology. He pays little atten¬tion to the specificity of the Islamic condition or tradition, as if the Islamic tradition is expected to serve as a yielding raw material for constructing the epistemological edifice of the West.
Arkoun presents his project as a detached, ideologically neutral and radical perspective on the development of the `religious phenomenon', and its implications for present and future human concerns. He rejects any link between his own thought and `islahi (reformist) thinking'. Questioning the assumptions of the historical-critical method, his own critical reading of `Islamic reason', his deconstruction of centuries of Islamic thought, and his constructs of revelation and orthodoxy challenge both academic scholarship on Islam, and Muslim self-understandings. As Ursula Gunther suggests, the `Arkounian' perspective has had little impact on both potential constituencies thus far.
The Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd introduced a linguistic problematisation of the religious discourse to a contemporary Arabic readership in a substantial manner for the first time. As Navid Kerman shows, his approach is based on application of the most relevant achievements of contemporary linguistics to the Qur'an, combined with literary study of the text and the adoption of Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. Its conclusions are implicitly posited in opposition to contemporary
Islamist discourses with their notion of a single, eternally valid interpretation of the sacred text. This provides the context for understanding postures adopted towards his writings in Egypt, and his trial.
Mohamad Mojtahed Shabestari's project provides an example of the rethinking of the Islamic revolutionary tradition in Iran. It represents one trend among post-revolutionary Iranian Islamic discourses, as they endeavour to address the contradictions inherent in the paradigm of what Farzin Vandat terms `mediated subjectivity', inherited from the founders of the Islamic Republic. Well-versed in German theological and philosophical scholar-ship, Shabestari relies on the principle of inter-subjectivity, which he situates within a religious model. He thus adopts a hermeneutic approach to subjectivity, which avoids any direct interpretation of Qur'anic texts. Vandat sees in his hermeneutic construct of inter-subjectivity a framework in terms of which the discourse of religious modernity in post-revolutionary Iran can be advanced, as compared with the inherited paradigm. Shabestari's critique of the negative side of human subjectivity is accompanied by the suggestion that religion, projected as a source of permanent principles and general values, can help ameliorate the crises that accompany the unavoidable moderni¬sation process in Muslim countries.
The Tunisian scholar Mohamed Talbi is best known for the case he advances from an Islamic perspective for religious pluralism and inter-religious dialogue, and for his work as a historian of North Africa. Ronald L. Nettler demonstrates how his progressive, liberal ideas are justified through a historical-contextual approach to the Qur'anic text, which seeks to elucidate God's intention in it. His `intentional' reading is put forward as a foun¬dation for resolving the current crisis in the Islamic encounter with modernity, and a foil to the literal readings that plague contemporary Muslim understandings.
Osman Tastan points to the pragmatic, utilitarian approach to the Qur'an, and its legal content in particular, developed by the veteran Turkish scholar Hüseyin Atay. Atay's extraction from the Qur'an of practical solutions to specific Islamic issues serves astraightforward understanding and simplified practice of Islam. While this makes it accessible to the general practising public, its rationalist, anti-traditionalist orientation clearly reflects and sits comfortably with the established emphasis on modernity in the Turkish Republican context. This orientation is prominent in the publications of many scholars who, like Atay, are situated in Faculties of Islamic Studies in Turkish universities.
The Syrian engineer Mohamad Shahrour and the Libyan writer Sadiq Nayhum share common features. Both emanate from essentially secular backgrounds, and are self-taught in the area of Islamic learning. Driven onto the discursive arena carved by the Islamic resurgence, their engagement with the Qur'an partly serves a critique of traditional Islamic and Islamist formulations and contemporary political conditions. Shahrour advances his `contemporary reading' of the Qur'an as the foundation for a comprehensive project of cultural, social, political and material renewal in Arab-Muslim societies. Andreas Christmann eluci¬dates his employment of a linguistic analysis to reprogramme Qur'anic terminology, thereby estranging readers from conven¬tional understandings and challenging traditional religious authority. As Suha Taji-Faroulzi demonstrates, Nayhum recruits Qur'anic texts in the context of a call for a culturally rooted form of direct democracy, embedded in `Islam' reconstructed as a formula for political emancipation. To some extent, his resort to the Qur'an suggests a `ritualistic' acknowledgement of the Islamic textual tradition. At the same time, it illustrates the appeal of the `Qur'anic message', however appropriated, among secular-oriented Muslim intellectuals confronting the experience of alienation and fragmentation brought by modernity.
By way of conclusion to this introductory chapter, attention must be drawn to a reform-oriented but Islamically rooted voice, which has become increasingly influential during the late twentieth century, reflecting a certain resonance with a broad public understanding in Muslim societies. This is the voice of reform-minded Muslim intellectuals and academics and a small number of reform-minded ulama, whose diverse contributions, put together, bear witness to important patterns of intellectual devel¬opment and change in contemporary Islamic thought.
While such reform-oriented thinkers might themselves be subject to various Western influences, having in some cases been trained in Western universities, they work self-consciously from within Islamic cultural and textual traditions, and adhere to an Islamic frame of reference. Often with an eye to invalidating extremist Islamic postures, they address the ongoing challenge of elaborating modern Islamic responses to the modalities and demands of the modern experience, and the profoundly changed realities and novel problems of modern Muslim life. Their inter¬pretive approach to the Qur'an and Sunna is direct and pays attention to social and historical contexts, distinguishing between universal principles and the moral thrust of the revelation on the one hand, and directives that may be bound to its specific circumstances on the other. In determining the meanings and implications of the revelation, they draw on the rich legacy of Islamic tradition in its diverse branches, while carefully probing the complex relation between this tradition and the context of its elaboration, taking into account aspects of its contingency.
Some of these thinkers deconstruct and critique aspects of the project of Western modernity, often sharing common ground in this with the critical discourse of modernity and its post-modern critics. However, they part company with the latter in their Islamic frame of reference, and their concern to offer `constructive' responses to the human predicament. Refusing to bow to a blanket privileging of the modern over the pre-modern, they maintain that modernity's characteristic sense of superiority must be tempered with a respect for pre-modern sources which, if properly contextualised, can yield much that is of value. Others divest the modern West of its claims to universal validity; their commitment to Islamic cultural resources derives further confi¬dence from an awareness that, at this juncture in history, there is a possibility for other voices to be received with less prejudice. Crucially, their contributions explore and advocate significant contemporary areas of reform within this culture, includingdemocratisation, pluralism, tolerance, openness to other reli¬gions, and equality of status for women and minorities in Muslim societies. Their arguments in this regard evince an alertness to the specific worldview upon which concepts and institutions are premised, identifying what may be incompatible with an Islamic cosmology and a commitment to transcendence.
Certain of the thinkers presented in this volume clearly contribute to this reform-oriented, Islamically rooted trend, which is exemplified to varying degrees by such figures as Khaled Abou El Fadl, Muhammad Salim al-`Awwa, Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Taha Jabir al- `Alwani and the `professional' `alimYusuf al-Qaradawi, to name a few. Relative to them, others studied here create an impression that they are Westernised liberals still under the spell of Western modernity, seeing in it a solution to the needs and problems of Muslim societies. In contrast with both, yet others discussed in this volume appear to have set out on the postmodernist road, which in its extreme form can ultimately lead to nihilism.
The reform-oriented Islamic discourse sketched in these concluding lines remains intimately connected to the reformist discourse of the turn of the twentieth century. Those who contribute to it are perhaps the genuine heirs to the reformists' legacy, while taking this into uncharted waters towards a destination yet unclear, in an unpredictable and rapidly changing context. What is clear is the bid made by such thinkers to avoid the pitfalls and excesses of modernity, and to preserve the moral and cultural integrity of the Islamic worldview, and the special Islamic identity and cohesion of Muslim societies. In the wider world, the contribution of this discourse perhaps lies ultimately in its non-negotiable commitment to applying an ethical dimension to the exercise of reason and power. In Muslim countries, it might respond effectively to pressing concerns for the injection of justice and morality into the political and socio-economic order, while avoiding the problems and excesses inherent in certain Islamist options
The `West' is now an omnipresent party to the ongoing process of re-negotiating Islam among Muslims, in which this reform trend represents one of many competing voices. This undeni¬ably complicates the task that confronts it, whether in invalidating extremist Islamic formulations, or galvanising Muslim opinion in the endeavour to establish an effective bridge between the demands of an ever-changing present and a commitment to eternal values and the tradition and culture that embody them. Indeed its foremost challenge perhaps lies in successfully navigating a path between openness to external influences and an enduring faithfulness to the internal cultural map and dynamics of Muslim society, in a world where human interactions are growing dramatically.
It hardly need be pointed out that the Qur'anic text forms the bedrock of any Islamic discourse, reform-oriented or other, worthy of the name. Modernity has focused attention perhaps in an unparalleled way on the complexities of interactions between texts and readers. During the last few decades, Muslims have read the Qur'an in a rich multiplicity of ways, something of which is illustrated by the present volume. It is hoped that the essays collected here will point to some of the challenges, problems and responsibilities contained within this act of reading.