Islam's problem in the modern world

Before I explore the causes of, and likely solutions to, Islam’s problem in the modern world, I would like to reverse the usual process and set out my broad conclusions reached as a result of a decade of research in the area of Islamic theology.

There is a strong tendency among Muslims of fundamentalist persuasion to believe that the Quran is not just the Word of God (which proposition I for one do not wish to quarrel with, as I believe that matters of faith are not resolved by arguments of reason: it is therefore best treated as a 'given' by all non-Believers like myself.

The trouble with the fundamentalists' expression of this belief is that for them the Quran is more than just "Word of God"; it is "Word of God, good and valid for all times and places". Now, it is my belief that so broad a claim as this is most responsible for Islam's negative image in the world today.

I need not remind readers of this writing that that Islam is a faith which, at its peak, not only produced three resplendent cultural empires - the Persian, the Moghul and the Ottoman - but nurtured a civilization which, for its splendid contributions to the arts and sciences of its time, has perhaps no parallel in world history.

But that was Islam of the past. Why and how has modern Islam come to lack the dynamism that was Islam's conspicuous feature then? We, Muslims, would do well to hark back to our history.

Students of Islamic studies will recall that lively debates that took place in the first two centuries of the Prophet’s death (632 AD) on highly controversial doctrinal issues, including the issue of the status to be given to the Quran. These debates are remembered in history as having taken place between two major schools of theology, the freethinking Mutazilite and its conservative rivals, the Asharite.

A close study of these debates shows that there is no doctrinal justification for the broad formulation now canvassed by our ulema about the eternal applicability for all times and places of the Quran's messages. No doubt, Asharite thought eventually won out over that of the Mutazilites, but this should not deter us from revisiting the debates and re-examining the merits of the arguments employed by the two schools on this important issue.

None of us would wish to deny the fact that the Quran as scripture has an eternal future; in this sense, the Holy Book of Islam is both eternal and timeless. But is this the same as saying that the values it lays down, particularly in such worldly, non-spiritual areas of social concern as crime and punishment or women's status in society and their rights vis a vis men, were simply intended to be ‘good and valid for all times and places’?

We need next to recall yet another fact. It is true of course that the debates between the Mutazilites and Asharites came to an abrupt end in mid-9th century. But what is noteworthy about this development is that this was not a result of ulema opposition - there is no historical evidence, for instance, to suggest that accusations of heresy or apostasy were hurled at the Mutazilites for their radical views including those held about the non-eternal nature of the Quran - but rather a result of high-handedness on the part of the rulers of the time. In other words, for the downgrading and eventual disppearance of the the 'free thinking' tradition of the Mutazilites, political and not theological factors were responsible. In fact, it may be argued that, had the debates been allowed to run their full course, there was a good chance that the Mutazilite doctrine about the Quran’s status with which we are grappling today would have won the day over conservative Asharite thought.

I believe therefore it is imperative for us modern Muslims today, particularly Muslims of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh subcontinent, to work for a revival of the spirit of this and other related aspects of our early theology. It seems to me that no scholarly investigation has been undertaken in this vital area by scholars, Western or Muslim, along the lines I am now trying so hard to put forward here. Such material as survives shows that much of what is relevant to our understanding of it has been buried deep by successive generations of the ulema under layers and layers of misinterpretation to ensure that it is never revived again.

A close study of such theology from the fragmentary materials available provides one with the reason to reach the following conclusion - namely:

- While devout Muslims are free to hold that the Quran is the Word of God in both its literal and metaphorical sense, a close study of our religious history shows that there is nothing in the early literature to support the broad formulation used by the ulema to interpret the original doctrine.

- If one analyzes the substance of those debates, it becomes clear that the Quran's pronouncements about cruel and unusual punishments and about the unequal status of women were never meant to be applicable for 'all times and places’.

- Indeed, a close reading of the debates shows that the status of the Quran issue was vigorously debated and challenged by the Mutazilites in the course of their exchanges with the Asharites, leaving one free to draw the conclusion that it is at least theologically arguable that the Quran is a non-eternal and historically specific scripture; and that its this-worldly provisions on the issues just mentioned, among other similar ones, were intended essentially for 7th century desert Arabs to whom it was addressed.

In furtherance of my interpretation spelt out above, I shall now add to this the following brief note:

I am not the only modern researcher to suggest that it would be best if Muslims treat certain elements of the Quran differently from certain others - that its purely scriptural and spiritual verses are regarded as different in their value as those of a this-worldly, mundane nature. Of course, the Modernist Muslim writers I deal with below each said this, or something approaching it; but of course in their own terms.

I enumerate below the suggestions made by such writers who hail from different regions of the Islamic world but share a common reformist agenda. Readers may please note that my summaries of their views are in most cases a paraphrase of citations appearing in the Canadian Scholar Andrew Rippin's 2-volume study, entitled The Muslims, since their original writings are not readily available to me here in India:

- A Muslim professor of philosophy at Columbia University, Akeel Bilgrami, in an article published in a learned journal in 1992, suggested that Muslims should sort out verses of Meccan origin from those of Medinan provenance (on the basis provided in the Quran itself) and treat the former as being of a higher value and the latter of a lesser significance. This would help, he implied, to get around the difficulty of reconciling the Quran's injunctions on women's rights and forms of punishment for crimes etc with modern concepts of these issues.

- The already referred to Egyptian writer, Mohammed Abu Zayd, suggested that the Quran needs to be reinterpreted to make it compatible with the values of our times by first reworking its 'supernatural' elements so that they are taken in their metaphorical and not literal sense. As examples of such supernatural elements, he cited references to Satan, the angels, and the heavenly journey the Prophet is believed to have made to meet with God in the heavens, face-to-face. A similar sorting out from the Quran's text of the provisions of such other outdated issues as the penalty of cutting off of hands for theft and the right of polygamy for men need also to be reinterpreted to yield a rational meaning - all of which would help to make the Quran a more meaningful scripture for our day and age.

- The eminent Pakistani scholar, Fazlur Rahman (who too has been referred to above) suggests however a quite different basis for such reinterpretation. In his Major Themes of the Quran, published in 1980, he called for a different treatment being given to the Quran's 'moral' regulations from that accorded to its 'legal' and 'legislative' provisions - the former are 'non-contingent' while the latter 'contingent'. He further felt that much of the law of classical Islam was wrongly formulated because the medieval jurists ignored the 'moral ideal' underlying the text and the relevant provisions were read instead as 'legal enactments'.

- A thoroughly radical basis for a differential approach to the Quranic text was suggested by yet another Egyptian scholar - Muhammad Ahmad Khalaf Allah. He seems to state that 'spiritual truths' of the Quran need to be distinguished from the 'historical realities' mentioned in it. For Khalaf Allah the prophetic stories in the Quran are not so much historical as 'kerygmatic': they are iterated and reiterated in the text for their moral/religious aims and to accord with 'Muhammad's needs in a given situation'. Thus, they are 'contingent' upon history - a point similar to the one made in the 8th/9th century by the Mutazilites in their theological exchanges with the Asharites (which has been dealt with earlier in this essay).

[The aim of the Quran, said Khalaf Allah in his book published in 1950-1, was 'to admonish and exhort' not to instruct in history. I might add here that Prof Rippin devotes a great deal of space to Khalaf Allah's thesis, presumably because it comes closest to reflecting the modern Muslim's concerns. I shall therefore reproduce Rippin's own summary of the rest of his assessment of this fearless Egyptian scholar and his contribution to modernist thought].

Prof Rippin supplements the above summaries in Khalaf Allah's case with the following additional information:

"Khalaf Allah was accused [in Egypt] of 'atheism and gross ignorance' and had to rewrite his thesis several times before it was accepted [by Cairo University]; it was published in 1950-51 but he was subsequently forced out of his university teaching post. Traditionally, all stories of the Quran (observes Khalaf Allah) have been seen to be of equal value and to be of a historical nature. This position raised a number of questions in the modern world, however. What of stories which did not seem to be in agreement with other earlier sources? .... what is the modern Muslim to believe? Are the facts of the Quran all necessarily true historically, and all other sources false? How will this attitude work in conjunction with the historical-critical method which clearly values older courses over newer ones?"

Now as we come to the end of my argument on the true nature of the Quran as scripture, I cannot but to add to it the following addendum:

I have just come across this review in the New York Times of a recent (2005) book: Reza Aslan's "No god but God". Aslan seems in it to get support for his basic thesis from the very Asharite-Mutazilite debates I have briefly touched on above. Aslan, it appears from the review, deals with the very question uppermost in my mind - namely, how in the conditions of the modern world one should interpret the Quran's various prescriptions and injunctions? The Times reviewer, summing up his book's major concern, writes:

"One of Mr Aslan's most important chapters deals with the centuries-long struggle between traditionalists and rationalists over the proper interpretation of the Quran. The outcome weighs heavy on the world today. The rationalists saw the Quran as both word of God and a historical document whose meanings change through time. For the traditionalists, the Quran is fixed and eternal. Therefore, 'what was appropriate for Muhammad's community in the seventh century must be appropriate for all Muslim communities to come, regardless of the circumstances.' The traditionalists won. The power to interpret the Quran came under the control of religious scholars, collectively known as the ulema, who ended the era of consensus and free reasoning that, up to the 10th century, had defined Quranic inquiry."

[posted by rasheedtalib @ 3:07 pm]