Hamka and Islam

Cosmopolitan Reform in the Malay World

Khairudin Aljunied

• Publisher: Southeast Asia Program Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501724565
• eBook ISBN: 9781501724596
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Since the early twentieth century, Muslim reformers have been campaigning for a total transformation of the ways in which Islam is imagined in the Malay world. One of the most influential is the author Haji Abdul Malik bin Abdul Karim Amrullah, commonly known as Hamka.

In Hamka and Islam, Khairudin Aljunied employs the term "cosmopolitan reform" to describe Hamka's attempt to harmonize the many streams of Islamic and Western thought while posing solutions to the various challenges facing Muslims. Among the major themes Aljunied explores are reason and revelation, moderation and extremism, social justice, the state of women in society, and Sufism in the modern age, as well as the importance of history in reforming the minds of modern Muslims.Aljunied argues that Hamka demonstrated intellectual openness and inclusiveness toward a whole range of thoughts and philosophies to develop his own vocabulary of reform, attesting to Hamka's unique ability to function as a conduit for competing Islamic and secular groups.

Hamka and Islam pushes the boundaries of the expanding literature on Muslim reformism and reformist thinkers by grounding its analysis within the Malay experience and by using the concept of cosmopolitan reform in a new context.

CHAPTER ONE

OF REASON AND REVELATION

Muslims have debated vigorously over the place of reason and revelation in human affairs since the early days of Islam. The Muʾtazilites in the eighth century were the first to focus on reason as the key to understanding God’s commandments and the wisdom of creation. While not denying the importance of revelation, they gave primacy to reason in the event of any contradiction between the two. Such a radical intellectual position generated strong responses and resistance from many mainstream Muslim scholars. Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (780–855), Abu Jaʾfar Ahmad al-Tahawi (853–933), and Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari (874–936) were among the influential ulama who wrote treatises that sought to harmonize reason and revelation in Islamic thought. In exchange for their rebuttal and exposé of the contradictions of Muʾtazilism, these scholars suffered persecution and even death until the decline of the Muʾtazilites in the tenth century.1

Another major shift in Islamic thought was noticeable from then on. The conservative ulama began to view the function of reason in religious discourses with suspicion. This move ushered in the widespread adoption of taqlid in many parts of the Arab-Muslim world, which subsequently stifled philosophical-scientific thought. Indeed, even if we accept Wael Hallaq’s persuasive argument that the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) were not closed after the first five Islamic centuries, what is certain is that theological discussions on the place of reason and rationality were severely circumscribed in many parts of the Muslim world.2

Muslims in the Malay world were relative latecomers to the fold of Islam (from the eleventh–twelfth centuries onward), and they followed an intellectual path that was very different from the route taken by their Arab counterparts. Since the fourteenth century, Malay-Muslim scholars have written legal and philosophical treatises that have contributed to the intellectual dynamism of Islam in that region. However, the dawn of high colonialism in the eighteenth century stifled Islam in the Malay world, transforming it from an intellectually driven faith that shaped the statecraft and the social life of ordinary Muslims “to a private and personal religion [that] justified itself in secular terms [treaties, the colonial state].”3

This atrophy of Malay-Muslim thought reached a turning point in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as new ideas about reason and rationality in Muslim societies appeared in response to the challenges posed by European colonialism and modernity. Jamaluddin Al-Afghani (1839–97), Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), and Rashid Rida, to name a few of the many Muslim reformists and revivalists, questioned prevailing Muslim views about reason while critiquing the dependence of scholars on preceding intellectual traditions. These ideas spread quickly across the Malay world during the age of the steamship and print.4 Modernist movements led by activists such as Syed Shaikh Al-Hadi, Syeikh Tahir Jalaluddin (1869–1956), and Ahmad Hassan (1887–1958; also known as Hassan Bandung) promoted these ideas zealously, so much so that by the early twentieth century, the region became an arena of intellectual combat between traditionalists, who urged blind obedience to customs and authority, and reformists, who asserted the primacy of reason.5

This chapter examines Hamka’s interventions in the debates concerning the marginalization of reason and revelation in Malay-Muslim thought. I shall develop the argument that Hamka engaged in the process of reclaiming “guided reason” (akal yang berpedoman) in Malay-Islamic thought.6 Reclaiming guided reason involves a few closely interrelated themes that Hamka developed in many of his writings on Islam and Muslims. First, Hamka outlined the problem of intellectual stagnation that was ubiquitous in societies across the Malay world of his time. Religious groups that were skeptical of using reason to chart new understandings of Islam were responsible for this crisis. These groups displayed scholarly dependency and espoused an unquestioning attitude toward different forms of temporal authority as well as established views about their religion.

Second, Hamka strategically appropriated what Muhsin Mahdi has termed the “rational tradition in Islam” to argue for the restoration of reason to its rightful place within Malay-Islamic thought. By rational tradition, Muhsin Mahdi means two things:

one that may be called extreme rationalism in which anything that is religious is denied as non-existent or is explained as being simply there to rule and corrupt society, and the other rationalism which more or less dedicates itself to trying to make sense—perhaps not rational in the narrow sense—of the non-rational phenomena of prophecy, revelation, the divine law and the problems that cannot easily be subjected to the laws of pure reason.7

Hamka belonged to the latter rational tradition. To convince his readers that reason and rationality were essential tools for understanding the sacred and the profane, he drew on the writings of a long line of Muslim thinkers beginning with medieval scholars such as Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), Ibn Rushd (Averroes; 1026–1198), and Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and extending to modern-day reformists such as Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), Muhammad Abduh, and Muhammad Natsir.

Third, while Hamka acknowledged and promoted reason and rationality, he was cautious in his approach toward speculative thought that went against the boundaries set by Islam. He was aware of an emerging group of Muslims who were swayed by secularist and Muʾtazilite arguments that reason was on par with revelation, if not superior to it. In the last section of this chapter, I will elaborate on the concept of guided reason, which describes Hamka’s views of how Muslims should exercise reason and rationality. From his vantage point, reason had its limits, particularly in matters of faith and belief. It therefore must be guided by revelation through the sacred sources of Islam—Qurʾan and Hadith (Prophetic sayings)—by good character, and by changing contexts, as well as by new understandings of how Islam should be practiced and lived. Peter Riddell aptly sums it up by stating that Hamka’s approach to Islam was based on “rational argument, reference to scripture, relating his discussion to a modern context, defence of what he sees as orthodoxy, and attacking what he considers as non-orthodox teachings.”8

Hamka used more than one word to describe reason. He used the word akal (also spelled ʿaql in Arabic) to refer to the faculty of reasoning and rationalizing; it also referred to the mind or the intellect. In addition, Hamka often used the word fikiran to mean thinking and rationalizing, and he sometimes coupled the two terms to form the compound word akal fikiran.9

THE STAGNANT MIND

Hamka was certainly not the first to bring the crisis of Muslim thought in the Malay world into sharp relief. Moenawar Chalil (1908–61), Ahmad Hassan, Syed Shaikh Al-Hadi, and Hamka’s own father, Abdul Karim Amrullah, were among the local reformers who forcefully argued for a total reformation of the ways in which local scholars approached Islam. They rejected the backward practices that resulted from an uncritical approach to faith and beliefs. For example, Syed Syaikh Al-Hadi’s controversial treatise Kitab Agama Islam dan Akal (The Treatise on Islam and Reason) demonstrated the wisdom behind obligatory rituals in Islam through sound reasoning. Al-Hadi argued that Muslims should perform these rituals with a clear understanding of the various sacred sources that support them. The best approach to Islamic rituals, he stressed, was to avoid blind obedience to religious authorities who taught Islam with incomplete proofs.10

Al-Hadi’s approach to Islamic rituals fits squarely within the revivalist strand of thinking that was gaining much ground in the Muslim world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Samira Haj notes, “Going back to the original authoritative sources, the Qurʾan and the Hadith, revivalists claimed to want to free Islam from the dead weight of ineffectual and harmful accretions. They considered the conventional religious authority, which imbued taqlid, as unable either to recognize the serious problems raised by current practices or to provide proper guidance to the community.”11 Hamka built on the reformist legacy of revealing the crisis of thought in Muslim minds. But rather than dealing with symptoms as exhibited in the practice of taqlid among Muslims in the Malay world, he directed his attention to the root of the problem: the stagnant mind (akal yang beku).12

By the stagnant mind, he meant a mind that was not able to think critically, logically, or rationally to address issues pertaining to life and faith. Muslims with stagnant minds came from all walks of life, from the scholarly class to the laity. They accepted everything that had been taught to them by their teachers and were unable to think creatively or to interrogate their inherited beliefs and traditions. This inability led to sloppiness and unoriginality in their writings, their speeches, and their conversations. “And when stagnancy [pembekuan] happens,” Hamka asserted, “the understanding of religion becomes rigid and the light ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Hamka’s Cosmopolitan Reform
• Chapter 1 Of Reason and Revelation
• Chapter 2 In Praise of Moderation
• Chapter 3 Muslims and Social Justice
• Chapter 4 Women in the Malay World
• Chapter 5 Restoring Sufism in the Modern Age
• Chapter 6 History as a Tool of Reform
• Conclusion: Thinking with Hamka
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index