Islam and Modernity

Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition

Fazlur Rahman

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226387024
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion

"As Professor Fazlur Rahman shows in the latest of a series of important contributions to Islamic intellectual history, the characteristic problems of the Muslim modernists—the adaptation to the needs of the contemporary situation of a holy book which draws its specific examples from the conditions of the seventh century and earlier—are by no means new.... In Professor Rahman's view the intellectual and therefore the social development of Islam has been impeded and distorted by two interrelated errors. The first was committed by those who, in reading the Koran, failed to recognize the differences between general principles and specific responses to 'concrete and particular historical situations.'... This very rigidity gave rise to the second major error, that of the secularists. By teaching and interpreting the Koran in such a way as to admit of no change or development, the dogmatists had created a situation in which Muslim societies, faced with the imperative need to educate their people for life in the modern world, were forced to make a painful and self-defeating choice—either to abandon Koranic Islam, or to turn their backs on the modern world."—Bernard Lewis, New York Review of Books "In this work, Professor Fazlur Rahman presents a positively ambitious blueprint for the transformation of the intellectual tradition of Islam: theology, ethics, philosophy and jurisprudence. Over the voices advocating a return to Islam or the reestablishment of the Sharia, the guide for action, he astutely and soberly asks: What and which Islam? More importantly, how does one get to 'normative' Islam? The author counsels, and passionately demonstrates, that for Islam to be actually what Muslims claim it to be—comprehensive in scope and efficacious for every age and place—Muslim scholars and educationists must reevaluate their methodology and hermeneutics. In spelling out the necessary and sound methodology, he is at once courageous, serious and profound."—Wadi Z. Haddad, American-Arab Affairs

1

The Heritage

The Qurʾān and the Prophet

When one reviews the performance of Muḥammad as a religious leader and studies the Qurʾān closely as the document of his revelatory experiences, one cannot fail to perceive that an inner unity and an unmistakable sense of direction—despite the multitude of different historical situations faced and exigencies met—are displayed in the Prophet’s activity and the Qurʾānic guidance. I am, of course, talking not of the actual effect this teaching had upon Muḥammad’s early or late followers, the treatment of which will follow this section, but of the nature and the quality of this teaching, viewed in its setting, with reference to its historical context on the one hand and the personality of the Prophet on the other. In this section I will be concerned with this teaching in its major features and this performance in its bold outlines, rather than with the minutiae of details, in order to bring out their originality and their potentialities.¹

It seems certain that, because of their mutual involvement and interdependence, the doctrines of the One Creator-Sustainer God, of the necessity of socioeconomic justice, and of the Last Judgment were elements of the original religious experience of Muḥammad. As this experience unfolds under the general refusal of the Meccans to accept his teaching the idea of a judgment in history upon nations in accordance with the quality of their collective behavior originates and gains steady strength in the middle and some years of the last Meccan periods. In fact, it almost overshadows that of the Last Judgment until Medina, where, owing to the new opportunities of the task of constructing an ethically based sociopolitical order, accounts of divine judgment upon earlier nations and their fates are no longer called for. Yet the idea of a universal judgment continues. Although both God consciousness and the conviction of the Last Day are powerful and persistent themes in the Qurʾān, there is no doubt that belief in God and human accountability play a strictly functional role there. The central concern of the Qurʾān is the conduct of man. Just as in Kantian terms no ideal knowledge is possible without the regulative ideas of reason (like first cause), so in Qurʾānic terms no real morality is possible without the regulative ideas of God and the Last Judgment. Further, their very moral function requires that they exist for religiomoral experience and cannot be mere intellectual postulates to be “believed in.” God is the transcendent anchoring point of attributes such as life, creativity, power, mercy, and justice (including retribution) and of moral values to which a human society must be subject if it is to survive and prosper—a ceaseless struggle for the cause of the good. This constant struggle is the keynote of man’s normative existence and constitutes the service (ʿibāda) to God with which the Qurʾān squarely and inexorably charges him.

But the substantive or “constitutive”—as Kantian phraseology would have it—teaching of the Prophet and the Qurʾān is undoubtedly for action in this world, since it provides guidance for man concerning his behavior on earth in relation to other men. God exists in the mind of the believer to regulate his behavior if he is religiomorally experienced, but that which is to be regulated is the essence of the matter. The bane of later medieval Islam, as we shall presently see, was that what was regulative, namely, God, was made the exclusive object of experience and thus, instead of men’s seeking values from this experience, the experience became the end in itself. Whether or not this experience had any other content—eminent Sufis themselves, like al-Ghazālī and al-Sirhindī, thought it had none, and this view seems to me both intelligible and correct—it was mostly either neutral to social morality or even negatively related to it. The intellectual efforts of Christian theologians to unravel the nature of God (as love) and the mysteries of the Trinity were empty formalism compared with the Sufi experience of God (for the latter at least had a positive and enriching influence on personaltiy building, though mostly individual and asocial). Nevertheless, the Christian theology had the beneficial effect of sharpening the mind, and therefore, when that mind later was applied to the natural world, it produced amazing results in the scientific field. But the bane of modernity, in the form of secularism, is far worse than that of either medieval Islamic Sufism or medieval Christian theology, since secularism destroys the sanctity and universality (transcendence) of all moral values—a phenomenon whose effects have just begun to make themselves felt, most palpably in Western societies. Secularism is necessarily atheistic. So far as the establishment of an ethically based social order is concerned—and this is the greatest desideratum of minkind today—the effects of medieval Islamic Sufism, of the Christian obsession with theology, or of modern secularism differ little.

How different and how morally invigorating are the concerns of the Qurʾān—for the Prophet, judging from both the Qurʾān and his Sunna (i.e., his exemplary conduct), was “God-intoxicated,” and the Qurʾān itself certainly appears to be theocentric. But this deep God consciousness is creatively and organically related to the founding of an ethical sociopolitical order in the world, since, in the view of the Qurʾān, those who forget God eventually forget themselves (59:19), and their individual and corporate personalities disintegrate. It is this God consciousness that sent Muḥammad out of the Cave of Ḥirāʾ, where he was wont to contemplate, into the world, never to return to that cave—or the contemplative life—again. What issued from his experience in the cave was not merely the demolishing of a plurality of gods, but a sustained and determined effort to achieve socioeconomic justice. He aimed at constituting a community for goodness and justice in the world—what I have called an ethically based sociopolitical order “under God,” that is, according to the principle that moral values cannot be made and unmade by man at his own whim or convenience and should not be misused or abused for the sake of expediency. Muḥammad tried to strengthen and enfranchise the weaker segments of society as well as to divest the privileged of their prerogatives in the religious field (the clergy), in the political field (autocratic or oligarchic rule), and in the socioeconomic field (undue economic or sex power). Mr. Maxime Rodinson has aptly characterized Muḥammad as a combination of Charlemagne, who spread Christianity among the Saxon tribes of Germans primarily so as to establish and consolidate an empire, and Jesus, whose kingdom “was not of this world.”

When one studies the social aspect of Muḥammad’s reform, two features appear striking. First, before introducing a major measure of social change, the ground was well prepared. Of course, in the sector of public legislation the Prophet did not have the power to act while he was in Mecca; it was only in Medina, where he had political and administrative authority, that he could legislate. Thus, although Qurʾānic warnings against usury were issued in Mecca, usury was not legally banned until the Prophet had been in Medina for some time. Similarly, emphatic statements concerning amelioration of the condition of the poor were made from the beginning of Islam (indeed, this coupled with the unity of God was the motive force for the genesis of the Islamic movement), but laws in this field, including the law of the zakāt tax, were not promulgated until well after the Prophet had settled in Medina, although the measure of “brotherhood” (muwākhāt) between the local population (anṣār) and the Meccan immigrants (muhājirūn) was taken soon after his arrival in Medina. Such instances militate against the liberal use of the “principle of graduation” in Qurʾānic legislation, so much exploited by later Muslim jurists and many present-day reformers. Nevertheless, it is beyond doubt that he made no precipitate decisions on important issues of public policy but awaited “the coming down of revelation.” The Prophet was naturally a shy and reticent person and did not intrude into people’s affairs so long as they ran smoothly—the portrayal of him by later juristic literature as ceaselessly coming forth with decision upon decision (more often than not contradictory!) on real or hypothetical questions is decidedly false. It goes without saying that he never gave decisions on purely hypothetical issues or on issues that were never brought to his notice. On the other hand, despite Muḥammad’s reticence, an equally determined will unfailingly comes through, a will that spurns compromises on fundamental issues. One does not need to remind oneself that a man with this mixture of opposing mental traits and conscious of a “heavy mission,” as the Qurʾān says, must be engaged in a constant inner dialectic—the ideal moral state for man to be in, according to the Qurʾān. The verses in sura 53, where the Prophet had reportedly made concessions to the goddesses of the Meccan pagans that were subsequently “abrogated,” is, along with other Qurʾānic evidence, a direct proof of this phenomenon. The second side of the Prophet, his determination, finally won over his other side. If there were an artist in the world who could portray pure moral states, the Prophet’s picture would emerge as most interesting, attractive, and significant.

The second all-important feature of the legislation of the Qurʾān is that it (like the decisions of the Prophet) always had a background or a historical context, which the Muslim commentators of the Qurʾān call “occasions of revelation.” But the literature on the “occasions of revelation” is often highly contradictory and chaotic. The basic reason for this state of affairs seems to be that, although most Qurʾānic commentators were aware of the importance of these “situational contexts,” either because of their historical si...