A Case for Moderating Islam
By Moin Qazi, New Age Islam
11 April 2017
For decades there have been rumblings, both muted and vocal, stressing a need for reformation in Islam. There have been consistent attempts to make the ulema incorporate the non Ulemic perspective in the formulation of an Islamic response to the changing complexities and multiple transitions in a fast evolving world. Hopelessness cannot become a permanent affair and we have to address issues that keep driving the new ideological tides.
Muslims have now begun to argue that the assumption that we must reconcile with the facile interpretations of some of the early scholars of Islam is not only erroneous but is symptomatic of a primitive understanding of the subject. Passive fatalism has no legs to stand on. Notable Islamic scholars like al-Afghani, Dr Muhammad Iqbal, Syed Ahmad Khan, Ali Shariati ,Fazlur Rahman and others have been pointing out since 18th and 19th century that the Muslim world and Islamic thought needs to be reformed. Such voices, however, have mostly been silenced by forces of status quo within the Islamic world.
The uneasy fact is that Islam is in desperate need of internal reforms that have been delayed to this point where the religion is being damaged from within causing serious identity crisis amongst the Muslim youth.
Where once Shar'ia was an organic and evolving body of law, emphasizing mercy, tolerance and inclusiveness, it is now characterized as an instrument of regression. When Europe’s barbarous principalities once slumbered through their Dark Ages, the Islamic world experienced an age of scientific, literary and philosophical enlightenment.
If Prophet Muhammad's life was revolutionary, its aftermath has seen a monological recital of Hadiths and inflexible analyses of Qur'anic verses, where historical context is taken up or ignored to suit the interpreter. Memories of early Islam have hardened into dogma, and many scholars have taken the Hadiths as tablets of stone.
One of the greatest jolts to progressive thinking in Islam came from the colonial powers .The onslaught of this wave of Western wave of enlightenment and renaissance shattered the Islamic psyche. We remain transfixed with the image of the aggressor, the predator; it is part of the colonial legacy. But it is time to turn our gaze inwards. We need to look at ourselves realistically, clinically as we are not as we imagine we are. The western onslaught convulsed Muslim society as it, dominated by the Ulema, went on the defensive instead of countering it .This was largely because progressive scholarship was curbed relentlessly within the Islamic world even when it was clear that an enlightened scholarship was emerging and was being nurtured in the West .
The point that has often been made is: If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three—and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now? Some have posed the question in a different form—not "What has Islam done to the Muslims?" but "What have the Muslims done to Islam?"—and have answered by laying the blame on specific teachers and doctrines and groups. One important factor that led to overall decline in Muslim morality that damaged its liberal and catholic outlook was the greed for power and the continuing conflicts for power and prestige among the Muslims. The aristocracy was more concerned with expanding kingdoms and embellishing its aristocracy. Barring rulers like Mamun Rashid who assigned a high position to learning and scholarship ,most rulers had little place for it .Moreover, the high levels of piety and justice exhibited in the reign of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs gave way to internecine quarrels ,greed and gluttonies in the epochs that followed.
But reform has to come with attendant caveats. It is very easy to sermonize from lofty pedestals of Chairs established by Western universities, protected as they are by the immunities and privileges that go with these positions. Many of them have to understandably remain beholden to their patrons. Some of them are media creations and have an ambivalent relationship with Islam. There is no reason to believe that the entire Ulemic spectrum and bandwidth is dominated by an opinion that is unpalatable for Islamic renewal .There have been highly creative and talented individuals all along even within Ulemic ranks; it is only now that they are feeling empowered. Neither traditionalist nor modernists should keep anointed spheres; they nourished and sustained by each other .in mutuality lies the betterment of both.
Unlike Christianity, Islam was concerned with politics and governance from the start: the Muslim rule that developed in the lifetime of the Prophet required attention to principles of community life, justice, administration, relations with non-Muslims, defence and foreign policy. A vision of what constitutes good governance; law and a just society were among the principal new ideas. The Prophet came not to protect the status quo, but to reform and change. Women, for instance, were given legal status (where they had none before) and concrete legal protection within society.
The key faultiness in the Islamic history that led to the ossification of Islamic thought are:
• The final destruction of Mughal rule in India at the hands by the British in 1857;
• The defeat and dismantling of the Ottoman Empire as a result of World War I; and
• finally, the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, in territory formerly ruled by Islam, which was considered by many Muslims to be the crowning humiliation in this long line of defeats.
Traditional Muslims are fundamentally xenophobic and this predilection accounts for many of the problems, which include a propensity for casting suspicions about external conspiracies of reforming Islam through a process that transcends textual literalism. The response of the conservative ranks has been seen in the revival of what is being projected as return to puritan Islam.
Some of the main formative strands of Islamic revivalism have been:
• The Wahhabi movement which originated in the 18th century;
• The Deobandi movement in India and Pakistan which dates from 1866;
• The Muslim Brotherhood founded 1928;
• Jamaat e-Islami, which was founded 1941 in India; and
• The Iranian Revolution of 1979.
From these have emerged myriad branches such as the Taliban (from the Deobandi movement); Al Qaida (a product of the ideology of Muslim Brotherhood theologian Said Qutb); the missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat; and Hizb Ut-Tahrir.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the 'United Nations' of the Muslim world, is also a revivalist organization: this is reflected in its Charter which states that it exists "to work for revitalizing Islam's pioneering role in the world”, a euphemism for re-establishing Islam's dominant place in world affairs.
In essence, Islamic revivalist movements aim to restore the greatness of Islam and make it 'successful' again. This hope is embodied, for example, in the Muslim Brotherhood's slogan "Islam is the solution”
The fears of the conservatives should not be rubbished as misplaced .Islamic liberalism must be authentic and well intentioned so that it finds conviction with the common Muslims who are important stakeholders in the process of evolution of Muslim thought. Else, it will always be construed a manufactured discourse of the West with whom several liberalists share kinship ties .The modernist should be well equipped with both the classical and modern tools of scholarship .Otherwise it will lead to an intellectual anarchy.
At this stage it would be proper to dwell on nuance semantics of the term 'moderate'. There are so many Muslims devout in their practice of their religion but are not considered “moderate” Muslims – since moderate was often taken to mean not hugely observant. . It is surprising to find a term that is assumed benign being so roundly misperceived. But if by being moderate we mean believing in freedom of expression and an acceptance of equality in gender and sexuality, it is by no means certain that the majority of Muslims are moderate, as the word is commonly used. Being moderate has to do with your mindset and not your religiosity. The implication in the term “moderate Muslim” is someone who is not especially devout. But being devout is not antithetical to being moderate. That is why it is so important to make a distinction between being moderate, conservative and religious.
It is not that Islam has not produced great thinkers from the ranks of the Ulema. It is not paradoxical that most leading modernist scholars are products of Islamic seminaries and not elite western institutions. It is true that there are several hardliners within the Ulemic ranks who have impeded and constrained the course of the reformist debate .But it is these hardliners who have also checked the tide of wild impulses, bordering around heresy, of intemperate scholars whose sacrilegious hyperbole is not an outlet for any erudition or creativity but a free reign for their toxic minds.
We can no longer afford to turn Islam into an arena for fruitless debates where the mountain goes into labour and finally produces just a mouse. There have been brave liberalists who started precocious but well intentioned critics of the polemics of the ulema, but ended up as pawns of western scholarship. We cannot allow pseudo scholars masquerading as saviours of Islam to keep stoking the fires of intemperance.
Radical thinking can be a ghastly and hazardous enterprise and lead the society into a moral abyss unless certain fundamental caveats are imposed. . New contours have to be charted out within a tightly disciplined Islamic framework. The traditional edifice of rigidly regulated analyses has not been built on quicksand; it has been the result of centuries of labour of highly committed and pious scholars, the by-products of whose works have permeated western scholarship.
Reform is an unruly horse that can go berserk unless it is properly saddled. In several societies it is the hardliners that have served as vigilantes and sentinels of their faith. Their resistance helps in winnowing the weaker strands in the process of formulation of new trajectories of thought and discourse. The unruly forces can acquire Kafkaesque proportions and demonize the entire discourse. Remember, Akbar is considered a great liberal king .But also remember, he was actually trying to subvert Islam by reinventing the faith .It was Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī, the great mystic and theologian, who was largely responsible for the reassertion and revival in India of orthodox Sunnite Islam as a reaction against the syncretistic religious tendencies prevalent of the time, that were threatening to usurp authentic Islam. .Persecuted in his times, he is today revered as a saint and saviour of Islam. Darah Shikoh was similarly a great liberal of his times but don’t we know that some of his writings were truly blasphemous .Both Akbar and Dara Shikoh were truly secular individuals with catholic minds but their creative output eroded some of Islam’s most cherished values and traditions.
Hardliners have their own unique place in all discourses and their presence helps in reining unchecked and anarchic impulses. The most sagely advice for the marquee thinkers and promoters of new paradigms is: No matter who you are, how experienced you are, and how knowledgeable you think you are, always delay judgment. Give others the privilege to explain themselves. What you see may not be the reality. Never conclude for others. This is why we should never only focus on the surface and judges others without understanding them first.
We must remember that traditional scholarship has emerged out of the labours of scholars who lived a life of hermits over several decades hibernating away from the mart of the daily economic and social strife. Pontification may be easy but we must make sure that we are not blurring the wafer thin line that demarcates faith and heresy. Islamic scholarship is today riddled with too many puzzlements and it is still in fluid state primarily because the traditionalists are not able to grapple with the perplexing tools in the arsenal of western critics.
The process of reformation has to be gradual; it cannot be seismic and convulsive, as most radicalists tend to believe. Sadly several Islamic reform movements have been driven by ulterior motives and hence protagonists of all such initiatives should appreciate the apprehensions and misgivings of the Ulema. Imam Ghazali is on record saying that once he opened the doors of doubts he could not close them .It was his firm resolve not to allow these doubts to tinker with his faith that sealed his dilemma .Endowed as we are with limited vision and cognitive abilities, we must realize that we cannot keep continually keeping the doors of doubts open; lest Satan will keep walking in.
It is unfair to tar the entire Ulemic community with the same brush of obscurantism .if there are regressive elements among the Ulema there also heretical minds among the modernists .Modernists cannot usurp the umpireship of the game .We need a level playing field where both the Ulemic and libertarian fraternities embrace each other. There are several strands in the traditionalist thought that bristle with flashes of liberalism and there is no reason that this greening effect will grow fast. Ulemic thought is no longer monochromatic; hybridization is fast catching up .We all know that in the Ulemic globe there are several islands of liberalism which are slowly getting bridged.
The interaction between the western and Islamic thought is not too old and it will be very premature to set a gold standard. By taking any radical stand we cannot easily rubbish a tradition of scholarship built through centuries of perseverance and assiduity by highly eminent men many of whom were polymaths. Much of western scholarship of today owes a great deal to the works of the likes of Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun.
Despite being an intellectual colossus, Ibn Rush acknowledged about his work: “God knows every single letter, and perhaps God will accept my excuse and forgive my stumbling in His bounty, generosity, munificence and excellence –there is no God but He!”
Many scholars are strong proponents of Ijtihad, the process of arriving at new interpretations of Islamic law through critical reasoning, rather than blindly following the views of past scholars. In the early centuries of Islam, the process of Ijtihad was an important contributor to the shaping of Islamic law.
Ijtihad was a vibrant legal process until the end of the tenth century, by which point many doctrines were settled by jurists representing the various schools of law. Around this time, influential orthodox Sunni Ulema (Muslim clergy with several years of training) began to argue against the process of independent reasoning, claiming that it could distort Islam. They instead advocated for a literal reading of religious texts. Reformers resisted, warning that a rigid interpretation of Shariah can be profoundly unhelpful in answering contemporary questions. But over the centuries, the literalists gained ground, leading to closiure of the gates of Ijtihad.
Muslim society is ridden with entrenched sectarianism with a diversity o hues and stripes: Sunni, Shiite, Barelvi, Deobandi, Ahmadi, and Mahdi Muslims – all of whom consider each other Kafirs (non-Muslims)? Most of the leading lights of these sects lack familiarity with complex field of Islamic political history and hence do not have the tools for grappling the modern challenges with are confronting Islam
For an idea to become legitimate its foundations must stand on all four legs - reason, tradition truth and belief. Liberals must continue to seek accommodation with them as they have done n the past. Plural societies, though, can be built by interrogating our long cherished traditions and withstanding the winds of either heresy or obscurantism .Religiosity is good as long as it does not retard the organic evolution of a thought and belief system. Both the traditionalists and modernists must enlarge the prism through which they view each other; this will create accommodation for both while at the time nurturing their respective constituencies. The world is now too complex, too interconnected, too globalised to be divided into ‘black’ and ‘white’: ’the abode of Islam’ and ‘the abode of unbelief’. The overall message is: break the monolith wherever it comes from. The fundamentalists must realize that their blind literalism could lead them to follow the letter of the law, but betray the intents of foundational texts. The future of freedom in the Islamic civilization lies the unique insights that modern discourses have provided -- that the Shari’ah was made for man, and not man for the Shari’ah. Luckily, the sources that will help nurture that insight are more abundant in Islamic theology and jurisprudence than what is often thought.
Today, an austere form of Islam (Wahhabism) married to a politicized Islam (Islamism) is wreaking havoc and its underlying principles are scriptural rigidity, bigotry, intolerance and violence. Never mind the battle between the Muslim and the infidel. The real battle, he implies, is between the Muslim moderates and the hardliners.
For Muslims, it is a good time to pause, to reflect, and to attempt to re-locate the main features of, to re-discover, Islam. God says in the Qur’an that a people’s condition will not be changed until they change what is in themselves (Q13:11). Muslim has free will and the power to rebel and surrender. Thus, he or she is responsible and the maker of his or her own image. “Every soul is held in pledge for what he earns.” (Q74:38) “And the human being shall have nothing but what he strives for.” (Q53:30) We need to be earnest in our efforts to let the path be enlightened.
Alfaz-o-Maani Mein Tafawat Nahin Lekin
Mullah Ki Azan Aur, Mujahid Ki Azan Aur
Parwaz Hai Dono Ki Issi Aik Faza Mein
Kargas Ka Jahan Aur Hai, Shaheen Ka Jahan Aur
(There is not a speck of difference in words and meanings
Bu the clarion call of a muezzin and Mujahid are poles apart
The vulture and falcon soar in the same skies
But the world of falcon and vulture are far different)
-Iqbal
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Moin Qazi is the author of the bestselling book, Village Diary of a Heretic Banker .He has worked in the development finance sector for almost four decades
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