Islam Needs Renewal and Not a Spring Of Change: We Need To Understand Every Religion from Its Primary Scriptures and Not From Secondary Sources
By
Moin Qazi, New Age Islam
28
September 2022
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
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In recent
years, clichéd calls for reform of Islam, have intensified. “We need a Muslim
reformation.” “Islam needs reformation from within.” Such headlines keep
flashing in the media. Yet if Muslims are true to themselves and their
scriptures, Islam doesn’t need a reformation, but Muslims need to reform their minds,
and their interpretations of Islam, which is not the same as that of others who
have imported many alien ideas and denuded the message of this priest that has
distorted the original teachings and resulted in the decline and, some may even
say, the possible eclipse of the golden age of Islam.
The vision
of some reformers asks Muslims to abandon fourteen hundred years of accepted
dogma in favour of a radical and demanding new methodology that would set them
free from the burdens of traditional jurisprudence. An enormous industry of
reform-minded interpreters has arisen in recent years to explain them,
contextualize them, downplay them, or simply ignore them, often quoting the
well-known verse that says there is “no compulsion in religion.”
We cannot
judge the era of the founding of Islam by the values of our own time, and
indeed, what we understand as the emancipation of women was never really
considered essential by any of the great monotheistic religions. It was Islam
that highlighted and showed the world the remarkable potential of women and the
rights they deserve as equal partners to men.
A more
pronounced and nuanced analysis would show that the problem is less religion
itself than the way it has been interpreted by commentators. The Qur’an has
multiple teachings with many meanings and Muslims have always been free to
comment on them according to circumstances. The texts have been interpreted
over centuries and used to promote openness, freedom, forgiveness, and
intellectual revival.
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.
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.
Islam
received the unique stamp of Prophet Mohammed’s success. Unlike earlier
prophets, Prophet Muhammad lived for some years as the head of a state of his
own creation and to which he gave laws. He shaped laws pertaining to marriage,
, inheritance, divorce and similar matters, aiming at the reform of generally
recognized customs. He restricted the number of wives a man might have to
four—imposed an almost impossible fulfilment of a condition that equality be
maintained among them. Women had no rights of inheritance; the new code granted
them the right to half of men's share. Slavery was then widespread; Islam
outlawed it except for captives taken in war, and for these it introduced
reforms and ways regaining freedom. Wine-drinking was gradually controlled and
usury forbidden. The caste system, which was still in vogue, was abolished, as
was the cruel practice of burying unwanted female babies alive.
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Read: Islam and Modernity: The Compatibility Question
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The first learned jurists in the period after
the spread of Islam followed his lead, emphasizing the spirit rather than the
letter of the law. But centuries witnessed a legalistic hardening of the
arteries —an unquestioning acceptance of authority became the rule and customs
and conventions were frozen to the point where little social change or progress
was possible.
We need to
understand every religion from its primary scriptures and not from secondary
sources, which are unfortunately prone to so many interpretations which may be
erroneous or deceptive and are usually representative of a particular school of
thought. The only lasting solution will be to liberate society from manmade
religion and return to the pristine message of the scriptures. These scriptures
had a simple, straightforward and plain-speaking message for all humanity,
which got distorted at the hands of the modern tools of so-called intellectual
sophistry and sterile polemics. We need to sanitize not just our bodies and our
environment, but also our minds and intellect.
The great
modern reformist thinker Fazlur Rahman firmly believed that one of the primary
purposes of the Qur’ān was to create a society based on justice. He
saw the Prophet Muḥammad as a social reformist who sought to empower the poor, the weak,
and the vulnerable. He viewed the Qur’ān as a source from which ethical
principles could be derived rather than a book of laws.
He played
the role of father, husband, chief, warrior, friend and Prophet. His respect
for learning, tolerance of others, and generosity of spirit, concern for the
weak, gentle piety and desire for a better, cleaner world would constitute the
main elements of the Muslim ideal. For Muslims, the life of the Prophet is the
triumph of hope over despair and light over darkness. For instance, Rahman
argues that the practice of family law in Islamic history had not accorded
females the equal rights to which they appear to be entitled based on the Prophet’s
example and teachings of the Qur’ān.
Earlier
attempts were made to create new ideologies promising rejuvenation. Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdouh led attempts to make Islam more legible
by calling for the adaptation of Muslim life to the West’s views on economic
and political modernity. They never called themselves Salafists (for them, it
was about returning to the original sources to find compatibility with these
new challenges).
Fazlur
Rahman writes in his book Islam and Modernity: “A historical critique of
theological developments in Islam is the first step toward a reconstruction of
Islamic theology. This critique should reveal the extent of the dislocation
between the world view of the Qur’an and various schools of theological
speculation in Islam and point the way toward a new theology.” This is a very
important suggestion, which should have been considered very seriously and it
would have benefited the Islamic world immensely. For him, it was the
intellectual ossification and replacement of scholarship based on original
thought by one based on commentaries and super-commentaries, the closing of the
gate of ijtihad, and basing of the Islamic method solely on taqlid (blind
imitation) which led to the decline.
Fazlur
Rahman’s goal was to reassess the Islamic intellectual tradition and provide a
way forward for Muslims. In his view, a re-examination of Islamic methodology
in the light of the Qur’an itself was a pre-requisite for any reform in Islamic
thought.
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Rahman says,
“Muslim scholars have never attempted ethics of the Qur’an, systematically or
otherwise. Yet no one who has done any careful study of the Qur’an can fail to
be impressed by its ethical fervour. Its ethics, indeed, is its essence and is
also the necessary link between theology and law. The Qur’an indeed tends to
concretise the ethical, clothe the general in a particular paradigm, and
translate the ethical into legal or quasi-legal commands. But it is precisely
the sign of its moral fervour that is not content only with generalizable
ethical propositions but is keen on translating them into actual paradigms.
However, the Qur’an always explicates the objectives or principles that are the
essence of its laws.”
At the same
time, there needs to be abundant caution. 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 has helped in winnowing the weaker strands in the process of
formulation of new trajectories of thought and discourse. The bigoted and
intolerant forces can acquire aggressive postures to suit their distorted
understanding and ideological positions
Akbar is considered a great liberal king. However, we must not forget
that he made extraordinary efforts to subvert Islam by attempting to reinvent
the faith.
It was
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindī, the great mystic and theologian, who was largely
responsible for the reassertion and revival of orthodox Sunnite Islam as a reaction
against the syncretistic tendencies promoted by Akbar. It was a serious attempt
to dilute Islam and reinterpret its original philosophy. Persecuted for his
outspokenness and straightforwardness, he is today, revered as a saint and
saviour of Islam. Similarly, Darah Shikoh was not just a great liberalist of
his times but was charged with blasphemy by clerics. Both Akbar and Dara Shikoh
were secular individuals, but their creative efforts had much to do with power
and politics, and nothing by way of communal harmony and interfaith cordiality
eroded some of Islam's most cherished values and traditions.
Hardliners
have their unique place in all discourses and their presence helps in reining
unchecked and anarchic impulses. 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
focus only on the surface and judge others without fully understanding their
perspective. This requires an enormous amount of tolerance.
All
scriptures are, above all, a spiritual and moral resource that, if they are
properly understood and internalized both in letter and spirit, provide the
reader with useful guidance through the complexities of modern life. It is the
nature of the human dialogue that finally culminates in the direction one is
seeking for his salvation. Human perversity, as well as ignorance, can turn
this overtly benevolent and benign exercise into intricate, complicated means
to divide people. Instead of divine consciousness and guidance being the moral
principles that bring people together, it becomes the embodiment of the most
irreducible differences. They should be seen as a training manual for human
nature. Submitting ourselves to their wisdom should mean testing and
interrogating all our ideas and experiences afresh in the light of the fresh
dose of thinking that is getting ingrained during the dialogue we must all teach
ourselves to read these divine and holy books liberated from the weight of
tradition and classical commentaries. The real wisdom that we can glean from
them is the one that ignites our spirituality when we constantly think outside
the box of our earthly concerns by keeping in mind the intersection of time and
timelessness
While
several reformist thinkers continued their creative work in the last two
centuries, it was the great poet Muhammad Iqbal who conceived a very coherent
and inspiring philosophy that crystallized around Islamic ideals. His Islam is
not the Islam of primitive punishments, the veil and bigoted mullahs, but the
Islam which provided a new light of thought and learning to the world, and of
heroic action and glorious deeds. He was devoted to the Prophet and believed in
his message. Iqbal regarded as ‘nullification’ the search for ‘inner meanings’
or ‘hidden meanings’ in either the code of Muhammad (peace be upon him) or in
his way of life, which he found not only satisfying but also convincing. He
blamed the Persian poets for confusing the message of Islam. As he put it, “The
Persian poets tried to undermine the way of Islam by a very roundabout, though
apparently heart–alluring, manner. They denounced every good thing of Islam and
made contemplation in a monastery the highest crusade in the way of God.”
Iqbal
preached action. He was a rebel against all the accretions that had gathered
around Islam as a result of the Hellenic and Persian influences and wanted to
cleanse it so that the world could, once again, witness the glory of Islam in
its pristine form. For the indolence and lethargy that had gripped the Islamic
fold, Iqbal blamed the Sufis who, with their Iranian background and Greek
ideas, had corrupted the religion of Muhammad (peace be upon him). As Iqbal
explains, “it is surprising that the whole poetry of Sufism in Islam was
produced in the period of political decline. The nation which exhausts its fund
of energy and power, as was the case with the Muslims after the Tartar invasions,
changes the outlook. The weakness becomes for it an object of beauty and
appreciation, and resignation from the world is a source of satisfaction.”
Iqbal’s
poems are a reflection of the pain and agony that he felt at the degeneration
of Islam. This feeling is patent in every couplet. Muslims are repeatedly asked
to go back to the early era of Islam when the spirit of Muhammad (peace be upon
him) goaded his followers to conquer half the world and brought enlightenment
to people of various regions and colours. While Iqbal retained his admiration
for the otherworldliness of Sufi mystics, he rejected their belief in the
transitoriness of the world and the unreality of life. He was nauseated by
western commercialism and acquisitiveness and he lamented the loss of the
Muslims’ empire and was saddened by the decadence of Islam.
A legacy
can be preserved only if it is honoured and respected by its custodians. We
must try to understand and delineate those attributes that aided the
personalities of yesteryears to attain those levels of glory. At the same time,
we have to examine the social and cultural factors that enabled them to use
their talents to their farthest value and harness their energies toward the
goals fruitfully. Some Muslim countries have seen the emergence of leading
politicians who have unfortunately not been able to live up to the ideals of
the early women and have done great damage to the reputation of an Islamic
female.
Islam is at crossroads today and Muslims are
poised at a critical juncture in their history. The stagnation in Islamic
thought is patent in the couplets of Muhammad Iqbal:
You are one people, you share in common your weal and woe.
You have one faith, one creed and to one Prophet Allegiance owe.
You have one sacred Ka’aba, one God and one holy book, the Qur’an.
Was it so difficult to unite in one community every single Musalman?
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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
URL: https://newageislam.com/ijtihad-rethinking-islam/religion-scriptures-secondary-sources/d/128053
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