Rethinking Islam

[Haddad]

Originally posted by Nur:

until we combine the two, to fully grassp allah's intentions in the revelations, we will continue to be bystanders in the march of life and our choices will be confined bewteen being monks or secularists.

Very well put.

[S.O.S]

Dear brothers and sisters,

It is not my intention to seriously comment on everything Professor Ziauddin sardar has to say, because I have neither the academic skills and in depth knowledge of the subject matter to do so, nor the time and energy needed to address all his empty rhetoric point by point. However, my intention is to maintain some integrity on SOL by letting no one who spreads falsehoods escape unchallenged, whoever that person may be. As a simple layman and a second-generation city dweller from a “reer miyyi†background, I take the freedom to put forth to you some of my reservations against this man. And by doing so, I hope to demonstrate that everyone can and should point out argumentative flaws of individuals who see everything Islam stands for as a burden rather than blessing.

 

Another reason that I’m posting on this thread is that I might be one of the few in this forum who live in the UK, and has suffered from the exposure to this man’s recycled ideas through the BBC, his books and newspaper columns. Initially I wanted to write about this man’s ideas and personal agenda, but since his autobiography is not the subject of this discussion, I’ll first comment on the article posted in this thread before I put to you my take on the man’s ideas.

 

To begin with, all of you who are familiar with Mr Sardar and his writings will immediately get the picture of what this article is all about. Mr Sardar is obsessed with and has been fixated on what he calls “metaphysical catastrophes†for a while now, and at times these catastrophes may number one, two, or as in this case three. Set aside the fancy name-package and we have the old uniform of the orientalist critique of the Shareecah. He formulated them as (1) the elevation of the shareecah to the level of devine, (2) the removal of agency from the believers and (3) the equation of Islam with the state. In this article he attributes these so called metaphysical catastrophes to the closure of “the gates of ijtihadâ€, but he often comes to conclusions before he even makes the case. Also in the remaining paragraphs, he fails to backup his claims with any substantial facts after he tries to elaborate his metaphysical catastrophes by using baseless definitions and by historically misrepresenting the shareecah.

 

I’ll first briefly comment on his three main arguments, and then the rest of his half-truths from the general content of the article. So I hope that SOL nomads will recognise that his case for ijtihad is on lose screws, ones the arguments used to underpin that case are shown to be fallacies.

 

Argument 1: (the elevation of the shareecah to the level of devine)

 

When he says “there is nothing divine about the shareecah†and adds at the same time that “the only thing that can legitimately be described as divine in Islam is the Quráanâ€, very conveniently ignores their relationship, as the Quráan is the first and foremost source of shareecah. In that case, can it be justified to claim “there is nothing divine about the shareecahâ€?

 

What about that the Sunnah of our prophet (peace be upon him) is not divine? Why is he ignoring the fact that Allah tells us in His (admitted by himself) Divine Quráan, that the words of His Prophet are divinely inspired (53:3)? That the Sunnah as a source of shareecah with regards to its rulings in Xalaal and Xaraam are on the same footing as the Quráan?

 

When he states that “the shareecah is a human construction; an attempt to understand the divine will in a particular contextâ€, he is either confused himself or he is out to mislead others with his failure to distinguish Shareecah and Usuuslul-Fiqh in the technical sense, even then, it remains a misleading statement as it’s not clear what is meant be “human constructionâ€. That is just the first four lines of the paragraph dealing with his first argument, so imagine how I would bore you to death if I attempted to comment on every sentence.

 

Argument 2: (the removal of agency from the believers and)

 

What the author is saying in this argument is that, if the shareecah is divine, which it is, then believers have no agency or a tool in which they can employ and exploit as they see fit according to their wishes. He is in other words seeking to give sovereignty to the people over the Commend of Allah and His divinely ordained system. He goes on further to say “since The Law is a priori given people themselves have nothing to do except to follow it.†However, as a muslim, once you surrender your will to that of Allah Almighty, you have by definition accepted the Sovereignty and the supreme controlling power of Allah over society, and not vice versa! If Mr. Sardar really thinks that either the presence or absence of ijtihad makes any difference to the stated subservience of one or the other, then he needs to go back to the real meaning of Islam.

 

His true intentions can be glimpsed when he purposively expresses the view that “if every thing is a priori given, in the shape of a divine shareecah, then Islam is reduced to a totalistic ideologyâ€. That statement harbours the following three anti-Islamic messages: 1) reject Islam, because everything priori given, 2) reject Islam, because the shareecah is divine and 3) reject Islam, because it’s totalistic ideology. He also gets little bet carried away with his mocking of Islamic States as far as declaring them to be based on ridiculous assumptions (not distinguishing present and past, existent and not existent, practical and theoretical).

 

Argument 3: (the equation of Islam with the state)

 

After opposing the shareecah as divine guidance based upon primary divine sources, in order to gain the free hand to subjugate the divine order to his wishful desires, now he is opposing all kind of Islamic State. I hope now you see and appreciate this man for the orientalist agent he is (forget about his smokescreen book) in what is nothing more than centuries old intellectual war to stop Islam, with the continuation of never changing focus area. The principal concept is always the same: To start with, the aim is to create doubts and confusions in the hearts and minds of Muslims by tactfully questioning the basic tenets of Islam in turn (Quráan and Sunnah, with regards to history, authenticity and interpretations), to create disagreements and give falsehoods a succeeding chance. Then uniformity of the Shareecah Law is undermined which leads to divisions, magnified by the positive feedback mechanisms from the questioning of the sources (Quráan and Sunnah) while at the same time, Muslims are generously fed with un-Islamic ideologies based on ethnic, tribal, nationalistic, linguistic and cultural chauvinisms. These efforts has been mostly successful in that they prevented and defused, either forcefully or tacitly, all attempts to create Islamic State or any form of unity within the Islamic world.

 

From general content of the article

 

I’ve described this piece as an empty rhetoric, because it only constitutes fragmented statements with no evidence to back it up. Even worse, for a reclaimed academic and a so called Islamic thinker, he totally fails to convincingly and coherently present his case, and on top of that, he tries to mislead people with his charged language. For example, he says “after the ‘gates of ijtihad’ were closed during the Abbasid era, ilm was increasingly reduced to religious knowledgeâ€. He expects us to buy that rather cheaply without bothering to explain the validity of that reasoning. If one field of cilm is restricted, shouldn’t the opposite happen and lead to other fields of cilm, which are unaffected prosper instead?

 

If I go on to the end of this article, I’ll become sick of the man, so I’ll skip all the way back to front and clarify with the situation of the scholars he desperately tries to associate himself with. First of all, Jamaluddin al-Afghani and his pupil Muhammad Abduhu, were sincere in their pan-Islamic movement to free the muslim world intellectually from an intellectual war that was being waged on Muslims from Africa to Asia. Also, they were looking for the creation of an Islamic State, which implemented the shareecah, and they understood it to be of divine in its originality, unlike our man here. Nevertheless, we can now look back in history and realise that their call for Modernism did more harm than good. This point needs clarification, as it may not be understandable to everyone how the Pan-Islamic Modernism movements was eventually hijacked by the Orientalists agents and lead to many disasters still evident today.

 

During the initial periods, these modernists were seen as extremists in their bid to face up with challenges facing Muslims in that crucial time. This formed obviously a danger to the western powers who understood very well the potential consequences of Islamic revivalism to their imperialist policies and struggle against Islam. These reforms thus, didn’t constitute an outright break with the past, rather it embraced to create a similar impulse as when Islamic light first started shining over the ages. The so called “gliding towards extremism†of the followers of Muhammad abduhu, who later rose to the position of Mufti, is well reported in Gibb’s Modern Trends in Islam.

 

However, soon after that the movements came under the secularising influence of Western trained Modernists. Initially they promoted reason and rationalism to break up with tradition, but later when they gathered momentum, they openly criticised Shareecah, which they alleged as being divine in origin, was incapable of development and adaptation to modern conditions, and thay even called the shareecah “the law of Islamic Churchâ€. Thus, unless separated from the state just as has been done in the West, no improvements whatsoever was possible (see Zagday, Modern Trends in Islamic Law, in Current Legal Problems).

 

Even Schacht concludes, “On the one hand, the modernist legislators are inclined to deny religious character of the central chapters of the sacred law; on the other, they are abt to use arbitrary and forced interpretations of the Koran and traditions whenever it suits their purpose. Materially, they are bold innovators who want to be modern at all costs; formally they try to avoid the semblance of interfering with the essential contents of the sacred law. Their ideals and their arguments came from the Wast, but they do not wish to reject the sacred law openly as Turkey has done†(Schacht, The Law, Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilication).

 

Watt concludes: “This is a constantly increasing group of men and women who have received Western education up to University level, and who may for short be called the ‘Westernizers’.†(Watt, Islam and the Integration of Society).

 

In short, the Modernists were a new Western breed of intellectual army who single-handedly defeated the Islamic revival Al-Afghani, Abduhu, Iqbal and many more great Muslim thinkers had in mind. Mr Sardar is undoubtedly part of that group of army, who unjustly tries to exploit a misleading link, between his corrupted views and that of men of honour. They even tried to associate themselves with Ibn Taymiyyah as the first representative of modern movements in history.

 

In unmasking these people, Professor S. M. Yusuf observed: “The talk of these people is full of inaccuracies, fabrications and stray quotations. They are not even ashamed of talking about Islam although they do not know a letter of Arabic. Some of them are lawyers who have studied Roman, English, French and Swiss laws, but have never studied Arabic, the Quran, or Prophet’s Traditions, and yet they talk about Islamic law in local and international meetings. Others are historians who have studied the history of the whole world but have never studied Islamic history, and yet they talk about the history of Islam and quote and quote secondary sources which do not help them in pronouncing the Arabic names correctly.†He correctly points out that those people “are the ones who refer to English translation of the Quráan, English translations of the Prophet’s traditions, and pick up information about Islam and Islamic law from English, French and other foreign language publications which are mostly produced by Western Orientalists whose animosity towards Islam has been proved beyond any doubt.â€

 

Conclusion

 

We have to be careful from these men who suffer from inferiority-complex, and have become apologetic when dealing with the Quráan and Sunnah. They look upon Islam as orphan whose sole hope for survival lies in “winning the patronage and the sheltering care of some dominant creedâ€. In their great disservice to Islam and their puzzle of hotch-potch political ideologies, they believe the only way to earn respect and honour in the eyes of their Western masters, is to prove that Islam resembles and is in agreement with contemporary ideologies.

 

The solutions/problems lies in the educational systems of the Muslim world! If anyone’s wish, who is present at this forum, is to seriously discuss the ways in which we can escape from this seemingly unending malaise, is to move that discussion to the Islamic Education thread started be brother Nur, which unfortunately didn’t get the magnitude and the attention it deserved.

WCWW

[Haddad]

Shams-ud-Din, yours was an elaborate & well written comment.

[Salafi_Online]

Shams-ud-Din, Akhee may Allah keep u smiling.

other then milking the dictionary, the poor old prof didnt say much.