Criticism of Fazlur Rahman's basics of the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam

• Main Author: Halilović Seid
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Center for Religious Sciences Kom, Belgrade 2017-01-01
• Series: Kom: Časopis za Religijske Nauke
• Subjects: reformism; modernism; Islam; Quran; revelation; Sharia; ijtihad; jurisprudence; history; tradition
• Online Access: https://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/2334-6396/2017/2334-63961703067H.pdf

Fazlur Rahman was a professor of Islamic Studies and Philosophy at prominent universities in England and America. He became the head of the Central Islamic Research Institute in Karachi a few years after the state of Pakistan was internationally recognized. At the request of the president of his homeland, he is actively committed to defining the religious strategies of the new state, which will be based on the cognitive principles of Islam and at the same time aligned with the changing needs of the modern world. Until the end of his life, and chiefly as a professor of the University of Chicago, Fazlur Rahman tirelessly explained that Muslims would not benefit from modernity until they established the correct model of understanding of the essence of religion in modern times. He believes that in traditional Islamic knowledge we cannot find adequate answers to the complex challenges of modern life and therefore proposes new basic guidelines for the interpretation of the Quran and Islam. Fazlur Rahman primarily stresses the importance of noticing the difference between the unchanging principles of Islam and historical Islam. In his view, all social teachings of the Quran in the form of Islamic regulations were established in the historical context of the needs of the first Muslim community, which means that these regulations are no longer credible today. Fazlur Rahman's model would practically evolve in the following manner: in the first step, we focus on history and analyze the historical contexts of the Quranic teachings, with the intention of recognizing and separating the general principles of the Quran. In the second step, the general principles thus obtained are aligned with the circumstances of the modern era with the help of modern social, political and economic sciences, and through this we come to formulate new social regulations of Islam. However, using the method of analyzing the contents of Fazlur Rahman's highly influential works, we will notice serious methodological weaknesses in his extreme reformist approach. His knowledge of the prominent theological heritage of the Muslims was obviously not vast enough, and he also did not try to exhaust all the possibilities of the rich instruments of the traditional Islamic methodology of jurisprudence. Our conclusion is that Fazlur Rahman's platform for the reconstruction of religious thought paves the way for the dominance of secularized Islam, despite the fact that Fazlur Rahman himself was most concerned of such a possibility.