Passion For Islam by Caryle Murphy

Author:Caryle Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster;
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Long Journey Just Begun

Some have compared this period of intellectual ferment in Islam to the Protestant Reformation in Christianity. The comparison is inexact. Europe’s sixteenth-century Christendom was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, a hierarchical, centralized institution exercising both spiritual and political power. Islam has no such institution. There are, however, similarities in the two periods.

Just as ecclesiastical abuses and corruption impelled Martin Luther to nail his 95 Theses to Wittenberg’s cathedral door, disillusionment with government and religious authorities in the Middle East is helping fuel a reexamination of Islam there. Egyptians are still vexed by questions like those that once plagued Abduh: If we possess the “final, perfect revelation” in Islam, why do we depend on Western foreign aid? Why did we need American military forces to push Iraq out of Kuwait? Why don’t our universities produce cutting-edge scientific research? Why am I poor? Why am I tortured in prison?

Questions like these have driven many Muslims into Political Islam. But they also are kindling wood for ijtihad and the impetus for new thinking in Islam. 18

The theological questioning that is percolating through Islam today is also likely to have long-term consequences for the Muslim world, just as the Protestant Reformation did for the West. As Muslims parse their Islamic heritage for its essential, universal truths in order to understand the meaning of God’s revelation for modern times, they are resurrecting something they lost when the gates of ijtihad closed down. They are reviving what one Muslim author described as “the continuous interpretative relationship” with their sacred scripture. 19

Restoring that “interpretive relationship” is a key to many doors. Individuals who revitalize their faith through ijtihad unlock their own spiritual powers and take responsibility for their lives. When this occurs on a large scale, new political and cultural attitudes emerge and intellectual creativity blossoms. These long-term effects are why the current devotion to ijtihad is likely to be the most important and enduring aspect of Islam’s contemporary revival.

But Muslims are only at the beginning of their latest communal journey. Decades of ijtihad lie ahead before “modern-friendly” ijtihad achieves critical mass. Along the way, there is likely to be messiness, experimentation, and discombobulations. Some Muslims will distort the process of ijtihad, producing warped versions of their faith for personal and political ends. Osama Bin Laden comes to mind. And in many Muslim countries, including Egypt, the winds of orthodoxy still blow strong. Resistance to new thinking in Islam comes from several quarters. Authoritarian governments restrict public debate and tradition-bound religious establishments, allied to the state, reject new interpretations of Islamic scriptures. Political opportunists who prefer religious slogans to genuine reform are another barrier. As are orthodox Islamists who read the Qur’an in a literal way and maintain that theirs is the “correct” version of Islam and all others heretical. Finally, extremists threaten new thinkers in Islam with violence.

These conservative forces are likely to remain powerful for some time to come. And in a world shaken by terrorism in the name of

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