Religions in the Modern World by Woodhead Linda Partridge Christopher Kawanami Hiroko

Author:Woodhead, Linda, Partridge, Christopher, Kawanami, Hiroko
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-12-19T11:16:26+00:00

Figure 8.5 Central Mosque, London

The modernist agenda set out two interrelated goals. The first was to provide a way forward out of Muslims’ current spiritual malaise and material decadence by demonstrating the compatibility of Islam with the values of the modern world. The second was to counter the Western perception of Islam as destructive and irrelevant to the modern world, and to challenge assertions like that of Lord Cromer, onetime governor of Egypt, that ‘Islam reformed is no longer Islam’.

Traditionally, the state of contemporary life had been judged on the basis of norms which were, in theory, ultimately grounded in the Qur’an and sunna. Modernists, on the other hand, approached the Qur’an and sunna from the rational norms of nineteenth-century natural science. Like their eighteenth-century predecessors, modernists argued that fulfilment of their task entailed returning to Islam’s original sources. But where the revivalists had tended to read the sacred texts in a literal fashion, modernists sought to capture their essential spirit and to distinguish a universal, immutable core from features deemed valid only for a particular time or place.

The modernist position implicitly involved a reassessment of the authority of the past. Like their eighteenth-century predecessors, they rejected taqlid (the authority of the medieval law schools), advocated ijtihad (independent rethinking) and hadith-based reform. Modernists, however, were far more radical in their reassessment of the hadith and sunna. Ahmad Khan expressed his view of Islam in the following revealing aphorism: ‘the Qur’an is the Word of God, nature is the Work of God’. No modernist ever questioned the fundamental precept of Islam that the Qur’an was the eternal word of God. It provided the principles by which the individual and society were governed just as nature followed its own laws also created by God. From here Ahmad Khan was led to deny miracles as they contravened God’s natural and immutable order. The Qur’an, he argued, did not support the view that some events could violate the laws of nature. Therefore, incidents recorded in the Qur’an which traditionally had been accepted as miraculous needed to be rationally reinterpreted: Moses’s escape across the Red Sea (Q 26:63) by smiting the waters with his staff meant simply he had found a fordable path across it at low tide. Abduh fully upheld the natural order of cause and effect but argued more cautiously that miracles could not rationally be demonstrated to be impossible.

The nature of the Traditions (hadith) was quite another matter. Ahmad Khan questioned and finally rejected the supposed authenticity of almost the whole corpus. He dismissed the classical methods of hadith criticism and argued for new, rational methods of assessment, allowing only a handful of Traditions dealing with spiritual matters as relevant and binding on contemporary Muslims. For his part, Abduh expressed a slightly more cautious scepticism toward the Traditions but did open the way for personal judgement to determine which Traditions to accept or reject. Significantly, their positions meant that rather than interpreting the Qur’an in the light of Traditions, revelation could be understood solely on its own terms.

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