Islam in Crisis (Part2)

I sent you among others an e-mail message suggesting what I think is wrong with Islam today. The first response to this note has come. It is from my barrister nephew in Bombay. He phoned me with positive feedback - a sign that the younger generation of Muslims are beginning to introspect. Which was precisely my intent.

My nephew’s response emboldens me to put out the following note as supplement to my thesis. I may be right or wrong about this, but the premiss I started my 1992 research work on Islam with, was the question of the authority Muslims attach to their scripture. Call this a deviation of the pure teachings of the Quran, as Prof Mark Lilla did in his NYT article from which I quoted copiously in Part One of this article.

That may well be the case. But I have long been convinced that for an Islamic Reformation to happen, one must start by asking a hitherto unasked question, namely, about the nature and character of the Quran as scripture.

The Quran is a different kind of scripture from any known today. It is made up of 6,000 verses (same length as the Bible) which embody the direct oral Revelations received by the Prophet from ‘on high’. These messages of Allah were either taken down or, in the best tradition of Arabic, memorized by his disciples. No doubt has thus ever been raised about the full integrity of its text. Even so harsh a critic of Islam as William Muir conceded as much. And that was in the 19th century when competition between Christianity and Islam to ‘save pagan souls’ was at its most intense.

However, it isnt the purity of the text that I am referring to. The strange thing about the Quran is that it is a mixed text, made up of four different kinds of elements - what I have characterized for my research purposes as: narrations, admonitions, prescriptions, and descriptions of Allah and his realm including references to his power, his majesty, his mercy and to vivid accounts of the rewards and punishments that await good and evil humans on the Day of Reckoning.

Asghar Ali Engineer, a shia Indian scholar and reform activist offers a more comprehensive typology in one of his recent pamphlets. So as to give you a more exact idea of the contents of the Quran, I reproduce this in paraphrase below:

Quranic verses, he notes, are of the following five types: a) verses pertaining to ‘ibadaat’ (religious devotions) which include ‘salah’ (prayer), ‘saum’ (fasting), ‘haj’ (pilgrimage), ‘zakah’ (charity) and similar other requirements of the faith; b) verses pertaining to ‘muamalaat’ (worldly affairs) which include such topics as marriage, divorce, inheritance, evidence in court proceedings, business deals, contract, property, agriculture and so on; c) verses pertaining to metaphysical beliefs like the oneness of God, day of judgement, hell and heaven, and angels; d) verses pertaining to the ethical conduct of individuals; and e) verses which seek to inculcate moral values like justice, equality and truthfulness among them.

The Quran includes, besides legislative prescriptions and ethical guidelines on social issues, brief narrative accounts of earlier Semitic prophets (somewhat similar to Bible stories) as well as a couple of brief references to some family problems that arose during the Prophet’s life in which Allah intervened to save his from embarrassment.

An oft-noted example of this is the case of Abu Lahab. He Muhammad’s nasty uncle-guardian after the death of his good one, Abu Talib, subjecting the Prophet during the early years of prophethood in Mecca to petty harassments. The narration of this and other similar personal incidents was one among other arguments used by Mutazilite theologians (whom I referred to in my last note) to urge that the Quran is a historically specific scripture, ‘created in time’ as they put it - and not an eternal text ‘good and valid for all times and places’ which is what our ulema would like us to believe.

It is interesting to note that the Mutazilites never once questioned the divine origin of the Quranic revelations, as I briefly mentioned in my last note. They believed, as do most Muslims today, that the Quran is literally the word of God. Influenced no doubt by the reason factor imported from their reading of Greek philosophy, the Mutazilites, however, wanted Muslims to see the Quran as time- and space-bound scripture, and not as textually rigid and immutable as to lend itself to literal interpretation.

The Quran, again it is worth noting, is a very detailed scripture in some respects. Some of its legal and social prescriptions - e.g. on a woman’s half-equal status to man’s, the punishment of cutting off of hands for common crimes like theft - are, I’m sure you will agree, totally out of sync with modern progressive values of our day. And speaking for myself, I do not believe you can get around this difficulty without treating the Quran as the Mutazilites in the 8th/9th centuries suggested we do. Remember, while this sensitive question was being debated between the Mutazilites and their rival theologians of the Asharite school, no objection was raised to suggest that this was apostasy, heresy or blasphemy.

Unfortunately, the Asharite doctrine of ‘the uncreated (or eternal) Quran’ came to be accepted as the established doctrine of Sunni Islam which constitutes some 85-90 percent of the Islamic world today. (The theological problems of the minority Shia sect poses a different kind of problem, requiring separate treatment).

Meanwhile, it may be as well to add here that there are a couple of via media solutions between my radical one on the Quran’s status and the ulema view that it is scripture ‘good and valid for all times and places’. One of these was written dealt with in an article published in the Bombay weekly, the EPW, in the early 1990s by an Indian professor of philosophy at Columbia University, Aqueel Bilgrami.

His suggestion was to separate those verses of the Quran verses that were revealed to Muhammad during his first decade of prophethood in Mecca from those revealed during his second and last decade in Medina. The first kind tend to deal predominantly with cosmic and spiritual truths because at this time Muhammad was purely a prophet bearing the message of strict monotheism to the people of Arabia. The latterday Medinan verses comprise, on the other hand, many provisions on worldly and mundane matters which was natural because by then Muhammad, besides being prophet, had become political head of the world’s first Islamic community and was developing his radical new ideology for the world.

Another via media solution for the problem of the Quran was suggested by the eminent Islamicist, Fazlur Rahman, in his classic book, Islam. Rahman, remember, was chased out by the conservative ulema in Pakistan in the 1960s after he had made a valuable contribution (as director of the Islamic Research Institute under President Ayub’s regime) to the modernization of Islam while remaining strictly within the framework of its traditions. After the Pakistani agitation, he went into self-exile, settling in the US where he was distinguished professor of Islamic thought at Chicago University until his death in 1988.

In summing up Rahman’s suggestion for Quranic reform, I cannot do better than reproduce this somewhat lengthy double quote from a recent 2-volume study by the Canadian scholar Andrew Rippin, an Islam-friendly professor of religious studies at Calgary University:

"Rahman was a fervent Modernist. In approaching the text of the Quran, he wished to differentiate legal regulations from moral regulations, the former being contingent, the latter non-contingent. Legal rulings must be considered binding in a moral sense even if not in their literal wording. Much of the law of classical Islam has been wrongly formulated because the jurists ignored the moral ideal behind the text and the words were read as literal legal enactments, according to this view. The Quranic acceptance of slavery - a form of ownership of people which has fallen into disrepute under the impact of modernity - is treated in the following way by Rahman".

Rippin follows up this intro to Rahman and his approach with this excerpt from Rahman’s book ‘Islam’. These are Rahman’s own words:

"As an immediate solution, the Quran accepts the institution of slavery on the legal plane. No alternative was possible since slavery was ingrained in the structure of society, and its overnight wholesale liquidation would have created problems which it would have been absolutely impossible to solve, and only a dreamer could have issued such a visionary statement. But at the same time every legal and moral effort was made to free the slaves and create a milieu where slavery ought to disappear ... Here again we are confronted by a situation where the clear logic of the Quranic attitude was not worked out in actual history by Muslims ...

"These examples [also including women and wine], therefore make it abundantly clear that whereas the spirit of the Quranic legislation exhibits an obvious direction towards the progressive embodiment of the fundamental human values of freedom and responsibility in fresh legislation, nevertheless the actual legislation of the Quran had partly to accept the then existing society as a term of reference. This clearly means that the actual legislation of the Quran cannot have been meant to be literally eternal by the Quran itself." (emphasis mine).

I need add nothing more except to say that, even after the tortuously favourable gloss that Rahman puts on the interpretation of the Quran, he is obliged to make a distinction between its moral and legislative provisions and to suggest that whereas the former are binding, the latter must be read in their spirit, not as literal truths.