from Ebrahim Moosa's "The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam" 2

Modern Muslim thinkers are not only challenged to be innovative, but they are also simultaneously required to engage with tradition. And yet, the content of tradition is possibly one of the most complex and contentious issues contemporary Muslims face. In the past two hundred years, tradition has been subject to an extraordinary assault both from within Muslim societies as well as from outside. The advent of colonization bought yet another tradition, namely modernity, into a more forceful encounter with Muslim tradition.

On the one hand, there are the pre-modern or traditionalist/"orthodox" accounts of tradition.

[footnote: My use of the term "Orthodoxy" must be distinguished from other uses of this term. I use it the way Talal Asad employs it, in which orthodoxy is not merely a set of opinions but a relationship of power, where this power is used to exclude, correct, and undermine. In short, orthodoxy is a discursive practice. See Talal Asad, "The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam," (Washington: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University Occasional Papers Series, 1986), pp.15-16.]

On the other hand, staunch advocates of Enlightenment rationality within Muslim societies not only challenge the idea of the pre-modern tradition or tradition itself, but propose a version of modernity as a mode of living and thinking for Muslim societies. The poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal was extremely perceptive in understanding the challenge with which the modern Muslim intellectual has to grapple. "The task before the modern Muslim is therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past...The only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us."

[footnote: Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1934; reprinted, Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1960), 97.]

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