from Ebrahim Moosa's "The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam" 5

You might be getting the idea that I really, really like this article.. :)

How do we both acknowledge the debt we owe to our intellectual predecessors and at the same time also recognize that they are products of their time just as we too are products of our time? To simultaneously acknowledge and respectfully disagree requires humility. The British historian E.P. Thompson offers sobering advise. When reviewing the past, we moderns have a tendency to gravitate towards elitism and vanguardism, especially when our practical experiences do not live up to theoretical hopes we thought the past could offer.

[footnote: Sumit Sarkar, "The Relevance of E.P. Thompson," in Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53.]

Often we may incline to judge the people and the times of the past rather harshly when they do not live up to our expectations. This is what Thompson in his justly famous and endlessly quoted phrase calls that "enormous condescension of posterity" to dismiss all movements and ideas that have not made the grade by today's standards of ideology of achievement.

[footnote: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 12.]

For people who wish to build and innovate in tradition such condescension will be unhelpful, if not serve as an obstacle to any kind of progress.

Another useful approach is offered by the prodigious belletrist (adib) and rational thinker 'Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz (d. 255/868). Jahiz shows complete awareness of the doubt debt of the Muslim community, both to the hereditary intellectual tradition, as well as to the tradition in the making: the ongoing and unfolding knowledge-making (discursive) tradition. Yet, he notes that one's attitudes towards the earliest fathers of the tradition should not be marked by a stultifying reverence, but that it should rather be similar to one's stance towards posterity. "For surely we inherited more edificatory admonition ('ibra)," observes Jahiz, "than our predecessors ever found; just as posterity will acquire an even larger amount of edificatory admonitions that we did."

[footnote: Abu 'Uthman 'Amr b. Bahr b. Mahbub al-Basri, "Kitab al-Futya," in Rasa'il al-Jahiz, ed. Muhammad Basil 'Uyun al-Sud, 2 vols (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyya, 2000), 1:223.]

Jahiz implies that by means of an unending and continuous process of accumulation, each later generation will have an advantage over its predecessors because they will have a larger body of knowledge at their disposal from which they can derive meaningful insights. His social Darwinism, aside, Jahiz does open the door for a continuous revision and engagement with the legacy of the past.

-pg. 113 of Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism

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