Ebrahim Moosa quote on Innovation of Thought in Islam Today

Indeed, studying the Muslim classical authors who wrote on law and moral philosophy will reveal their creativity and ingenuity for their time.  This discovery should serve as an inspiration for modern Muslims to realize that innovation in thought is not proscribed in Islam. But that is precisely the purpose that a Ja`far al-Sadiq, Shafi’i, Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Mulla Sadra and others serve: exemplars of inspiration.  The innovation in thought is the responsibility of every age.

The contemporary thinker and scholar engaged in ijtihad, must take the knowledge of our time in its broadest framework seriously.  Most often, scholars only take the canonical authority of the past not only seriously, but reverentially, and dismiss knowledge of the present.  This kind of approach is fairly injurious to any serious effort to understand faith, tradition, self and society.  One cannot do ijtihad by revamping old knowledge. That is not ijtihad, that is like admiring monuments, in itself an admirable disposition, but it should not be mistaken as an intellectual effort to resolve the challenges of the present. Walking through the arcades of the past will make one nostalgic and give one a sensibility for history.  But one has learnt nothing about the past if one duplicates the past into the present. 

 -Ebrahim Moosa, "Sharia, Theology and Modernity"