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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from Ebrahim Moosa's "The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam" 4

The question of innovation and continuity in tradition has never been an unproblematic one in Muslim societies. From Islam's very inception in the seventh century and afterwards, Muslim intellectuals have found themselves embattled by this question. It has it roots in the furious debates about the legitimacy of borrowing knowledge and insights from the Greeks, Indians, Persians, especially Aristotelian philosophy and Neoplatonic mystical knowledge. Intellectuals have found themselves on both sides of the debate. A close examination enables one to see clear battlefield scars on the knowledge handed down the centuries in the multi-dimensional and polyvalent Muslim intellectual tradition. For many scholars, like al-Farabi, al-Baqillani, Ibn Sina, al-Juwayni, al-Ghazali, and many others, there could no boundaries in matters of knowledge. Knowledge itself could not be tainted by the religion, ethnicity, or beliefs of the producers of knowledge, since we have the tools of independent judgement to evaluate it on its merits. Their attitude was shaped by the belief that "foreign knowledge" was the "lost camel of the believer." Wherever believers find such knowledge, they were the most deserving of it. But these scholars have also had their opponents. Many luminaries in the early intellectual tradition balked at even studying the knowledge of "others," let alone internalizing and employing such knowledge to illuminate the teachings of Islam. For men like al-Shafi'i, Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Salah, and even more so Ibn Taymiyya, knowledge that had its provenance in other cultures and civilizations had a corrupting influence on the legacy of the pious ancestors of early Islam. For them the teachings of the Qur'an and those of the Arabian Prophet were sufficient and could not be contaminated with the way of thinking of other cultures.

This is but a very brief and simplified snapshot of the kinds of debates that preceded us. Knowledge produced in those medieval contexts was not uncontested. In fact, what is often hailed as the high point of Islamic civilization and knowledge was also a period of contestation, conflict, and debate not very different from ours. Innovation in knowledge did not come without a price. Knowledge, like the birth of a new style in the art of miniature portraits, "is the result of years of disagreements, jealousies, rivalries and studies in colors and painting," says one of the characters of the Turkish novelists Orhan Pamuk.

[footnote: Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, 168]

While the most gifted of painters, writers, and scholars will beget the innovations, to the rest will fall the "singular duty of perfecting and refining this style through perpetual imitation." Both the innovators as well as the imitators deserve our respect, even though we acknowledge that we may no longer be able to agree with their views today.

pg. 112-113 of Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism

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from Ebrahim Moosa's "The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam" 3

This dilemma to keep past and present in a productive conversation while producing something entirely innovative and fresh has had a fairly schizophrenic outcome, to put it mildly. On the one hand, religious knowledge is regarded as being coterminous with the pre-modern Muslim tradition itself, with the full pedigree of authenticity and legitimacy. That version of tradition continues its passage through the modern period largely by resisting modernity or grudgingly adjusting to modernity, on its own terms. On the other hand, another more contested Muslim tradition that is more euphoric about modernity and dazzled by its rapture develops side-by-side with the pre-modern tradition. This one is relatively smaller, has less popular appeal, and remains the domain of a small elite. In between these two polarities a plethora of traditions emerge that co-exist within Muslim societies and communities globally. Thus, it is preferable to speak of Muslim traditions, in the plural. Like all traditions, continuity and discontinuity are essential elements in a dynamic and organic tradition.

-pg. 112 of Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism

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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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