Ziauddin Sardar is London based modern Islamic scholar who has launched a blog ” Critical Muslim” and in this article he discusses what is a Critical Muslim.

A critical spirit has been central to Islam from its inception. The Qur’an is generously sprinkled with references to thought and learning, reflection and reason. The Sacred Text denounces those who do not use their critical faculties in strongest terms: ‘the worse creatures in God’s eyes are those who are [wilfully] deaf and dumb, who do not reason’ (8:22). A cursory look at the life of Muhammad reveals that his strategic decisions were an outcome of critical discussions – the way he decide, for example, to fight the Battle of Badr outside Medina, or, later on, defend the city by digging a trench. The Prophet’s basic advice to his followers, in one version of his ‘Farewell Pilgrimage’, was to ‘reason well’ [1]. The scholarship that evolved around collecting the traditions and sayings of the Prophet was itself based on an innovative and detailed method of criticism. It is widely acknowledged that debate and discussion, arguments and counter-arguments, literary textual criticism as well as scientific criticism was a basic hallmark of the classical Muslim civilisation [2].

Yet, with a few notable reform oriented scholars and thinkers, this critical spirit is nowhere to seen in the Muslim world.

The reasons for the evaporation of this critical thought are many and diverse. Perhaps it was all the fault of al-Ghazzali, as ‘a widely held view’ has it: he ‘strongly attacked Islamic philosophy in The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ and, as a result, ‘their role was significantly reduced in the Sunni world’ [3], along with the importance of criticism. Perhaps it was ‘the well-known decree of al-Qadir in 1017-18 and 1029’, that banned the rationalist Mutazalite school of thought, as the late Mohammad Arkoun suggests. As a consequence, ‘to this day, the ulama officially devoted to the defence of the orthodoxy, refuses to reactivate the thinkable introduced and developed by original, innovative thinkers in classical period’ [4]. Perhaps it was the closure of ‘the gates of Ijtihad’ that sealed the door to criticism: while no one actually closed the gate, it came to be treated, as Sadakat Kadri notes, ‘as a historical fact rather than a poetically pleasing way of saying that jurists were no longer as good as they used to be’ [5].  Perhaps it was because Muslim societies could not develop ‘legally autonomous corporate governance’, Arabic thought is ‘essentially metaphysical’ and incapable of developing universalism, and Muslim culture and ethos is just too reverential to religious authorities, as Toby Huff has argued [6]. Perhaps criticism died out because of a lack of any kind of state support or protection for dissent; or maybe it was colonisation of the Muslim world. However, all of these explanations of the decline of Muslim civilisation and the disappearance of the critical spirit are partial, and some are seriously problematic, as I argued in my Royal Society lecture [7].

While it is important to explore the reasons why Muslims have developed an aversion to criticism and critical thought, it is also necessary to do something about it. The absence of a critical spirit as well as philosophers, thinkers, writers and activists who constantly challenge received wisdom and take issue with orthodoxy, over many centuries, has allowed the advent and dominance of a singular interpretation of Islam. It has also contributed to an atmosphere of intolerance and allowed extremism and obscurantism to become intrinsic in Muslim societies. Much of what goes under the rubric of ‘religious thought’ or ‘culture’ in Muslim societies is a non-chemical sedative. Islam has thus been reduced to a set of pieties, rendering Muslims societies incapable of generating new and original ideas. Indeed, one can argue that Muslims no longer have a model of living genially with Otherness, accommodating difference, or adjusting to rapid and accelerating change.

But what does it mean to be ‘Critical’ anyway? We are critical in the sense of being skeptical of orthodoxy and regard all arguments as provisional and dependent on evidence. We do not understand ‘Islam’ as a set of pieties and taboos, that exists, or has existed in some romanticised distant past, in a pure, unadulterated form. For us, Islam is what Muslims, in all their diversity, make of it. The interpretations of the Qur’an, and the Sunnah of the Prophet, to use the words of the late Fazlur Rahman, are ‘essentially an ever-expanding process’ [10]. Neither do we recognise the authority of religious scholars at a loss with the modern world, issuing foolish fatwas, maintaining a stranglehold on authority, and too often giving respectability to prejudice, bigotry, xenophobia, and social and cultural malpractices. We do not label Muslims, whether they define their identity religiously or culturally and regard themselves as secular, liberal, conservatives or socialists. Rather, we embrace the plurality of contemporary Islam in all its mindboggling complexity. However, we challenge all interpretations of Islam: traditionalist, modernist, fundamentalist and apologetic to develop new readings with the potential for social, cultural and political transformation of the Muslim world.

There are two particular contexts that are of concern to Critical Muslim: what Arkoun calls the ‘unthought’ of Islam, that is received and accepted ideas not produced by the process of reasoning; and what I describe as ‘postnormal times’, the specific nature, the spirit of the age, of contemporary times.

Arkoun uses unthought to describe ‘an Islam that is isolated from the most elementary historical reasoning, linguistic analysis or anthropological decoding’ [11]. It is the main source of the power of the ulama and the ideological power of ‘Islamic states’; and is used to ensure that dogmatic, obscurantist and authoritarian versions of Islam are protected from intellectual and critical scrutiny. A good example would be the blind reverence shown to hadith literature, and how hadith is used to justify all variety of unjust and unethical laws in the name of Islam. It is assumed that ‘Islam’ would be irrevocably broken if hadith literature is subjected to the type of analysis we are familiar with in Biblical criticism, judicious judgements about the validity of religious texts. For us this type of critical analysis is essential to liberate the creative potential of Muslim thought and reformulate Islam as a more humane and human enterprise.

http://ziauddinsardar.com/2013/07/critical-muslim/

Posted by F. Sheikh