Re-reading Sunni Islam through Qur'anic Hermeneutics

Scott C. Lucas has reviewed the book Contemporary Issues in Islam by Asma Afsaruddin.

The Qur'an-centric approach largely ignores the legal tradition of Islam—that is, fiqh. Most of the contemporary issues concerning politics, war, and gender inequality that Afsaruddin discusses are jurisprudential matters. Muslim jurists have always recognized a number of legal schools and have generally respected the schools belonging to their own sect. But what seems strange in the hermeneutics of many Muslim modernists is their disregard for fiqh.

Sedanet invites you to read the translation of "Re-reading Sunni Islam through Qur'anic Hermeneutics" on the Tarjomaan website.

It is worth noting that this author of Bangladeshi origin won the 32nd World Book Award of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2014 for her book Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought.

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Los Angeles Review of Books — In the eyes of many Westerners, Islam is a religion opposed to democracy, freedom, and women's rights, and at the same time, prone to violence and repression. Many Muslims critique these stereotypes in their daily lives, but few have written books in English that elaborate this critique in a detailed and scholarly manner. Asma Afsaruddin's¹ new book, Contemporary Issues in Islam², aims to show other facets of the Islamic religion to the English-speaking audience. In Afsaruddin's book, Islam is (or can be) pacifist and populist, grants women considerable agency, and is a partner in interfaith dialogue.

How has Afsaruddin accomplished this? In chapters dedicated to Islam and politics, Islam and gender, Islam and war/peace, and Islam and interfaith dialogue, Afsaruddin applies the hermeneutics of her liberal predecessors and selects passages from the Qur'an. According to an account of Islam that she presents alongside a remarkable collection of generally Muslim intellectuals, most Muslims past and present have not read the Qur'an correctly. They have marginalized, misinterpreted, or abrogated the most important verses and have failed to grasp the comprehensive teachings of the Qur'an. By restoring the Qur'an to its rightful place, and selecting classical exegetes whose views align with the norms of freedom and equality, Afsaruddin shows how many issues in Islam can be resolved or at least ameliorated.

A clear example of this approach is Afsaruddin's explanation of this Qur'anic verse (Al-Tawbah, 71): And the believers, men and women, are protecting friends of one another; they enjoin the right and forbid the wrong, and they establish worship and they pay the poor-due, and they obey Allah and His messenger. As for these, Allah will have mercy on them. Lo! Allah is Mighty, Wise.

In Afsaruddin's view (who attributes this interpretation to Azizah al-Hibri³, a professor of jurisprudence), "the primary intent of this verse is to demonstrate the equality of men and women as collaborators in a shared enterprise of promoting good and establishing a righteous society on earth, just as they are equal before God in the performance of their individual and social duties."

Another example is verse 59 of Surat al-Nisa’, which Afsaruddin translates as “O you who believe, obey God and His Messenger and those in authority among you.” In the Sunni world, this verse was long used to justify obedience to authoritarian rulers, but Afsaruddin shows how many early, classical, and modern exegetes interpreted it so that this obedience encompasses religious authorities and other things, not merely political rulers. In her view, the original meaning of this verse has nothing to do with political powers.

In general, Contemporary Issues in Islam acquaints the reader with a helpful guide to a host of modernist Muslim scholars and intellectuals who are Sunni and hail from the Middle East. (Shi‘i thinkers are absent from this book.) Afsaruddin defines Islamic modernists as: discerning Muslims … who generally believe that reinterpreted Islamic principles can demonstrate their compatibility with the principles of the democratic state, civil society, gender equality, and the like, without their formulation necessarily resembling Western models.

She introduces readers to the liberationist hermeneutics of Jamal al-Banna⁴ (d. 2013), the political thought of Ali Abd al-Raziq⁵ (d. 1966), the Qur’anic hermeneutics of Amina Wadud⁶, and three other contemporary scholars who believe that jihad actually means spreading peace, not warmongering.

Afsaruddin is one of the latest members of a distinguished lineage of Muslim intellectuals who seek to privilege the Qur’an within the Muslim intellectual sphere. About a century ago, the famous Egyptian revivalist Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) issued a similar call, which his devoted student Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935) expanded upon. Rashid Rida authored an unfinished multi-volume commentary on the Qur’an, published under the title al-Manar. More recently, the Pakistani-American scholar Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), whom Afsaruddin greatly praises, made a similar call in his books Major Themes of the Qur’an⁷ and Islam and Modernity⁸. Amina Wadud’s groundbreaking book, Qur’an and Woman⁹, also focuses explicitly on the Qur’an, setting aside all other Muslim texts. Despite a century of efforts to rethink Islam through a new reading of the Qur’an, Afsaruddin informs her readers that the project of rethinking Islam “is still very much a work in progress,” the results of which “will probably not gain general acceptance any time soon.”

Why are the results of such a Qur’an-centric method unlikely to gain general acceptance in the near future? Although this important question is not really addressed in Afsaruddin’s book, I am inclined to explain three factors that may account for Muslims’ lack of enthusiasm for these ideas.

First, what about those verses of the Qur’an that are illiberal or sanction violence? One need only glance at Islamophobic websites or those of Muslim extremists to see that a completely different view of Islam, yet one thoroughly grounded in the Qur’an, is possible. Afsaruddin points to some of these challenging verses, but many remain. Fortunately, most Muslims do not read the Qur’an as an invitation to violence, although in most cases the inclination toward liberal Islamic thought is also low. What do liberationist and modernist approaches have to say about this category of Qur’anic verses?

Second, the Qurʾān-centric approach largely ignores the legal tradition of Islam, namely fiqh. Most of the contemporary issues concerning politics, war, and gender inequality that Afsaruddin discusses are jurisprudential matters. The body of schools in which Muslims have debated these topics and defended positions is the vast library of fiqh books and their commentaries that religious scholars have authored over the past millennium. Islamic jurisprudence includes, among other things, manuals of practical rulings that explain in detail how a Muslim should practice Islam. Muslim jurists have always recognized a number of legal schools and have generally respected the schools belonging to their own sect. Today, this legal tradition is commonly known as sharīʿa in order to emphasize the divine element of Islamic jurisprudence. To be more precise, sharīʿa is God’s law, but Muslim jurists have traditionally believed that God has provided indications of this law (the Qurʾān and the teachings of the Prophet, which are contained in thousands of ḥadīths) and has left it to Muslims to derive their laws directly and also on the basis of analogy from these indications.

What seems strange in the hermeneutics of many Muslim modernists is their lack of attention to fiqh. But again, this may not be accidental, because, as Afsaruddin says in some illuminating sentences, sharīʿa should not be considered merely as jurisprudential laws:

From the modernists’ perspective… the revival of sharīʿa in the historical sense means the revival of a set of broad recommendations and ethical guidelines that have shaped the Islamic way of life, not merely jurisprudential rules.

A few sentences later, Afsaruddin describes the “modernist project of revisiting sharīʿa” as follows: A return to the Qurʾān as the most authoritative source of ethical and legal rules, and secondly, placing the beginning of new research into ḥadīth and evaluating the jurisprudential laws derived from ḥadīth on the basis of Qurʾānic precepts.

Note that there is no mention here of the Shīʿī and Sunnī legal schools and their manuals of practical rulings that have determined the method of Muslim scholars and their readers. It is true that there have been important Muslim reformers who proposed the reconstruction of Islamic jurisprudence based solely on the Qurʾān and ḥadīth—such as the Andalusian jurist Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) and the Yemeni jurist al-Shawkānī (d. 1834)—but Islamic modernists have so far failed to show progress in this direction.

The only jurisprudential issue that receives fundamental attention in Contemporary Issues in Islam is the controversial branch of “minority jurisprudence” (fiqh al-aqalliyyāt). This part of jurisprudence concerns only Muslim communities living in countries with non-Muslim majorities and appears practically to be a kind of legal stratagem to allow Muslims to function in non-Muslim societies.

The third major weakness of modernist Muslim hermeneutics, which is also evident throughout Contemporary Issues in Islam, is the lack of attention to the rich ethical-mystical tradition called Sufism. (The only reference to Sufism in this book is where it briefly discusses the Turkish spiritual leader, Fethullah Gülen). The Qurʾān repeatedly refers to human beings as those who are “in darkness,” those who need a light or a rope to hold them together. No other aspect of the Islamic tradition is as preoccupied with the spiritual and psychological well-being of human beings as Sufism. In an age of terrible human alienation, economic insecurity, and cultural confusion, Sufism offers individuals a way to connect with God and find peace.

For much of the twentieth century, Sufism has been attacked by secular, liberal, Salafī, and fundamentalist Muslims, who have considered it superstitious, outdated, totalitarian, or irregular innovations. Some of these criticisms are true, at least regarding the extreme practices of Sufis. Perhaps one of the main reasons Afsaruddin neglects to address Sufism in her book is this long-standing reaction of Islamic groups against it. Many Muslims, especially teenagers and young adults, need inspiring religious leaders who can respond to their fears or spiritual needs and help them on their spiritual path. To whom can these young people turn?

If modernist Muslims wish to be serious contenders against the conservative or Salafi interpretations of Islam propagated on satellite channels, they must move beyond their heavily Qur'an-centric hermeneutics and systematically engage with the schools of Islamic jurisprudence and Sufism. They must find creative ways to reduce the sectarian violence that has become one of the primary concerns of the Islamic world today.

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Endnotes:

[۱] Asma Afsaruddin [۲] Contemporary Issues in Islam [۳] Azizah al-Hibri [۴] Jamal al-Banna [۵] Ali 'Abd al-Raziq [۶] Amina Wadud [۷] Major Themes of the Qur'an [۸] Islam and Modernity [۹] Qur» an and Woman