The News, July 3, 2006
Evolution of Islamic thought
Feuilleton
Prof Khwaja Masud
Worn-out ideas have never come to power among the people who have worn them out – Iqbal Shah Waliullah (1703-1762) and his school of Islamic thought have been the predominant influence on the Muslim religious and intellectual life from the mid-18th century onward.
Among Shah Waliullah’s main contributions is the fact that he broke the shackles of taqlid (compulsory adherence to any one of the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence), which has been the single biggest factor in the intellectual stagnation of Islam.
Shah Waliullah’s main point of departure was the attempt to work out the social basis underlining the Qur’aanic injunctions. The shariah, he pointed out, only aims at the reform of society. But, no shariah takes place in a vacuum. It develops in the context and on the basis of usages and customs of the society concerned. This is also true of the Islamic shariah. The customs of the Arabs, and, among them especially of the tribe of Quraish, constituted the raw material of the shariah of Islam.
Iqbal also took the same line. After giving a summary of the prophetic method as explained by Shah Waliullah in “Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”: The Shariah values ahkam resulting from this application (for example, rules referring to penalties for crimes) and are in a sense specific to the people; and since their observance is not an end in itself, they cannot be enforced in the case of future generations.
Preceding Iqbal, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan independently discussed the principles of the exegesis of the Holy Quran. He was dealing with the problem when the discoveries of natural sciences were sought to be rejected on the plea of being opposed to the Quranic text. Sir Syed argued that the word of God (revealed text) be understood in terms of the work of God (i.e. nature). Its meaning, he said, will have to be re-interpreted in the light of the ever-growing knowledge and the latest discoveries of science.
Sir Syed applied the same principle of exegesis of the Quran in matters concerning social affairs. He came to the conclusion that cutting of the hands of a thief is not compulsory, nor is polygamy, nor slavery. The Quran at one place enjoins adl (justice, equity) between wives; at another, it says equity is impossible (iii, 13, iii, 129). Sir Syed argued that, read together, the two versus sought to prohibit polygamy. In the same way, he argued, the Quran sought to abolish slavery gradually. The Quran sets before us an ideal, it does not ignore the social reality.
Moulvi Chiragh carried forward Sir Syed’s ideas in a more radical way. He says in Azam-ul-kalaam fi irtiqa-il-Islam: “The most essential civil and political problems of Islamic Shariah said to be based on the Quran have been deduced from a single word or sometimes from a simple phrase. Uncalled for insistence on following the letter, neglect of the true intent of Quran has become a characteristic of our exegesis and our fuqaha (Jurists).
Of the almost 6000 verses of the Quran, there are about 200 verses which related not only to civil, penal, fiscal and political matters, but also to prayers and religious rites. It is obvious that these verses cannot provide definite guidance on specific rules about civil law.”
About the traditions of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), Maulvi Chiragh maintained that the Prophet, his companions and successors condemned the practice of compiling the traditions, thus denuding them of religious authority.
About the third source of Muslim law, Maulvi Chiragh notes that none of four schools of Sunni jurisprudence has claimed any finality for their conclusions. They never insisted that their opinions or analogical deductions be compulsorily followed by their contemporaries, not to speak of the future generations.
Let us see what Quaid-i-Azam has to say on the matter. On February 6, 1912, an amendment to the special (civil) Marriages Act was moved by Bhupinder Nath Basu in the Legislative Council. It sought to provide for the registration of civil marriages between persons belonging to different religious dominations. Till then, both the parties to such marriages had to declare that they belonged to no religion. The amendment was lost, but the 1912 amendment is memorable for Jinnah’s speech on the subject.
When Jinnah rose to speak, the law minister, Sir Ali Imam, drew his attention to the Quranic injunction prohibiting Muslim male from marrying women outside Ahl-i-Kitab (the people of the book, and of course, the Muslims; and a Muslim woman from marrying anyone but a Muslim).
Jinnah, then, reminded the Law Minister that it was not the first occasion in the history of India that the Council had either ignored or amended Islamic Law in such a way as to make it suitable to meet the requirements of the times. He cited many examples. The Islamic law of contract which had continued to be in force even after the establishment of the British rule in India, had been completely abrogated. The Law of Evidence as set forth in the Islamic law was nowhere prevalent in the country. Then there was the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1854. Under the Muslim Law, the person in the event of apostasy lost all rights of inheritance. This, too, had been abrogated: “I submit”, said Jinnah, “that these laws are the precedence which we should follow in order to be able to meet the requirements of the times. For this many a precedence can be found in Islamic Law.”
The Quaid’s stand on this issue is crystal clear from his above quoted speech on February 6, 1912 in the Legislative Council.
On August 4, 1955, a seven-man commission was appointed to study the existing laws of marriage, divorce and family maintenance to determine whether these laws needed modification in order to give women the proper place in society according to the fundamentals of Islam.
Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim, Secretary of the Commission, wrote in the introduction to the majority report: “Islam is not the name of any static mode of pattern of life; it is spirit and not body; it is aspiration and not temporal and rigid fulfilment. The essence of life is constituted of permanence and change. The ideal alone is permanent; the changed or the regulations that deal with particular — situations of a particular ideal can never achieve the status of an ideal. Land and capital mean different things in different epochs; the mode of handling them must change accordingly.”
The trouble with traditionalists, as Khalifa Abdul Hakim sees it, has been that they confuse the permanent ideal with the temporary regulations.
As a result, Islam lies buried beneath the heap of retrograde legalism, it’s spirit smothered by centuries of obscurantism, clericalism, fanaticism, despotism and fundamentalism.
Too often, too many people have been duped in the name of religion. But obscurantism stands doomed though the struggle is tough and hard. Inspired by the true spirit of Islam, people are moving ahead, despite temporary setbacks. The direction of the path travelled by the Islamic thought so far makes it amply clear that the iconoclastic spirit of Islam would ultimately prevail.
The writer is a former principal of Gordon College, Rawalpindi. Email: khmasud22@yahoo.com
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