In contemporary Muslim societies – both in majority and minority contexts – there is such a simplistic understanding of texts (nusus) that it does violence to the longstanding intellectual tradition of Islam. For those of us engaged in the study of Islamic thought, especially law (fiqh), legal theory (usul al-fiqh), dialectical theology (kalam) and language, it is very disheartening to witness the radical deterioration of a once dynamic and vibrant intellectual heritage. Traditionalist scholars (ulama) are increasingly drawn to the neo-revivalist agenda and methodology and in the process discard the positive elements of a sophisticated intellectual tradition.

The other problem is that serious Muslim scholars who are engaged with the reconstruction of religious thought, in the sense advocated by the Indian thinker Mohammed Iqbal, have thus far failed to provide a coherent methodology and theory for interpreting the Islamic heritage. Even though the medieval schools of thought (madhahib) are in disarray today, given the effects of modernity, they are still sufficiently tenacious to displace or keep out reconstructionist understandings of Islam from acquiring legitimacy. In order to make a new case, say on a woman’s right to attend a mosque, or become a leader of a country, many reconstructionists would raid the intellectual archive of Islam by collecting a motley of opinions in order to legitimate a contemporary need. In the process little attention is given to history and the contradictions of collecting opinions without examining their premises. So one will find articles and essays filled with views ranging from Ibn Hazm, the literalist scholar of Andalusia, to Abu’l- Husayn al-Basri, a Mu’tazili scholar, to al-Shafi’i, Abu Hanifa and al-Sarakhsi all thrown together to validate a point. Very little attention is given to the fact that Ibn Hazm and Abu Hanifa have totally different methodologies. By patching together their diverse views in order to provide an opinion and argument in order to allow women to become presidents may be a liberating move, but only very temporarily. Such a motley of views patched together have inherent contradictions of methodology and cannot offer long term solutions in thought. In two or ten years time, other issues will arise that will require a new round of searching for opinions from the past. The main reason for this state of affairs in my view is that contemporary Muslim intellectuals have not developed a methodology that is rooted in the present for interpreting the source texts of Islam. That means that the development in our understanding of language over the past 800 years has not contributed anything to our theories of interpretation; the development of the social sciences and humanities, in which Muslims have had some role in its formulation and in most cases adopted and domesticated in various way, hardly makes a meaningful impact in our understanding and interpretation of our source texts as well as the interpretation of society.

It may come as a total surprise to some people that the Egyptian Hanafi scholar Sa’d al-Din al-Taftzani (d. 791/1388) for instance argued that a verdict is established by the discourse (khitab) and not by the text (nass). One cannot just simply conclude from a report of the Prophet commenting on the state of Persian women, that this means that Muslim women cannot lead a community at the political level. The reason being that a ruling (hukm) is derived from the discourse, which is much more complex and broader than the text itself. When studying the work of some Muslim commentators, Ibn Jarir al- Ttabari (d. 310/923) and that of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (606/1290) on their discussion of the idiots/fools or weak-minded (sufaha) as discussed in the Qur’an I was pleasantly surprised. These commentators collected all the reports of the Companions of the Prophet and later generations and preserved them for us. Interestingly one found that the early exegetes (mufassirun), including some of the Companions, were virtually unanimous that the sufaha are women and children! This can imply that this opinion must have been an element in the Arabian sub-culture. However, 300 years later al-Tabari, and 600 years later al-Razi, set aside that ‘authentic’ and authoritative traditional interpretation (tafsir bi ‘l-naql) and said that weak-mindedness (safaha) was not a gender specific trait and applied to anyone who suffered of certain characteristics of mental infirmity. In this and many other instances one will find that the reconstruction and reconfiguration of social thought was an on-going process of Islamic history. There was a lively diversity of thought. The famous al-Ghazali used and employed forms of Aristotelian thought in his discussion of legal theory and logic. Others disagreed with him and insisted on following al-Shafi’i’s example of a form of purist Arabic thought. Serious reconstructionist scholars need to unpack the patterns of early Islamic thinkers more effectively and show the contemporary generation the road-map of thinking in the Islamic past. The sheer grandeur and impressive nature of that thought for its own time, will hopefully disarm the modern day extremist literalists. The future of reconstructive thought in Islam lies in the careful rendition of the past in an intelligible and accessible manner as an illustration of what happened and for an analysis of its various implications and changing discourses.