It is once again time for Earth Hour, the first of many, I hope, in my own home (March 28th). So I settled down armed with tea, candlelight and a book. You know a book is good when before you know it, the hour is up and you're still engrossed in reading. That's exactly what happened but I came across a passage in the book that got me thinking and I felt I needed to "pen" it down.
The book by Khaled Abou El Fadl is entitled "Reasoning with God." Let me first share the passage here before exploring my thoughts:
While the passage mentions the nineteenth and early twentieth century, we can still feel the effects of this movement today. In fact the movement is still alive in various parts of the Muslim world. When I grew up in the 70s and 80s, my father, influenced by this movement, created quite a non-traditional Islamic environment. While most of Singapore profess to be Shafi'i, we didn't follow a madhhab but instead espouse the idea of 'going back to the Qur'an and Sunna." In my university days and after (in the 90s), this movement heavily influenced the Muslim student association in the university and other higher educational institution.
The idea behind the movement for me through these formative years was to be critical and to not accept what the 'authorities' say blindly, but to refer it back to the two sources. That is still a fundamental make up of my thought process today and I still don't officially follow a madhhab. But looking back over the years and what has happened in the world over the last two decades especially, I can see the point made by Prof Abou El-Fadl.
The danger of the "egalitarianism" as stated in the passage was to open the door for anyone to be seen as an authoritative figure by Muslims all over the world in this age of internet. We no longer seem to have a criteria of who is capable to fulfill this capacity and who isn't. While in the other domains, we have acknowledged experts who we know are qualified to be experts. What the movement have done is to eliminate that qualification in the field of Shari'ah, in the eyes of many ordinary Muslims. We no longer really question the qualifications of those who give out 'fatwas' because we no longer understand the criteria behind the qualifications.
I believe this opening of the door led to the rise of extremism in the last two decades as any Tom, Dick or Harry cropped up and started interpreting the Qur'an to their own biases and based on their own whims and fancies. A friend who served in the US armed forces once mentioned how a man in Afghan (this was during the 2002 Afghan war) pointed to a verse in the Qur'an to justify the violence to women and another for justification for killing non-Muslims. He asked me about these verses and I was taken aback. The problem is that the man took the verses out of context and was not rooted in history that the interpretive tradition mentioned in the passage would have taken into consideration. Today there are so many different 'Shaykhs' claiming to speak on behalf of Islam. Some of these have influenced and shaped the current rhetorics and tension within the Muslim world as well as the relationship with the non-Muslims to the detriment of the Ummah. Not just the extremists but also the conservatives, the puritans and the liberals.
I wonder therefore if the founders of the movement ever foresaw the far-reaching effects, both positive and negative, of what they set into motion. Only time will tell if we can reconnect to the roots of our tradition and produce the calibre of scholars like those of past for this modern age. The book asks:
The book by Khaled Abou El Fadl is entitled "Reasoning with God." Let me first share the passage here before exploring my thoughts:
",,,A broad movement started in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that rebelled against the centuries-old interpretive tradition that cumulatively defines Shari'ah. In a sense, inspired by a dream of Islamic authenticity waiting to be realised, this was the ultimate deconstructive and reconstructive movement. It thought to throw away the Islamic tradition and start fresh by reengaging and reinterpreting the primary textual sources of Shari'ah (the Qur'an and Sunna). But with the institutions of learning and law being in poor condition, the original-sources school undermined the interpretive traditions of the past without offering an alternative that transcended the apologetics of the movement. The egalitarianism of the original-source movement set the bar so low that any person with a modest degree of knowledge of the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet was considered sufficiently qualified to authoritatively represent the Shari'ah, even if such a person was not familiar with the precedents and discourses of the interpretive communities of the past. The Islamic intellectual culture witnessed an unprecedented level of deterioration as the Islamic heritage was reduced to the least common denominator, which often amounted to engaging in crass generalizations about the nature of Islam and the nature of the non-Muslim 'other'."
While the passage mentions the nineteenth and early twentieth century, we can still feel the effects of this movement today. In fact the movement is still alive in various parts of the Muslim world. When I grew up in the 70s and 80s, my father, influenced by this movement, created quite a non-traditional Islamic environment. While most of Singapore profess to be Shafi'i, we didn't follow a madhhab but instead espouse the idea of 'going back to the Qur'an and Sunna." In my university days and after (in the 90s), this movement heavily influenced the Muslim student association in the university and other higher educational institution.
The idea behind the movement for me through these formative years was to be critical and to not accept what the 'authorities' say blindly, but to refer it back to the two sources. That is still a fundamental make up of my thought process today and I still don't officially follow a madhhab. But looking back over the years and what has happened in the world over the last two decades especially, I can see the point made by Prof Abou El-Fadl.
The danger of the "egalitarianism" as stated in the passage was to open the door for anyone to be seen as an authoritative figure by Muslims all over the world in this age of internet. We no longer seem to have a criteria of who is capable to fulfill this capacity and who isn't. While in the other domains, we have acknowledged experts who we know are qualified to be experts. What the movement have done is to eliminate that qualification in the field of Shari'ah, in the eyes of many ordinary Muslims. We no longer really question the qualifications of those who give out 'fatwas' because we no longer understand the criteria behind the qualifications.
I believe this opening of the door led to the rise of extremism in the last two decades as any Tom, Dick or Harry cropped up and started interpreting the Qur'an to their own biases and based on their own whims and fancies. A friend who served in the US armed forces once mentioned how a man in Afghan (this was during the 2002 Afghan war) pointed to a verse in the Qur'an to justify the violence to women and another for justification for killing non-Muslims. He asked me about these verses and I was taken aback. The problem is that the man took the verses out of context and was not rooted in history that the interpretive tradition mentioned in the passage would have taken into consideration. Today there are so many different 'Shaykhs' claiming to speak on behalf of Islam. Some of these have influenced and shaped the current rhetorics and tension within the Muslim world as well as the relationship with the non-Muslims to the detriment of the Ummah. Not just the extremists but also the conservatives, the puritans and the liberals.
I wonder therefore if the founders of the movement ever foresaw the far-reaching effects, both positive and negative, of what they set into motion. Only time will tell if we can reconnect to the roots of our tradition and produce the calibre of scholars like those of past for this modern age. The book asks:
"Is it possible to have an identity without a memory, and is it possible to feel empowered without an identity? And in what ways is the future affected by the construction of memory and identity?"
