New Muslim Mujtahids

A common wisdom among Muslims has it that the door of ijtihad or independent reasoning (bab al-ijtihad) is shut down now. What remains with Muslim today is simply to follow the existing mazhabs (pl. mazahib) or schools of thought born during the Islamic classical era (circa 8th-10th century). The age of intellectual creativity is long gone, and the “new” era set in where the rule is a passive repetition and imitation (known as taqlid) of what had been said and invented by the people of yore.

The dawn of Islamic reform in 19th and 20th century has set in motion another way of thinking. Instead of passive imitation, the Islamic reform movement propagated a return to the original source of Islam, i.e. the Quran and sunna of the Prophet, casting away accretions that overlays on the surface of its pristine message of monotheism, freedom, justice, and humanism, etc. It sought to revive the dead classical notion of ijtihad that, for many new Muslim reformers of 20th century onward, is seen as the secret of intellectual creativity and progress characteristic of past golden era – the era of independent scholars such as Abu Hanifa (d. 767), al-Laith (d. 791), Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), Imam Shafi’i (d. 820), Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855), Ibn Jarir al-Thabari (d. 923), and many others.

New Muslim reformers thought that as new Muslim generation descended into a docile and passive imitation, abandoning ijtihad, the age of darkness and backwardness set in, causing them to lag behind other nations in the race towards civilizational progress. They think that the cure for such chronic disease is to return to ijtihad, freeing Muslim minds from the shackle of taqlid.

The reform movement began in modern era with figures such as Jamaluddin al-Afghani (d. 1897), Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), and Rashid Rida (d. 1935). Through Al-Manar, a reform-minded magazine published by Rashid Rida in Egypt, both Abduh and his pupil Rida spread the message of reform all over the Muslim world. The message met with mixed response: an enthusiastic acceptance of Kaum Muda (The Young Generation) and a hostile resistance of Kaum Tua (The Old Generation).

The message swept nearly every single corner of Muslim world, triggering the birth of modernist organizations. The key message of Abduh’s reform is to encourage Muslim umma to revive the independent reasoning or ijtihad. The intellectual legacy of classical Muslim scholars should not be a drag on the creativity and progress of Muslim of today. No matter how impressive and successful the legacy is within its own confinement of historical stage, it is bound by its particular context, hence the urgency of its re-evaluation in the light of new challenges.

The reform message of Abduh’s generation set in motion an era of what Albert Hourani once called “the liberal age in Arabic thought”. One of its key spirits is to look at the Western progress both on scientific and institutional levels not as a source of suspicion as it was the case with the post-Abduh era of 60s-80s. It rather looked at the Western science and political institution as the source of progress that could be adopted by Muslim, albeit with some modification as to conform to the Islamic tradition.

The era of Abduh was that of freedom of thought and positive attitude towards Western progress. This era ended in 60s, replaced by another era of hostility towards the West, particularly with the onset of Islamic revivalist movements that burgeoned all over Muslim world in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The key spirit of this, let’s say, “Revivalist era” is that of rejection of anything that smacks of Western influence (they used the term “west-toxification”). The attitude of rejection can be understood as a logical response to Western hegemony and what many Muslim see as apparently a new form of colonialism. The West is no longer seen as the source of modernity and progress, but rather humiliation and new colonialism.

The new era brought to the fore a new Muslim obsession with authenticity (ashala), reflected intellectually in the currency of The Islamization of Science movement (aslamat al-‘ulum). The “revivalist” Muslim intellectuals were in fear of losing Islamic identity amidst the massive progress of Western science of which they think as being plagued by materialist spirit. Obviously they see it as a great danger to what they call as Islamic weltanschauung or worldview. They think that the only way forward for Muslim is to seek a middle course between catching up with modern scientific progress and maintaining Islamic identity.

It hardly escapes us, however, that the spirit lying deeply in the mind of this “revivalist” intellectual generation is that of suspicion towards the West, which is characteristic of new era that began with the victory of Iranian Revolution I had already mentioned above. There are some excesses of such suspicion which is reflected, among other things, in the negative attitude of certain Muslim scholars and intellectuals towards recent efforts by liberal-minded Muslim scholars to adopt more historicist approach toward Islamic texts.

This is an approach that has been propounded by scholars such as Muhammed Arkoun, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and many others. Its key assumption is that Islamic sacred texts are bound by its social and historical milieu, which begs its reinterpretation in the light of new context lived by Muslim society of today.

The historicist and contextual approach toward Islamic sacred text is an epistemology (in the sense of way of knowing and understanding) of a new generation of Muslim intellectuals, often called, with a good reason I guess, liberal and progressive. It seems that they show different tendency and attitude towards possibilities of methodological appropriation of modern approaches in social sciences and humanities and its application to Islamic texts.

Prof. Zayd, an Egyptian scholar who was forced to exile in Netherland due to hostility of traditional ulama towards his pioneering research in Quranic studies, is one of the good examples. He adopted, of course with some re-moulding as to fit in the Islamic tradition of tafsir and ta’wil, the modern hermeneutics as a new way of approaching Islamic texts. He put a great emphasis on the historicity of any text (tarikhiyyat al-nass), sacred and secular alike. What is also interesting about his scholarship is to show to modern Muslim audience that historical approach toward text is not so new to Islamic intellectual tradition. Pre-modern and classical Islamic scholarship has already developed and applied such approach to studying Quran and other foundational texts in Islam, exemplified, among other things, by theories of occasion of revelation (asbab al-nuzul) and abrogation (naskh).

Prof. Muhammad Arkoun, an Algerian born scholar who spent his entire scholarly career at Sorbonne University in French, is another example. Prof. Arkoun is known for his sophisticated application of post-structuralist methods in the study of Islam. His scholarship showed a clear echo and influence of French avant-gardism in the realm of philosophy, humanity and social sciences. We can discern in his scholarship a Foucauldian epistemology, for instance. 

There are other Muslim scholars who are noted for their intellectual effort to scrutinize critically Islamic classical intellectual legacy, particularly in the realm of legal studies or fiqh, often seen as the queen of Islamic sciences. Prof. Khaled Abou El Fadl, currently Professor of Law at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is one of important modern scholars who are at the forefront of current movement seeking to historicize Islamic intellectual legacy in jurisprudence. Their method is marked, inter alia, by a search for more substantialist approach toward Islamic law (exemplified by the modern application of the theory of maqashid al-shari’a, or the basic goals or intents of Islamic law), critiquing textualist approach characteristic of Wahhabi scripturalism, for instance.

Indonesian Muslim scholars and intellectuals are no less active in developing new approaches and methods in the study of Islamic text. Historicist approach had been adopted by Muslim scholars since 80s when the late Prof. Munawwir Sjadzali, a McGill University educated and former minister of Religious Affairs, was a good case in point. He developed what he called the contextualization of Islamic precepts. He came out with a call to revise the Islamic law of inheritance that gives men two times share given to women.

Prof. Sjadzali rejected, based on his contextualist approach towards classical Islamic political theory, the theory of Islamic state (dawla Islamiyya) in the traditional sense. In his interpretation, Indonesian modern state is Islamic in its essence as long as basic Islamic norms and values of justice, humanity, equality, peace, respect for diversity, etc. are reflected in practical reality of governance. There are other scholars who are in the same boat with Prof. Sjadzali, sharing and developing further his ideas, and even inventing more creative approaches to Islam such as Prof. Nurcholish Madjid, Abdurrahman Wahid aka Gus Dur, and Dawam Rahardjo, just to name a few.

In my opinion, those above mentioned scholars are new type of Muslim mujtahid. They show a good model of how ijtihad can be of great service to Islam and Muslim umma in the form of more creative approach towards Islam and Islamic precepts. They have shown so well that by ijtihad, Muslim can be simultaneously faithful to their faith and tradition without losing pace with modernity.

Only that ijtihad as we see it practiced by those new generation of Muslim scholars is of different type of ijtihad in a traditional sense. I agree with Dr. Muqtedar Khan that traditional theory of ijtihad is too simplistic and limited in vision as it pertains only to ijtihad in legal matters using methodologies that are closely tied to legal discourse, i.e. ushul fiqh. There is a dire need for a new theory of ijtihad which is broader in scope.

We need to understand ijtihad broadly as, quoting from Dr. Khan, “freedom of thought, rational thinking and the quest for truth through an epistemology covering science, rationalism, human experience, critical thinking and so on.” (See Muqtedar Khan’s “Two Theories of Ijtihad” in his blog Ijtihad [http://www.ijtihad.org/ijtihad.htm]).

With this new understanding of ijtihad, we may say that the door of independent reasoning is no longer shut; it is re-opened again. The participants in this new ijtihad are not limited to the ulama in a traditional sense, but to include modern Muslim scholars whose academic training and specialization span a broad range of field and expertise.

Modern scholars who apply methods of inquiry in humanities, social sciences, political science, etc. are no less eligible to bear the title of mujtahid than traditional ulama who study tafsir, hadith, kalam, fiqh, and other branches of Islamic sciences.[]