Muslim Reformers Research Articles

The Republican Sisters of Sudan

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, known as al-Ustadh (teacher), his a Muslim reformist who advocated an interpretation of Islam that is fit for our time. His interpretation depended on reviving the Meccan verses of the Qur’an as the original and basic ideals and ideas in Islam. One of his major endeavors was how Islam addresses equality in Islam; equality of men and women and equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, as citizens of the same state and have equal rights. This paper discusses the Republican thought as a social movement and how equality of women was practiced in that movement.

Sinkretisme dalam Adat Tradisi Masyarakat Islam

Dalam kajian agama, sinkretisme telah menjadi salah satu kategori konsep yang dibahaskan dan kontroversi disebabkan terma ini memberi gambaran “tidak suci” atau “tidak tulen”. Walaupun terminologi sinkretisme telah lahir dan berkembang di Barat, namun ia telah turut digunakan oleh beberapa sarjana dalam menerangkan fenomena beragama dan pengamalan adat tradisi masyarakat Islam di Nusantara yang membawa kepada natijah penolakan adat tradisi oleh golongan reformis Islam. Oleh itu, makalah ini bertujuan menghuraikan konsep sinkretisme serta analisis Islam mengenainya bagi menjelaskan sinkretisme yang berlaku khususnya dalam konteks adat tradisi masyarakat Islam serta cadangan menanggapinya. Kajian ini merupakan kajian kualitatif iaitu data kepustakaan yang diperolehi dianalisis secara deskriptif dan analitikal bagi menjelaskan sinkretisme dalam adat tradisi masyarakat Islam. Kajian mendapati imej “tidak suci” atau “tidak tulen” yang dibawa oleh sinkretisme dalam adat tradisi masyarakat Islam boleh dikaitkan dengan percampuran elemen Islam dan pra Islam yang masih bercanggah dengan prinsip Tauhid. Ia adalah bersifat sementara dan boleh dikikis, manakala adat tradisi pula boleh diteruskan sekiranya tidak lagi wujud percanggahan tersebut.

Women's Voices, Men's Lives: Masculinity in a North Indian Urdu newspaper

AbstractLiterary journals and newspapers aiming to reform the religious beliefs and domestic habits of women were common in early twentieth-century North India. Although most readings have focused on how these texts reflected male legislation of women's behaviour, we should look at Muslim reformist literature to understand male experiences; this investigation offers new insights into an emergent middle-class identity defined more by manners than birth. Readings of a previously little-researched Urdu newspaper, Madinah, and its women's section offer new insights on male experiences of reformism, characterized by profound ambivalence. Playfulness emerged in some reformist descriptions of women's voices, channelling the influence of rekhti. Ultimately Madinah cultivated pride in Islam's strict division of gender roles and conversely threatened men with shame for failing to regulate uneducated women. Descriptions of powerful, Ottoman women warriors were framed to incite men to acts of bravery, using reports from Europe as cautionary examples of the over-indulgence of women. While the newspaper offered outlets for men to express curiosity about women's experiences, ultimately reformist literature limited expressions of pleasure. Male ambivalence regarding the implications of the reformist project remained embedded in writing about women.

Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa and Contemporary Reformist Muslim Thought: An Examination, edited by Adis Duderija, 2014

Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa and Contemporary Reformist Muslim Thought: An Examination, edited by Adis Duderija, 2014

Debt and Muslim self-making in late-colonial Bengal

ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which indebtedness, which plagued the peasantry in the early twentieth century colonial Bengal intensified debates that raged in the Bengali-Muslim public sphere about the status of the prohibition on riba (a Quranic prohibition on usurious transactions). In investigating these debates and its actors, I explore the manner in which discussions about circumventing debt-induced hardships, as they came to be anchored in the thorny issue of the prohibition on riba, got entangled in the problem of defining moral visions of the Muslim self and community and revealed conflicting notions of Muslim improvement and reform between more elite social and religious reformers and their rural co-religionists. Within a rural discourse of Muslim ‘self-improvement’, the process of interpreting the riba prohibition would successfully establish the immorality of interest on loans as a form of earning made without the expenditure of labour. This linking of the prohibition on riba (variously interpreted as interest, usury or excess) with the expenditure of labour (or its lack thereof) was a novel spin on earlier theological positions on the issue, which would inform modes of peasant radicalism as well as a nascent leftist city-based Muslim intelligentsia’s justification for socialism as the antidote to economic ills.

Давление метрополий и тихий национализм академических практик

The article reviews the recurrent cycles of wholesale modernization of Kazakh culture over the last century to argue the futility of policies based on complete eradication of the previous cultural code. Putting the main focus on the sphere of education, particularly at university level, the authors compare the situation at the turn of the twentieth century, during the Early Soviet period, and after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The ruthless criticism of the traditional cleric culture by Muslim reformers (the Jadids), the subsequent assault on them as not modern and radical enough by Soviet educators, and the dismissive attitude to Soviet cultural and educational standards by government managers in modern Kazakhstan have had profound structural parallels. Their radicalism notwithstanding, these reforms were securing Kazakhstan’s role as a periphery of some external center of “true knowledge”, and thus its essentially colonial status. The logic of modernization understood as embracing some complete cultural sphere from elsewhere made any local knowledge (including national identity) synonymous to backwardness. This started a vicious circle: any successful intellectual had to refute any national cultural legacy, thus making national culture incompatible with modernity by definition. The authors discover the persistence of cultural practices behind the fiery rhetoric of all cultural revolutions in modern Kazakh history, which they call the “quiet nationalism of academic practices”. They use the case of Soviet academy to demonstrate the effect of hybridization of the nationalist discourse within the Soviet institutions, and thus the reality of accommodating tradition within modern culture. They conclude that local culture, despite being pushed to the “backyard of modernity,” has shown a remarkable capacity to reproduce itself and influence the parameters and the direction of the modernization project at all periods. Therefore, rather than fighting the “quiet nationalism of academic practices”, a truly postcolonial modernizing project should explicitly embrace them.

Ijtihad and Islam in the spirit of the age in Muhammad Iqbal and Ali Shariati Seid Halilovic

Implementing practical religious rules in his personal and social life, a Muslim is approaching secrets of eternal bliss and supreme realities of the universe. In fact, these rules are the result of God's knowledge. B rilliant representatives of Islam's juristic heritage found their final formulation in religious sources - through a professional process called ijtihad. In order to get to know the subject of these rules, they were necessarily focused on empirical achievements and social contexts of their time. Under the influence of the dominant modern science, Muslim reformers identify ijtihad with empirical research. In this way, they reject sublime and unchanging cognitive bases of ijtihad, which comprise religious revelation and rational knowledge. However, they ignore the fact that modern science has absolutely no power to judge all the realities and values as scientists from XIX century naively wanted. In this paper, we try to follow fundamental changes in the meaning of ijtihad, primarily using a detailed content analysis of popular works of two famous Muslim reformist thinkers, Muhammad Iqbal and Ali Shariati. The former insists that today only modern, empirical knowledge has scientific credibility and that it is the only one to follow in all aspects of life. In the works of the latter, we read that in the light of ijtihad, Islam has to change and go in line with modern science and new social needs.

REVIEW - Safdar, Ahmed. Reform and Modernity in Islam: The Philosophical, Cultural and Political Discourses among Muslim Reformers. vii + 296 pp. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.

REVIEW - Safdar, Ahmed. Reform and Modernity in Islam: The Philosophical, Cultural and Political Discourses among Muslim Reformers. vii + 296 pp. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Pesantren dan Islam Puritan: Pelembagaan Tajdid Keagamaan di Lembaga Pendidikan Islam

In the 18th century, the leaders of Muslim reformers focused their movement to break the internal rigidity in the form of tauh}id purification against the dominance of schools and heretical eradication which commonly called the religious purification (tajdid al-fikr al-Islâmi). Therefore, at the end of the 19th century popping figures reformer (mujadid) which called on Muslims to take modern civilization that support progress in the sense of rationalization and technical. At that time also, a wave of renewal of thought emerged in Indonesia as echoed by Ahmad Dahlan, Sheikh Ahmad Soorkati, KH. Zamzam, etc. Movement purification of Islam in Indonesia is implemented with the establishment of educational institutions such as pesantren and formal schools, as the form and attempt to inherit and maintain ideological purists like Pondok Modern Muhammadiyah Paciran, Lamongan; Pesantren al-Ishlah Sendangagung, Paciran Lamongan; Pesantren al-Islam Tenggulun, Lamongan Solokuro; Pesantren Maskumambang, Dukun Gresik; and Pesantren Persis in Pasuruan Bangil. These five pesantrens have been selected as the research because that had been considered to represent the ideological purists in Indonesia and some organizations and institutions that embrace the puritan ideology. This paper will discuss the topic of pesantren and Puritan Islamic from the standpoint of its history and dynamics, relation with tajdid, and renewal of existing typologies in boarding schools, as well as how tajdid be implemented in boarding institutions.

The Ṣāliḥiyyah School in Qazvīn and Shiʿi Religious Authority, with an Emphasis on Scholars from the Baraghānī Family

This paper introduces the Ṣāliḥiyyah school in Qazvīn, an innovative religious school founded in nineteenth-century Iran which taught both religious as well as academic subjects. Relying on memoirs by the descendants of its founder, Mullā Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ Baraghānī, it traces the pivotal role of this seminary in Iranian religious and political affairs, as well as renowned graduates from this school, both male and female. It situates the school in the greater Shiʿi pre-modern debate between Uṣūlism versus Akhbārism, as well as the emerging Bābī movement, and shows how one of the great contemporary Muslim reformers, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Asadābādī, was a direct product of this school.

Waḥy and tanzīl

This article analyses modern discourses about “revelation” in the writings of three Western Orientalists (Muir, Bell and Watt) and of a selection of contemporary Muslim reformists (Fazlur Rahman, Farid Esack, Ibrahim Moosa, Abdelkarim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd). After some terminological considerations, the named thinkers’ views of revelation are analysed in light of their understanding of the Qur'anic terms waḥy (“inspiration”) and tanzīl (“sending down”), which in modern discourses are conventionally associated with the phenomenon of revelation. The author finds that the cited reformists’ understanding of revelation and of the terms waḥy and tanzīl may be wedded to (1) an interest in the inspired person, (2) a progressive view of divine communication or (3) an insistence on the human nature of the sacred text. From a hermeneutical perspective, the author suggests that Paul Ricoeur's notion of “the world of the text” may offer a more useful framework for discussing the nexus between divine and human communication than the elusive phenomenological category of revelation.

Shaykh Abdullahi al-Qutbi and the pious believer's dilemma: local moral guidance in an age of global Islamic reform

Using the writings of the religious scholar `Abdullahi al-Qutbi, this article examines the ‘transregional’ nature of Muslim reformist discourse in the early twentieth century and the way in which the trajectories of individuals, objects and ideas cut across the largely imaginary boundaries traditionally used to divide the Middle East and Africa. African Muslims have maintained intimate ties with their non-African brethren across space through various intellectual, economic and political relationships throughout the history of Islam. However, they have also remained entwined across time via engagement with the more or less commonly accepted canon of the faith and what Talal Asad has termed the ‘discursive tradition.’ This essay demonstrates the persistence of these processes through the age of European colonialism into the early twentieth century. But equally important is the way in which the increasingly elaborate and rapid networks of empire created in the nineteenth century facilitated and intensified the interaction of both people and ideas helping create the modern horizontally integrated community of believers.

From Islamicizing the Sciences to Strategizing for Muslims’ Scientific Breakthrough

At inception, science and religion were seen as poles apart and so science was vehemently kicked against by religious leaders. Islam later came to bridge the gap between religion and science only to be later hijacked by the Western world and so science was rewritten from a purely materialist point of view; hence, experts in modern science became over-confident and arrogant to have relegated religion to the lowest ebb and looked down upon any knowledge which could not be scientifically proved. However attempts are being made to reconcile religion and science by Muslim reformers. These attempts are not without their shortcomings, hence the need for Islamization of the sciences for them to conform to the Islamic principle of unity of knowledge. However, the present researcher feels that there should be a step forward from the contemporary approaches to Islamicizing the sciences in form of colouring the Western scientific discoveries Islam, to making their own scientific breakthroughs, the type which immortalized Muslim scientists of the Islam’s golden ages. Without this, Muslims will continue to be mere consumers of the Western products. The strategy for the Ummah to achieve this is suggested in this paper.

Pemikiran Islam Kontemporer Abdullah Saeed dan Implementasinya dalam Persoalan Murtad

Western media coverage on Islam and especially on terror attacks by Muslims has been exaggerated and pejorative. This stereotyping has portrayed Islam as problems. First, Islam is seen as sluggish in responding modernity and the advance of science and knowledge so it always lacks behind the West. Second, Islam is associated with extremism and terrorism which are incompatible with the West. Therefore, the emergence of rational thinking and cosmopolitan approach to Islam promoted by Muslim reformists, such as Abdullah Saeed, are very urgent to encounter such stereotype and discourse on Islam in the West. This article examines Saeed’s method called “progressive Islam”. By taking one example of conversion (murtād), this article elucidates how the method of ijtihād progressive is applied in one of the most controversial topics in Islamic law. This study shows that the law on murtād, as it was introduced by classical Muslim jurists, is now adopted by Muslim countries. However, such adoption does not have a sound ground on the Qur’anic texts and the Sunnah.
 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20414/ujis.v19i1.1251

Destiny: The Life of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, 1785–1855 by Peter Carey (review)

Reviewed by: Destiny: The Life of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, 1785–1855 by Peter Carey Anton O. Zakharov Destiny: The Life of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, 1785–1855 Peter Carey Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. xlix, 381 pp., illus. US $81.95. ISBN 978-3-0343-0926-4 Prince Diponegoro is an Indonesian national hero who led a major uprising against the Dutch colonial regime, or the Java War, in 1825–30 and who wrote a valuable autobiography Babad Dipanagara. His life and the Java War itself have been subjects of numerous stories, research and ever paintings. Peter Carey, who published Diponegoro’s biography The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–1855 in 2007 (Leiden: KITLV Press) offers an updated reconstruction of his life. The new book title speaks for itself: Diponegoro’s life is treated as determined by his specific environments that considerably and even drastically changed over [End Page 120] time, and their connections with changing world patterns as well as inner Javanese developments. Carey shows that Diponegoro became the ‘crucial figure’ of the Java War (p. 327) due to historical coincidence. Despite the fact that the Java War was decisively the summit of Diponegoro’s fate—the time when he enjoyed greatest impact on the Dutch and Javanese—Carey places his life in a much broader historical context covering economic, social, political, and cultural changes in Europe that were influenced by the Double Revolution and in turn had influenced the changes in Southeast Asia and particularly in Java. Carey divides his book into four well-balanced parts of three chapters each: ‘Youth and Upbringing, 1785–1808’, ‘The Beginning of the Ruin of the Land of Java, 1808–1812’, ‘Golden Years, Iron Years, 1812–1825’, and ‘War and Exile, 1825–1855’. The monograph also contains a glossary of Javanese terms and an index. The first chapter, ‘Diponegoro’s Youth and Upbringing, 1785–1803’, shows that the prince was greatly influenced by his great-grandmother, Ratu Ageng Tegalrejo, who was his guardian and to whom he was obliged for his early and deep acquaintance with the needs of Javanese peasantry, for his great devotion to Muslim beliefs and Javanese practices, for his knowledge of the ideas and representatives of the Javanese Muslim (santri) communities in south-central Java. Such upbringing was unusual for the Yogyakarta princes and may be treated as a factor of Diponegoro’s unique destiny. The death of Ratu Ageng in 1803 made Diponegoro the lord of her estate, Tegalrejo, and opened a new page in his life. The second chapter, ‘Young Manhood: Marriage, Education and Links with the Religious (santri) Community, 1803–1805’, stresses that, despite his impressive knowledge of Javanese and Muslim literary works, Diponegoro was in fact an ‘autodidact’ (p. 31). The prince ‘[w]as more a typical Javanese mystic than an orthodox Muslim reformer’ who concentrated more on ‘the use of dhikr (short prayers for the glorification of Allah endlessly repeated in ritual order and on various forms of meditation’ (pp. 33–4). Carey also emphasizes that Diponegoro was ‘flawed and all too human’, a fact which may be easily ignored due to on-going national myth-making in Indonesia (p. 42). The third chapter, ‘Pilgrimage to the South Coast, circa 1805’, sheds a light on Diponegoro’s wanderings and spiritual visions. From them he learned that he ‘would become king’ (p. 51), that ‘the ruin of the Land of Java’ would begin soon, and that he should help his father and reject the title of Crown prince. Carey takes Diponegoro’s own stories about these prophecies, be they correct or imaginary, as the indispensable markers of his destiny. Diponegoro also strongly identified himself with the Javanese puppet theatre (wayang) hero Arjuna, a famous ascetic warrior. The fourth chapter, ‘The Beginning of Ruin: Daendels’ “New Order” and the Central Javanese Courts, 1808’ touches upon Marshal Daendels’ reforms in Java. Daendels ordered new etiquette and ceremonial to the Yogyakarta court that had [End Page 121] broken the Yogyanese perception of Java as divided between the Dutch in west Java with Batavia and the Sultan of Yogyakarta in south-central and eastern Java. From then on...

Indonesia. Islam, nationalism and democracy: A political biography of Mohammad Natsir By Audrey R. Kahin Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 235. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Indonesia. Islam, nationalism and democracy: A political biography of Mohammad Natsir By Audrey R. Kahin Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 235. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 46 Issue 2

Modernist Reform and Independence Movements

This article makes initial observations on various historical relations and analogical comparisons between the Central Asian Muslim and Korean modernist reform and independence movements from 1850 to 1940. It presents a more nuanced and integrated understanding of Asian and world history as it took shape across “the long 19th century” while also laying ground work for further research. It introduces newly translated Kazakh and Turkish source material, particularly that of Ibrai Altinsarin, the Kazakh modernist educator, and Abdurreshid Ibrahim, the Turkic-Tatar advocate of Japanese-led Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian cooperation. The essay follows a historical, rather than analogical approach, placing each movement respectively in its broader shared Asian and world historical context, leaving the reader to discern points of comparison and contrast. It argues first that certain Central Asian and Korean reform and independence leaders not only were aware of and sympathetic toward one another’s predicaments, but encountered one another, particularly in Russian Asia, Manchuria, Japan, and even Korea. Second, both came under the direct influence of a significant number of the same sources, particularly Meiji Japan.

Muslim Response to the West: A Comparative Study of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Said Nursi

During the 19th and 20th centuries, the entire world witnessed dynamic changes. Dramatic alterations such as the decline of the Ottoman Empire, colonization of Muslim lands, two world wars, divisions in the Muslim world and quest for unity, emergence of major ideologies like Communism, Capitalism, Materialism, and other political changes like the French Revolution affected the globe in general and the Muslim world in particular. These ideologies and philosophies earmarked the development of the Western world, which created imbalance and resulted in the socio-political and economic hegemony of the West on the rest of the world. With the intellectual and military domination of the West over the Muslim world, a process of taking over Western institutions for the benefit of the Muslim world commenced. Islam became a rallying point against these philosophies and hegemony. Many Muslim reformers and intellectuals worked to counter Western influence on Muslim institutions and ideas, which resulted in the emergence of various reform movements that arose from different parts of the Muslim world. While some reformers rejected the West at the outset, others advocated the West and still other reformers maintained a balance between the two. Notable among such Muslim thinkers and reformers were the Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) and the Turk Said Nursi (1876-1960), who left such an indelible imprint on Muslims minds that their ideas and thoughts are still reverberating in both the academic and public discourses. Since these two contemporary scholars witnessed the whole milieu of the changing Muslim world, this paper aims to analyze and compare their response to the West.

Turning the Tables: Perspectives on the Construction of “Muslim Manhood”

This article analyzes the alternative discursive strategy undertaken by Muslim women reformists, in different contexts and for different purposes, which can be described as turning the tables on Muslim men. The process involves a reversal of roles, in which women take on the religious responsibility of holding men accountable to certain Islamic ideals or ethics, judging and correcting their conduct, and demanding behavioral change. Hence, in effect, they are engaged in producing a new discourse on men in Islam, their duties and morals, as well as re-defining male identity according to Islamic ethical standards and from the perspective of Muslim women. The article also analyzes how male writers themselves conceive manhood and the characteristics of “men” in Islam. I examine three cases, arguing their correspondence to three distinctive perspectives on manhood in Islamic discourses: (a) medieval representations of the male character that concentrate on the relational dimension vis-à-vis women in the family; (b) the modernist conception of masculinity that emphasizes inherent qualities based on biological essentialism; (c) women reformists, from three different time periods, who have attempted a reconstruction of manhood and a re-definition of men as “domestic” beings by measuring them against Qurʾanic ideals and the model of the prophets.

Islam is a foreign country: American Muslims and the global crisis of authority

Acknowledgments Introduction: Unmapping the Muslim World Part I: The Roots and Routes of Islam in America 1 Islam Is a Foreign Country: Mapping the Global Crisis of Authority 2 Islamic Utopias, American Dystopia: Muslim Moral Geographies after the Great Migration 3 Imaginary Homelands, American Dreams: Sunni Moral Geographies after 1965 Part II: Tradition Bound 4 Retrieving Tradition: Pedagogical Forms and Secular Reforms 5 Choosing Tradition: Women Student-Travelers between Resistance and Submission 6 Transmitting Tradition: The Constraints of Crisis 7 Muslim Reformers and the American Media: The Exceptional Umma and Its Emergent Moral Geography Epilogue: American Muslims and the Place of Dissent Notes IndexAbout the Author