The Qur'an

Modern Muslim Interpretations

Massimo Campanini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136927638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Qur'an: Modern Muslim Interpretations offers a lucid guide to how Muslims have read the Qur'an in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Massimo Campanini explores early approaches to the understanding of the Qur'an, including that of the Salafis and the construction of the Islamic Renaissance Movement, contrasting the development of traditionalist and 'scientific' interpretations and examining the work of the phenomenologists who followed. This lively book explores the radical ideas of Sayyid Qutb and his followers, a significant part of what is known as political Islamism, and investigates the idea of exegesis as a liberation theology, through the work of Esack and Wadud.

Students taking courses on the interpretation of the Qur'an will find this an invaluable aid to their study, and it is essential reading for all those interested in how Muslims have understood the Qur'an in the contemporary period.

Chapter 1
Traditional commentary

SALAFI COMMENTARY

1

While starting from what could be described as a “traditional” standpoint, Salafi commentaries are, nevertheless, the first of the twentieth century to move in the direction of praxis through a renewal of its exegetical categories. The term Salafi refers to an important reformist movement born in the last decades of the nineteenth century in reaction to the impact on Muslim peoples of a Europe then at the peak of its military and economic power.¹ The Salafi movement can be seen as the final outcome of a process that had seen Muslim intellectuals at first enthusiastically embracing and accepting modernity. This was followed by an ever-increasing sense of disillusionment with the fact that modernity benefited the colonisers but not the colonised. The latter were excluded culturally and exploited economically, remaining on the margins of history. Albert Hourani writes:

The occupation of Tunis by France in 1881, of Egypt by England in 1882, pointed the moral, and from that time there took place a radical change in the political thought of the Near East. For some of the Near Eastern Christians, indeed, the advantages of the European presence might outweigh its disadvantages; European domination did not challenge their whole view of the universe, and it might hold out hopes of influence and culture for their community, of prosperity for themselves. For a Muslim, however, whether he was Turkish or Arab, the seizure of power by Europe meant that his community was in danger. The umma was, among other things, a political community expressing itself in all the forms of political life, and a community which has no power may cease to exist. The problem of inner decay still exercised men’s minds, but there was grafted on to it a new problem, that of survival: how could the Muslim countries resist the new danger from outside?²

Or, as Basheer Nafi puts it:

[G]one was the clean, harmonious, charitable, prosperous West that was depicted in al-Tahtawi’s [the Egyptian scholar who visited France in the 1830s] Takhlis al-’Ibriz, the west of the enlightenment, of the French revolution, of Mill, Darwin, Spencer and Comte, under whose impacts and in whose image, Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, ‘Ali Mubarak, Muhammad ‘Abduh, and the young Rida moulded their visions of modern Islam. In its place, a new version was being pieced together of a ruthless, exploitative, self-destructive and lethal West.³

The American scholar Tamara Sonn goes so far as to attribute the rise of radical Islamism to this period:

The stress on reason and science in nineteenth-century Islamic reform movements was accompanied by an optimism that was lost in the aftermath of World War I. Instead of gaining independence and progress, those Muslims who supported the European war effort remained under colonial rule or great-power influence. This disappointment caused a backlash against the earlier reform efforts and eroded the Muslims’ admiration for the European culture of Enlightenment. Some Muslim leaders embraced Soviet-style militant socialism. But on the popular level a more indigenous approach to cultural and political empowerment, based on Islamic symbols and values, had greater appeal and led to the emergence of a movement variously called fundamentalism, Islamism and political Islam.⁴

Salafiyya puts forward a plan of reform based on the “Islamisation of modernity”.⁵ This phrase is used to describe the tendency that regards Islam as fully able to deal with the challenges of modernity and able, furthermore, to subsume modernity into its own intellectual categories. Since modernity has for decades – and particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – been identified with colonialism and the political, economic and cultural subordination of Islamic countries to the triumphant Western model, it comes as no surprise that the reaction would be concerned to stress the merits in, and offered by, Islam.

One of the essential themes of this new approach is the conviction that Islam is perhaps the most rational of all religions. Although not a commentator on the Qur’an, an Indian philosopher (living in what is now Pakistan), Muhammad Iqb

l (1873–1938), said:

[I]n view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science. Science may ignore a rational metaphysics; indeed, it has ignored it so far. Religion can hardly afford to ignore the search for a reconciliation of the oppositions of experience and a justification of the environment in which humanity finds itself.⁶

The encounter with Greek philosophy in the early years of Islamic expansion, while broadening the outlook of Muslim thinkers, had, at the same time, the effect of obscuring their understanding of the Qur’an.⁷ For this reason, Iqb

l advocates a return to a proper understanding of the Scripture, the spirit of which he describes as anti-classical, in the sense that, contrary to Socrates and Plato, it is not simply anthropological, nor is it inimical ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Translator’s introduction
• Introduction: The Qur’an and praxis
• Chapter 1 Traditional commentary
• Chapter 2 The Qur’an as text, discourse and structure
• Chapter 3 Radical exegesis of the Qur’an
• Chapter 4 The Qur’an and the hermeneutics of liberation
• Appendix Other areas of Qur’anic exegesis
• Notes
• Index