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by braj » Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:27 am
By The Name of Allah, The Most Merciful, The Most Beneficial
Why the doors of Ijitihad must reopen
Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmed Badawi said recently that "Ijitihad" or independent reasoning should be encouraged in Islam. In complete agreement is Farish A. Noor who argues that Islam will become exclusive, dogmatic and rigid if Muslims are prevented from critically examining and understanding their religion.
As a cultural movement Islam rejects the old static view of the universe and reaches a dynamic view. The ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals itself in variety and change.
A society based on such a conception of reality must reconcile, in its life, the category of permanence and change. It must possess eternal principles to regulate its collective life.
But eternal principles when they are understood to exclude all possibilities of change tend to immobilize what is essentially mobile in nature. What then is this principle of movement in the nature of Islam?
This is known as "Ijitihad". Thus wrote the Muslim philosopher and poet, Maulana Muhammed Iqbal in his work "The Reconstruction of the Religious Thought in Islam".
Iqbal touched on the subject of the dynamics of Islam civilization and cultural development for one simple reason. He was rejecting the claim that Islam culture and civilization had come to a standstill and was arguing against the finality of thought and ideas in the intellectual circles of Muslim thinkers, theologians and leaders.
For him, the Muslim world had reached a point of crisis for the simple reason that the religious leaders among the Muslims had voluntarily closed off all possibility of further thought and critical innovation among Muslims. After centuries of intra-Muslim doctrinal disputes which led to the emergence of the major schools of Islamic legal thought: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafie and Hanbali, the ulama of the 10th century declared that the doors of "Ijitihad" (Independent reasoning) is shut.
The closing of the doors of "Ijitihad" by the ulama of the 10th century was a deliberate act to safeguard the interests of Muslims.
The ulama believed that by doing so they would help bring about greater unity in mind and purpose among the Muslims, and stop arguing and engaging in countless polemics and confrontations about the correct interpretation of Islam.
This move was fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons. It failed to produce the results that the ulama and Muslim leaders wanted so badly.
Muslim splinter groups and sects continued to emerge time and again, such as the Ahmadis and others. It also did not prevent some Muslim leaders from wantonly reinventing Islam to suit their purposes, such as the case of the Moghul empreor Jallaluddin Muhammed Akbar who created his own hybrid faith known as the Deen-illahi in Moghul India.
Furthermore, if the closing of the doors of "Ijitihad" was meant to end or at least contain the civil strife that had torn its way through the Muslim community, it must be remembered that the roots of the disturbances were not always religious or founded on disagreements over doctrine and dogma: More other than not, Muslims confronted each other for political, economic and strategic reasons as well.
But perhaps the most serious outcome of the closing of the doors of "Ijitihad" was that it closed the doors of Islamic intellectual space and gave the ulama the sole right and privilege to dominate and control the discussions and debates that were taking place within the Muslim intellectual world.
What it did, in effect, was to elevate them to an even higher position to the status of the defenders and disseminators of the "true" and "authentic" version of Islam.
Islam and Muslims have been burdened by the demands of this discourse of authenticity ever since. For centuries, Muslims have been had to deal with the legacy left behind by the conservative ulama of the past.
The ulama of the 10th century had created a stifling and narrow intellectual environment that ensured that knowledge - both religious and profane - in the Islamic world would not be able to develop without going through a rigid order of regimentation and regulation first.
The ulama's rigid control over what could be said and what could be discussed effectively cut of the rest of the Muslim community from the intellectual developments that were taking place in Islamic legal, theocratic and philosophical circles, making Islamic discourse less and less open an egalitarian and instead turning it into an exclusive space that was available only to the Muslim clerical elite who had passed the same tests of accreditation.
Islam was, in short, reinvented into a more exclusive and dogmatic religion with a pseudo-clerical class at its helm, while in its early form Islam was more open and Muslim society was free of such artificial hierarchies.
The world of Islam that was created as a result of the closing of the doors of "Ijitihad" was also less dynamic and less able to meet with the demands of the changing times.
The ulama who became the literal and illuminati of the Muslim world, eventually fulfilled he same role as the Mandarins of the Confucianist China. Both the Mandarins of ancient China and the ulama of the age of classical Islam had the same intention: to control the production and the reproduction of knowledge and to preserve only what they regarded as worthy of preservation.
In the Muslim world as was the case with China, this tendency towards intellectual policing managed to produce positive results in the beginning (such as the codification of knowledge and laws), but eventually created ossified and monolithic systems of thought that were slow to develop and rigid in their execution.
With the power of the European power in the Western renaissance, it was clear that the Muslim world (like Chinese civilization then), was not able to meet and counter the challenges directed against it.
Muslims eventually retreated back into their fabled past and dream of the "golden age" of Islam that provided them with little solace for their stagnation and decrepitude in the real world of the present.
What has become clear by now is that the decision to close the doors of "Ijitihad" had less to do with the desire to maintain and preserve the purity of the faith and more to do the desire on the part of some conservative Muslim scholars to maintain their own grip on a system of discourse that was open to all.
It was for this reason that Muhammed Iqbal condemned the mindset which sees the closing of the doors of "Ijitihad" as something irreversible and final. He wrote thus: "The closing of the door of Ijitihad is a pure fiction suggestion by the crystallization of legal thought in Islam, and partly by that intellectual laziness which in periods of spiritual decay turns great thinkers into idols for the masses".
The fault therefore lay not only with the ulama who claim to be the sole possessors of real knowledge of Islam, but also with ordinary Muslims who have relinquished their right (and their obligation) to learn about Islam and to think critically.
Today, we are still burdened with the legacy that has been left behind by the ulama of the past. In the contemporary Muslim world, we see that Muslims are more divided than ever.
In an age where Muslim states are desperately trying to maintain an adequate pace in the race of development, Muslims remain under the influence of religious leaders whose claim to authority and power rest solely on their status as the bearers of "authentic" traditions and religious knowledge.
It is undeniable that for a vast section of Muslims today, modernity and the development of the modern age represent daunting challenges to their inherited world view.
In the developed capitalist countries the "global citizens" of the borderless world speak and think as if geography was no longer relevant and frontiers no longer exist.
But in many parts of the Muslim world, Muslims still live in a state of deprivation and backwardness. Muslims the world over are still deprived of decent education, health, care, communications as well as their political and economic rights.
The plight ofMuslim women in particular, in counlike Pakistan, Afghanistan and others is so pathetic that it defies belief. Under such circumstances, we need to ask ourselves if the closing of the doors of "Ijitihad" is something that has helped Muslims to live amidst the painful realities of this modern world.
Can Muslims still hope to find their salvation in the empty slogans that have been repeated, ad nauseam, by the same school of ulama as generations before?
As Iqbal once described it: "Such is the lot of Muslim societies today. They are mechanically repeating old values. The question that confronts the Muslims today, and which is likely to confront Muslim societies in the future, is whether the law of Islam is capable of evolution?"
While some sections of the Muslim ulama and the Islamist movements continue to reiterate their claim that the plight of Muslims would be resolved if only they returned to the "pure" Islam of the past, there is a growing body of contemporary Muslim thinkers who are calling for the reopening of the doors of Ijitihad.
Ironically, these reformers include some of the more prominent Muslim thinkers of the 19th and the 20th centuries like Jamaluddin al-Afghani and Muhammed Iqbal, who were not too long ago the heros of the Islamists as well.
The opening of the doors of Ijitihad is the only way through which the socio-cultural, intellectual, political and economic dynamics of Muslim society can be revived from within.
Muslims of the modern world can no longer deal with the problems of modernity by using ancient remedies. Believing in empty promises or fantasies about the past will not feed the poor nor clothe the needy.
Fables about the grandeur of Islam will not educate the young, nor will they bring justice to the Muslims who cry out for them. What is needed more than ever today, is the revival of the spirit of Ijitihad which takes as its starting point the simple premise that not all the answers to the Muslims' questions can be found with a group of religious scholars alone.
The future of Islam depends on the entire community, and not only the ulama. What is more, the Muslim community needs to be allowed to find the answers it seeks without being restricted by the self-appointed guardians of their faith.
As Iqbal once wrote: "The teaching of the Quran that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems".
From New Strait Times Newspaper the issue of January 17, 2000.
