[Reader-list] Rethinking Islam

[S. Jabbar]

Thanks for the post, Shuddha. A quick reply as I must dash off this morning.
Your question about textual inconsistencies in works considered to be
immaculate I¹m sure will spark off a huge debate‹ not all savoury.

Spot on about curiosity.  Many of us are born into traditions we accept at
face value or don¹t bother to examine because we can¹t be bothered etc.  My
studies of various traditions over the years has brought me if nothing else
great excitement and food for thought and further whetted, what seems to be
insatiable curiosity about history and philosophy and the history of various
philosophic traditions.

Before somebody jumps down my throat I wish to preface the following 3 brief
observations with a disclaimer that I too, like M. Shuddha, am a mere
student and not an authority, and I should be happy to be corrected if
wrong.

The first is regarding practice within Islam.  The Qur¹an was revealed over
a period of 21 years and many practices seem to have changed or been added
over the course of its development. Few Muslims know, for instance, that the
Qiblah‹ or the direction of prayer‹ which is considered so basic and
fundamental, was towards Jerusalem, and that only in 624 AD, a full 14 years
after the beginning of the revelations did the Prophet change it towards the
Kaaba in Mecca.  The decision had less to do with religion than politics.
It appears that the early Muslims had wanted to align their religion with
the Judaeo-Christian tradition, wanted it to appear as a worthy successor to
an illustrious lineage than a new, Œstand alone¹ religion.  It was only when
problems arose with the Jews of Medina that the act of praying towards Mecca
became a Œtradition.¹  There appear to be many such examples including your
illustration of the Treaty of Mecca.  Like Sardar stresses in the essay I
posted earlier, traditions only remain relevant if they are dynamic,
changing with the exigencies of the times.  Perhaps a contemporary Ijtehad
needs to take a good look at  spirit of the Treaty of Mecca.

To follow the thread of our earlier converstaion about Buddhism and Ijtehad,
the Tibetan Gelug tradition that strictly follows the Prasangika Madhyamik
school has the following criterion to judge the authenticity of a work or
teaching of the Buddha:
1. The teacher of the work must me able to follow the link from his teacher
all the way back to the Buddha himself (quite in the way families trace
their lineage backward through Œx begat y begat z¹)
2. The work should have been subject to the analysis and commentaries of the
Nalanda masters. 
3. In practice, one of the 84 Mahasiddhas should have put the teaching
through the rigours of meditative practice.  And most importantly,
4. If, in spite of the criteria cited above, the work  cannot stand up to
the rigour of logic, debate and commonsense it ought to be discarded.

And finally Patna-- it seems felicitous that Ram Mohun Roy spent his
childhood there and that even in the 19th and early 20th c., Bihar (Vihara
of old) was a place of learning and not the Gangland of today.  Rahul
Sankrityayana spent time there too and there is a museum, I believe,
dedicated to him in Patna‹ Sankrityayana being the Hindi writer and
inveterate traveller who mastered the tripitaka and then traveled to Tibet a
few times, making the journey on foot and muleback to bring back to India
bag-loads of ancient Buddhist texts which he translated from the Tibetan
back into Sanskrit, completing the circle of the texts that traveled from
Nalanda to Tibet.
That R.M.R studied at a madrassahat Patna is fascinating and points to the
quality of education in those institutions, underscoring the need to
challenge the present stranglehold of the ill-educated.

Thanks for the reference to the Dabistan.  I found this translation within a
few seconds of doing a search. Jai Google! Jai www!

Best
sj





On 4/29/08 7:28 AM, "Shuddhabrata Sengupta" <shuddha at sarai.net> wrote:

> Dear Sonia, dear all, 
> 
> 
> 
> thanks for the ongoing correspondence on the matter of rethinking Islam. 
> 
> 
> 
> I think rethinking Islam is as important as rethinking Hinduism, or Sikhism,
> Buddhism, Environmental Thought, Automobile Engineering, Anarchism,
> aesthetics, cooking, Communism, transport, biology, quantum physics, sexuality
> and gardening. That's my list for the moment, on other days it expands and
> contracts to include or evade other categories. In other words I think
> rethinking Islam is crucial, in a world where the word 'Islam' (like many
> other words, including all the words in the above list) is deployed by people
> that I would both, happily agree with, and totally argue against, but in
> either case have questions for. I like questions. I enjoy the way they turn,
> rise and fall.
> 
> 
> 
> I would like to thank Sardar Master Gyani Kirdar Saheb for the honorific of
> Maulavi that he has bestowed upon me, of which I am entirely undeserving. The
> word, Maulvi, (which in Persian, derives from the root Maula, in Araibic,
> which in turn is related to Ma'al, or property connotes a certain degree of
> mastery, it signifies some one who has property, or as we say in Hindustani,
> 'jaagir') and I have none; least of all in the matter of Islamic theology,
> exegesis, fiqh or history. Islam is not my property,  not my jaagir, neither
> is 'Hindusim' or any other belief system. I am curious. I have questions. I
> try and pursue these questions. I recognize in Sonia's post a similar desire
> to ask questions. I respond to her questions, with some speculations of my
> own. I do not 'know' Islam, in the same way as I do not 'know' the history of
> science fiction in the erstwhile Soviet Union, or travel literature in the
> Bengali language, or the internal debates within the Mahayana tradition.These
> are areas I have interests in and questions about. To be curious, or
> interested, is not necessarily to be a master, Kirdar ji, nevertheless, in his
> generosity, mistakes my curiosity for mastery. 
> 
> 
> 
> Perhaps all you gyani and guni jan have some answers. Since I don't, I will
> stick to what I know best, which is the act of asking questions.
> 
> 
> 
> So, here are some more questions.
> 
> 
> 
> If the textual substance of any body of knowledge, say scripture, is
> considered immaculate and perfect, how then does one explain an inconsistency
> within the corpus of the text? And I am doing this in order to try and be
> responsive and responsible to Kshemendra's request to keep the discussion
> going in a workmanlike manner. So, In the specific history of Islamic
> exegesis, this is a problem to do with the abrogation, or annulment of certain
> quranic injunctions, by others, which means, certain commandments and
> injunctions are thought of as being cancelled by others, as if God changes his
> mind. Typically for instance, the ecumenical spirit of the Treaty of Medina,
> which is the first inter communal constitutional document in human history,
> which spells out a charter of tolerance (between Jews, the recent Muslims,
> Christians, and others) and a very significant move towards an acknowledgment
> of the need to 'iive with difference' gets cancelled, by later, so called,
> 'second' Meccan injunctions of a more intolerant nature, that govern the
> relations between believers and others. When faced with questions of this
> nature, we need to ask - "Are we given to understand that the truth of
> revelation consists in the cancellation of tolerance by subsequent
> intolerance. Is God, first tolerant, and then intolerant towards the same
> people." We are also asked to think about the limits and boundaries of
> tolerance. It was problems like these that led the Muta'zilities to think in
> terms of trying to analyse human agency in what had hitherto been seen as
> divinely inspired revelation. They were pious, but intended to try and not
> impose consistencies between pefection and inconstancy.They reasoned that  If
> god was perfect, he could not be inconsistent, and if there was inconsistence,
> it meant that the corpus of the quran, needed to be seen as a result of the
> interaction between divine perfection and imperfect, contingent, human
> understanding. The quran, or for that matter, any scripture, any philosophy,
> needed interpretation, analysis and criticism, in order to continue to be seen
> as relevant in the domain of changing human affairs. 
> 
> 
> 
> I think this holds true, not just for quranic exegesis, but of all matters
> where we are faced with the claim of unchagning authority in the light of
> radically changing circumstances. It is from matters such as these that I try
> and derive a personal ethics of scepticism. I am aware of a great deal of work
> being done, for instance, by some interesting young Sikh theologians,
> primarily in Canada and the United States, who are working quite closely on
> matters of exegetical enquiry in the Sikh tradition, fbut whose work will
> never be accepted or tolerated by the 'panthic' leadership, who want to
> present a sanitized Sikhi to their adherents. Of the current state of
> Hinduism, the less said the better, because the entire tradition of
> philosophical debate within the Sanskrit tradition has actually been sought to
> be extinguished by the custodians of the Hindutva, who are more busy hunting
> and inventing enemies (including their minions on this list)  than they are in
> serious enquiry and reflection on what they claim to have inherited.
> Similarly, though there has been a lively tradition of debate within
> contemporary Catholic theology, with interesting contributions by feminist
> theologians, the current Pope is a hard core theological reactionary, and is
> in the course of doing lasting damage to the liberty of intellectual inquiry
> within the Catholic tradition. Of course, in Marxism, things are in a mess,
> because the lasting influence of Stalinist, Maoist and Social Democratic
> orthodoxy means that very few self confessed Marxists are even remotely
> prepared to reflect critically on their convictions. Had the gentleman known
> as Karl Heinrich Marx been alive today, he would have been thrown out of the
> vast majority of so called 'leftist' organizations because of  his
> 'irresponsible and subversive' persistence on asking questions about matters
> that the parties concerned considered settled a hundred years ago.
> 
> 
> 
> If you look at some one like Ram Mohan Roy, his interest, in the early
> nineteenth century, while a young student in a madrassah at Patna (in the
> Mutazilite legacy is an interesting case in point about how a person utilizes
> the accidents of their personal life to build a corpus of enqiry. yes, In
> nineteenth century Hindustan it was perfectly normal for a nominal Hindu to be
> educated in a madrassah) But it would be considered odd today. I think this is
> a tragedy. My personal opinion is that the more curious we are about the
> histories of those considered to be 'other' the more interesting our
> examination of ourselves becomes. That is why, I am interested in Muslims who
> are interested in their 'kaffir' inheritance, in Christians who can talk to
> Jews, in observant Jews who feel more at home with Muslims that they do with
> the custodians of Jewish orthodoxy and in atheists like myself (who have come
> to maturity within a Marxist tradition) but who are nevertheless passionately
> interested in entering into dialogues with those who profess to have religious
> experiences of all kinds. Perhaps this is a personal perversino, perhaps not.
> Whatever it may be, it helps me insulate myself from the danger of taking what
> I think, what I have grown to believe, what I know, too seriously. it reminds
> me, forever, that there is always something in the other that i do not know.
> That zone of uncertainty keeps me open and vulnreable to the presence of
> others, and I think it keeps others, reciprocally, open to me. That is why,
> despite the occasional torrents of abuse on this list, it is still
> interesting, and worhtwhile, to have conversations on this list, especially
> with people with whom one does not necessarily agree. 
> 
> 
> 
> To end, Sonia asked, why Patna, what was Ram Mohan Roy  doing in Patna. Well,
> because, he happened to be living there (his father was a minor official in
> Patna) during his late adolescence, and because Patna was the last refuge of a
> remarkable  school of comparative religion which had its core in dissident
> Shi'a enquiry, who doffed a distant hat to the mutazilite legacy and who also
> produced a later medieval classic of comparative religious anthropology called
> the 'Dabistan-e-Mazahib' which Ram Mohan Roy was clearly familiar with. I am
> not aware of sources in English that go into this question of Roy's affinity
> with these people in great detail, there are two major biographies in English,
> one by Iqbal Singh, the other by Mary Carpenter, and both evade this question.
> The Bengali sources, with which I am more familiar point to these contacts
> tangentially, and crucially, the earliest manuscripts, (the Perso-Arabic works
> of Roy) are either textually corrupt or have been lost. There are some Bengali
> scholars, like the Radical Humanist (and lapsed Brahmo) Shib Narain Ray, who
> touch upon this in their essays (in Bengali) but then, they are hardly read
> and commented upon, and a great deal more research needs to be done. I wish
> someone would do it, because I would learn a lot from it. 
> 
> 
> 
> regards
> 
> 
> 
> Shuddha
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> Shuddhabrata Sengupta
> 
> The Sarai Programme at CSDS
> 
> shuddha at sarai.net
> 
> www.sarai.net
> 
> www.raqsmediacollective.net
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