[Reader-list] Rethinking Islam

[S. Jabbar]

Forgot the Dabistan url in the last post:

http://persian.packhum.org/persian/main?url=pf%3Ffile%3D15501050%26ct%3D0


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
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> Shuddha
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> Shuddhabrata Sengupta
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> The Sarai Programme at CSDS
> 
> shuddha at sarai.net
> 
> www.sarai.net
> 
> www.raqsmediacollective.net
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