Critical-Progressive Muslims: On Islamic hermeneutics, Gender and Interreligious Dialogue

With the death of the Prophet, Ḥadith attained a semi-formal status. The main purpose of Ḥadith, as mode of Sunnahic transmission, was, according to Rahman, for practical reasons “as something, which could be generated and be elaborated into the practice of the community”. Its random writing down marked the development of Ḥadith during this period of time in simple notebooks usually referred to as ṣaḥīfa/ṣuḥuf.71 Nonetheless, judging by their own involvement in making decisions based upon them, the importance given to Ḥadith at the time of the Caliphs was not great. Juynboll asserts that: It is safe to say that Abu Bakr, the first caliph, cannot be identified with Ḥadith in any extensive way. This may show that during his reign examples set by the prophet or his followers did not play a decisive role in Abu Bakr’s decision making. With regards to second Caliph’s [Umar] use of word Sunnah ‘the term is usually use to mean: the normative behaviour of a good Muslim in the widest...

The concern of this study has been to explore how on the basis of different manahij , and the assumptions that inform them, the two contemporary Islamic schools of thought, Neo-traditional Salafism (NTS) and progressive Muslims, conceptualise their respective versions of a religiously ideal  ‘Believer’ and ‘Muslim Woman’ concepts. A particular focus of the study was to highlight the crucial importance of the act of interpretation and its underlying methodological, epistemological and hermeneutical assumptions in the formulation of the NTS and progressive Muslims representation of these concepts. The broader context of the thesis was informed by the contemporary intra-Muslim debates on the issues of religious authenticity, legitimacy and the authority to speak for, and thus, define the very nature and future of Islam. In this context I pointed out that the existing scholarship suggested that, due to the forces of globalisation and modernisation which favour democratisation of ...

Professors Izutsuand Hallaq  claim that the emerging Qurʾānic Weltanschauung during the revelationary period was not completely divorced from its pre-Qurʾānic one. Although the Qurʾān is to be considered an independent ethico-religious and linguistic entity with its own worldview, it did not claim a complete epistemological break with pre-Qurʾānic Arabia. Over the revelationary period of some two decades, the Qurʾān rejected, modified, condoned and accepted the socio-cultural values and moral of Arabian tribal communionism of pre-Qurʾānic Arabia in accordance with the budding Qurʾānic ontological and ethico-religious value system. The foundation of this emerging Qurʾānic view of “reality” was, quite naturally, the Qurʾān as embodied by the Prophet himself. The notion of Sunnah was, as we argued earlier, a well-known concept in pre-revelational Arabia understood as a normative action-behavioural system set by an individual worthy of tribe’s emulation, in the post-revelatio...