How to Think About Qur'an and Revelation from the Perspective of Progressive Muslim Thought -A Brief Preliminary Reflection

 CAVEAT -This preliminary reflection is written for non academic audiences and is not meant to be a fully systematic ,academic treatment on the subject but primarily as a piece that I can share on social media. I hope to develop these ideas more fully in the future.

To understand the nature of progressive Muslim thought it is essential to understand how it approaches the nature of the Qur’an and the nature of the idea of Revelation itself. In my previous writings on progressive Islam ( here and here,) drawing upon the work of A. Al-Khuli and Nasr Abu Zayd, I emphasised the idea that progressive Islam considers the Qur’an as a socio-culturally produced and literary discourse or set of discourses (for summary of parts of this work click here). In other words, according to progressive Muslim thought there is an organic and symbiotic link between the specific religious environment out of which the Qur’an emerged and the nature of the Qur’an itself.

Importantly, from the perspective of philosophy of religion that is embraced by progressive Muslim thought, namely one informed by process-relational metaphysics, the concept of “Revelation” (i.e. what constitutes sources of Divine signs) is not text-dependent but emphasises the validity of the concept of “Revelation” by pointing to the idea of: 

1.centrality of human religious experience, including the mystical and perennialist , as a universal phenomenon historically and across diverse cultures and civilisations 

2.  the natural world and human rational faculty as sources of Divine signs. These Divine signs are repeatedly used in the Qur’an as such. In this respect, there is a qualitative difference here between progressive Islam’s approach to Revelation (and the nature Qur’an) and Islamic orthodoxy. For Islamic orthodoxy it is the plain, ahistorical and non-philosophically informed reading of Qur’an itself (and the associated orthodox canonical literature) that sets the parameters of what constitutes Divine signs (including crucially the Qur’an itself) whereas in progressive Muslim thought, the concept of “Revelation” is a by-product of a particular approach to philosophy of religion understood from the perspective of process-relational theology through which Qur’anic theological ideas are conceptualised and interpreted. This difference between the two approaches exists in part, because in progressive Muslim thought the understanding of the emergence and nature of the Qur’an are metaphysically different from that of the Islamic orthodoxy which brings me to another point.  

 

Since the publication of my 2017 book on progressive Islam important studies have been penned by progressive minded Muslim scholars further emphasising the historicity of the Qur’an and the contingent and evolving nature of  human religious experience including that termed “Prophetic” religious experience. Moreover, additional important   research has been produced closely linking the emergence and the nature of the Qur’an to the religious ecosystem of late Antiquity Near-East. This research ,among others, highlights the inter-textual nature of the origins and the composition of the Qur’an. Hence, in concert with process-relational metaphysics/theology and in contrast with orthodox Islamic dogma, progressive Islam’s approach to scripture as source of Divine signs is premised on the metaphysical impossibility of a purely Divine text and the metaphysical impossibility of the non-contingent and non-evolving nature of human religious experience itself including the “Prophetic”.  

Importantly, this approach does not necessarily imply that the Qur’an (or more generally the rich Islamic theological, philosophical, and spiritual mysticism-based literature) is bereft of any sound theological ideas  but that these ideas expressed in the Qur’an ought to be interpreted: 

1. in the light of the metaphysical parameters of process-relational metaphysics in general and process-relation theology specifically both of which reject the concept of God as conceptualised in classical theism (including the Islamic version of it). 

2.in the light of its intertextuality and the historical context in which the Qur’an originated.

As noted above these are ideas that I am still developing and hope to provide more substantial reflections in the future .