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

  We Cannot Escape Metaphysics: Why Every Islamic Interpretation Rests on Deeper Assumptions   Adis Duderija Many Muslims today want to focus on what they see as practical questions: How should we interpret the Qur’an? What is God’s justice? Who has religious authority? What rights do human beings possess? How should revelation relate to changing historical circumstances? These are important questions. But there is a deeper issue that often goes unnoticed. Before we answer any of them, we already carry certain assumptions about reality itself. Philosophers call these assumptions  metaphysics . Put simply, metaphysics concerns our most basic beliefs about what is real, what has value, how power works, what it means to be human, and how God relates to the world. This is why every account of Islamic hermeneutics presupposes a metaphysics of meaning. Every account of divine justice presupposes a metaphysics of moral value. Every account of religious authority presu...

  Islam Is Not a Museum Piece: Why Process Thought Matters for the Future of My Islamic   Faith     Adis Duderija I am often asked, by fellow Muslims and by curious outsiders alike, what “ progressive Islam “ actually means. Is it just liberal politics dressed up in Arabic vocabulary? A watered-down accommodation to modernity? I want to suggest something different: progressive Islam is best understood not as a fixed set of positions at all, but as a community of becoming — a community defined less by the doctrines it holds than by the orientation it takes toward growth, responsibility, and the ongoing work of moral discernment. That may sound abstract, so let me make it concrete. For centuries, much of Islamic theology has assumed, often without saying so out loud, that reality is made up of fixed, self-contained things: a fixed human nature, a fixed law, a fixed and unchanging relationship between God and the world. On this picture, the task of religion i...

   Muslims   Need a Fresh   Imagination of God—and of Reality   Adis Duderija If there is one idea that could fundamentally transform how Islam is lived and understood in the 21st century, it is this: reality itself is not static. It is relational, dynamic, and in constant becoming . And if that is true, then Islam—like everything else—cannot be reduced to a fixed system of doctrines or laws frozen in time. It must be recognised as an unfolding, participatory process. This is precisely where progressive Islam, at its most intellectually serious, makes its most important contribution. It is not simply advocating reform, nor merely updating old interpretations to suit modern sensibilities. It is grounded in a far deeper shift—a process-relational understanding of existence that recasts God, revelation, tradition, and ethics as dynamic rather than static realities. At stake here is not only theological nuance, but the future of Islam as a lived, mor...

  Liberating Islam: A Call for Dynamic, Comparative Critique in an Age of Stereotypes   Adis Duderija In an era where Islam is often reduced to headlines of conflict, extremism, and cultural clashes, the words of the late Algerian-French scholar Mohammed Arkoun resonate with urgent clarity. In his seminal work, Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers (translated and edited by Robert D. Lee, Boulder, 1994), Arkoun declares: "I have sought to liberate critical discourse on Islam and so-called Muslim from all these limitations and contradictions by systematically choosing a dynamic vision rather than a static presentation, a bundle of methods taught by the social sciences rather than one method privileged over all others, and a comparative approach rather than the ethnographic view taken by those who tend to enclose and marginalize Islam in 'specificity,' particularism, and singularities." (p.1) This statement isn't just academic jargon—it's a...

  Living in the Ocean of God ‘God and the world live together in a mutual coinhabitation, mutually immanent to, and caught up with, one another in a mutual adventure of relationality and creativity, compassion and beauty, love and surprise’ (Faber 2019, 59). Roland Faber, The Ocean of God What if God is not somewhere “up there,” watching the world from a safe distance, but is instead living with us—deeply involved, responsive, and vulnerable to what happens here and now? That is the unsettling and deeply hopeful vision offered by theologian Roland Faber, who writes that “God and the world live together in a mutual coinhabitation, mutually immanent to, and caught up with, one another in a mutual adventure of relationality and creativity, compassion and beauty, love and surprise.” This is not the God many people imagine. The familiar picture—especially in popular religion—is of an all-powerful, all-knowing being who stands above history, unmoved by pain and untouched by change. In ...

  Toshihiko Izutsu’s God and Man in the Qur’an: Semantics of the Qur’anic Weltanschauung stands as a watershed moment in the history of Islamic studies, representing a rigorous application of linguistic analysis to the foundational text of Islam. Published originally in 1964, the work introduced a methodological framework—semantics—that sought to move beyond traditional philology or purely theological exegesis to uncover the "structural genius" of the Qur’anic world-system. By treating the Qur’anic vocabulary not as a collection of isolated terms but as a dynamic, interconnected "Gestalt," Izutsu provided a blueprint for understanding how the revelation fundamentally reconfigured the Arabian mental universe. The Methodological Innovation: Semantics as a Cultural Science The primary importance of the book lies in its methodological clarity. Izutsu defines semantics as the analytic study of key terms with the goal of arriving at a conceptual grasp of a people's W...