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

In this article progressive Muslim thought is defined in relation to what Moosa terms the “innovation, discontinuity and continuity” [i] of the accumulated Muslim tradition ( Islamic tradition ) and its approach to and the understanding of the notion of late [ii] modernity and its underlying worldview. In this context I am not interested in discussing the concept of late modernity and its episteme [iii] from a philosophical vantage point but define it by some of its most important  defining characteristics in relation to its social, cultural, political and religious elements including  the emphasis on critical thought, dynamism, [iv] rationality and epistemological/methodological pluralism. The first point that needs to be made is that progressive Muslims’ concept and engagement with the Islamic tradition rejects the NTS assumption of the regressive character of history/time and the static nature of the Islamic tradition described in the second chapter. Apart from s...

 In order to better  understand the way progressive Muslims engage and conceptualise the Islamic tradition and the manner in which they approach modernity and its epistemology  progressive Muslim thought needs to be placed in the broader context of the not only the past intellectual movements based on the indigenous Islamic tradition stemming from the Muslim majority world but also but also those intellectual streams  originating from the non-Muslim majority realm which can be considered as its predecessors in relation to how they deal with the questions pertaining to interpretation of religion and sacred texts , and as a corollary, interpretation of history and time. This is so because progressive Muslim thought, as shall be argued below, is marked by epistemological pluralism and methodological fluidity and self-consciously incorporates modern episteme when self-defining itself. Wright in his Ph.D. thesis Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics makes a compelling case f...