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

  On the Concept of a   (Woman)   Saint     Adis Duderija   What comes to mind when we hear the phrase woman saint? For many, the image is almost predetermined: a figure of purity, obedience, humility, and self-sacrifice. She is patient under suffering, submissive to authority, and detached from worldly ambition. Such qualities may indeed characterize some women recognized as saints. Yet, as Robert Ellsberg perceptively observes, these conventional portraits often tell us as much about the expectations of those who wrote the stories as they do about the women themselves.   The history of sainthood has largely been written by men, shaped by institutions dominated by male religious authorities. As a result, women saints have frequently been celebrated for embodying virtues deemed appropriately feminine while other traits have been minimized or ignored. Courage becomes obedience. Leadership becomes service. Intellectual brilliance becomes pi...

 The Poverty of a Worldview Without Imagination Adis Duderija One of the clearest signs that a worldview has become spiritually, aesthetically, and ethically deficient is its inability to make room for imagination, creativity, and genuine novelty. Such a worldview may appear strong, certain, and orderly. It may promise stability and protection from ambiguity. Yet beneath its surface lies a deep poverty of spirit. It reduces the richness of human existence to repetition, conformity, and control. In doing so, it undermines some of the very qualities that make human life meaningful and flourishing. Imagination is often misunderstood as a form of escapism, a retreat from reality into fantasy. In fact, imagination is one of the most profound ways humans engage reality. It allows us to envision possibilities that do not yet exist, to empathize with lives different from our own, and to perceive dimensions of the world that routine habits obscure. Every social reform, scientific breakthrou...

  Response to the Australian Government’s Response to the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Report   Adis Duderija I welcome the Australian Government’sresponse to the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia and its recognition that anti-Muslim prejudice undermines social cohesion, democratic citizenship, and the wellbeing of Muslim Australians. The initiatives relating to education, community resilience, interfaith engagement, and improved reporting mechanisms are important steps towards addressing anti-Muslim discrimination and ensuring that Muslim Australians feel safe and valued members of our society. However, successfully combating Islamophobia requires more than increasing awareness of Muslims as a minority community. It also requires challenging the underlying assumptions that often sustain anti-Muslim prejudice. One of the most persistent drivers of Islamophobia is the tendency to portray Islam as a monolithic religious tradition defined primarily by its most ...

  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...