Islam Is Not a Museum Piece: Why Process Thought Matters for the Future of My Islamic Faith

 

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 is essentially custodial — to guard a deposit of truth handed down once, complete, at the time of revelation. Change is treated with suspicion. Novelty looks like betrayal.

I don't think that picture is true to lived religious experience, and increasingly I don't think it's true to reality itself. This is where process-relational philosophy — the tradition associated with Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne — has become indispensable to my own thinking. Process thought starts from a different premise: that reality is not made of static substances but of relationships and events, of becoming rather than fixed being. Nothing simply is; everything is always in the process of becoming. And crucially, this is not a philosophical curiosity imported from the West to modernize Islam. I think it names something the Islamic tradition has always half-known about itself, and which we are now in a position to say more clearly.

Consider revelation. On the static picture, the Qur'an is a closed textual event: meaning was fixed at the moment of its delivery, and our job today is simply archaeological — recover what was meant then. But this was never really how believing communities have engaged scripture. Meaning has always been made and remade through the encounter between text and community, generation after generation, in dialogue with new circumstances and new moral insight. Revelation, understood this way, is not a monologue delivered once and for all, but an ongoing and dialogical process — one that presupposes an active, interpreting community on the receiving end, not a passive one merely transcribing instructions.

The same is true of tradition itself. A living tradition is not a fixed body of precedent to be replicated; it is an inheritance that must be creatively received — recalibrated, again and again, in light of new historical circumstances and emerging moral insight. I call this the poiesis imperative: the recognition that human beings are not merely transmitters of what came before, but active participants in shaping what the tradition becomes. To be faithful to Islam, on this view, is not to freeze it in amber. It is to keep participating in its unfolding.

And what of God? This is perhaps where process thought offers its most striking contribution. Classical theology, both Islamic and otherwise, has tended to picture God chiefly as unilateral power: a sovereign will that commands, and before which creation simply submits. Process-relational thought offers a different picture — of God as fundamentally relational, responsive, and persuasive rather than coercive. Divine influence, on this view, works through moral appeal and loving invitation, not domination. God calls creation forward toward greater justice, beauty, and harmony; God does not simply compel it. I find this picture not only more coherent, but also more compatible with the Qur'an's repeated emphasis on divine mercy, patience, and relationship.

Why does any of this matter to ordinary believers, rather than academic theologians? Because it changes what we can say — and how confidently we can say it — about the ethical commitments many of us already hold. Progressive Muslims are regularly told that our commitments to gender justice, human dignity, and religious pluralism are borrowed from secular liberalism, bolted onto Islam from the outside. Process-relational thought lets us respond differently: these commitments are not impositions from outside the tradition, but historically emergent articulations of a deeper, ongoing divine moral aim — one that was present in seed form from the beginning and is still unfolding.

It also resolves a real and long-standing tension in Islamic thought between the idea that morality is simply whatever God commands, arbitrarily, and the equally deep intuition that justice is real and rationally knowable, not just decreed. A relational understanding of God allows us to affirm both divine sovereignty and the objectivity of moral truth, without treating them as competitors. And it lets us affirm something that classical frameworks have often regarded with suspicion: the very possibility of moral progress. The growing recognition of universal human rights, or of the moral equality of women and men, need not be seen as a departure from a perfect and complete moral order established once in the past. It can be understood instead as part of the ongoing creative advance of reality itself — what Whitehead called the divine lure toward greater beauty, justice, and relational harmony, working itself out in history rather than against it.

Finally, this framework offers something valuable for how we think about other religious traditions. Because reality itself is relational and unfolding rather than fixed and finished, it becomes possible to say that more than one tradition can participate in the truth without collapsing into sameness or competing for a single, limited prize. As the Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush has argued, religious texts are inherently multilayered and human understanding is always situated — which means plurality is not a scandal to be managed, but a reality the Qur'an itself invites us to embrace.

None of this asks anyone to abandon Islam for a philosophy imported from elsewhere. It asks us to notice that Islam, rightly understood, was never a museum piece to begin with. It has always been a living, relational, unfinished conversation between the divine and the human — and process thought simply gives us better language, and perhaps a more honest metaphysics, for saying so out loud.