The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman

by Asma Afsaruddin

The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman. Edited by EARLE H. WAUGH and FREDERICK M. DENNY. South Florida-Rochester-Saint Louis Studies on Religion and the Social Order. Atlanta: SCHOLARS PRESS, 1998. Pp. ix + 273. $39.95.

Professor Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988) was (and remains) one of the leading Islamicists of this century and, possibly, "[the University of] Chicago's greatest scholar of Islamic religion in the twentieth century," as maintained by Richard Martin in his essay in this memorial volume. The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse is a collection of twelve essays in honor of Professor Rahman by his former students (Martin being the one exception). The essays do not all, however, have a direct bearing on the title of this work. The book is divided into five sections, reflecting the wide-ranging interests of the honoree, spanning the fields of philosophy, Sufism and mystical literature, Arabic poetry, Qur[contains]anic hermeneutics, and modern social issues. Part I is entitled "Islamic Priorities and the Contextuality of Discourse," and includes chapters by Earle H. Waugh and Donald L. Berry. Part H deals with "Islam and Philosophy," and contains chapters by Daniel Brown and Sheila McDonough. Part III is concerned with "Hermeneutics and Contemporary Issues," and is comprised of chapters by Valerie J. Hoffman, Tamara Sonn, and Donna Lee Brown. Part IV is called "Sufism and Poetry"; chapters in this section are by Michael A. Sells, Marcia K. Hermansen, and Th. Emil Homerin. Part V has the title "Community in Change" and includes chapters by Frederick Denny and Richard C. Martin. I will here restrict my remarks to those chapters that directly address the central theme of the book--namely, Fazlur Rahman's legacy in the field of Islamic studies, particularly concerning Muslim engagements with modernity and the role of Qur[contains]anic hermeneutics in defining these engagements.

Earle Waugh's introductory chapter, "Beyond Scylla and Kharybdis: Fazlur Rahman and Islamic Identity," assesses the lively debates among modern Muslims concerning their identities, especially in the face of Western critiques of the Islamic religious and intellectual tradition. When the world could be neatly divided into Muslim and non-Muslim camps, automatically implying an East-West division, this debate could be simplistically rendered in terms of a civilizational conflict, exacerbated in the last two centuries by Western colonial interests in the Muslim East. But Islam in the waning decades of this millennium has very much become a part of the West. In the United States, for example, Muslims number about six million and are collectively becoming more visible in American public life. Thus, as Waugh points out, "being an American Muslim adds another level to the problematic by which Islam is understood, not only by Western scholars, but by Muslims themselves" (p. 18).

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In his role as an academic, trained both in his native Pakistan and in England, and as a practicing Muslim who continuously lived in America from 1968 on, Fazlur Rahman was among a handful of scholars who were uniquely poised "to build bridges" between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Waugh sees Rahman's hermeneutic methodology, rooted in an acceptance of "the Western contention that revelation had a historical context" (p. 21), as the latter's principal contribution to this academic bridge-building. Waugh goes on to say that "[Rahman] believed that Islam, uniquely among the monotheistic traditions, is aware of its historic contextualization" (p. 21). Clearly, the above two statements in juxtaposition reveal that Rahman would have had to take issue with Waugh's assertion that recovery of the historical context of revelation is primarily a Western enterprise. The entire asbab al-nuzul ("causes of revelation") literature in Islam is, after all, premised on the historical contextualization of revelation. The w hole tenor of Rahman's academic activity suggests that he had a bone to pick with two distinct camps: certain contemporary Muslim traditionalists who ignore or downplay the historicist stance of many classical Muslim scholars; and those Western Orientalist scholars who failed to recognize or adequately deal with this historicist impulse, perhaps on the mistaken assumption that this could only be a modem, Western phenomenon. Both obscurantist camps were challenged by Rahman. Donald Berry perceptively refers to this in passing in his chapter reviewing Rahman's life; he states that Rahman "had the courage to be innovative amidst rigid Islamic and Western attitudes" (p. 40). Rahman's emphasis on this "historicist awareness at Islam's core' (p.21) led him to deal at length in his scholarly works with the importance of hermeneutics in the modern period for recovering, firstly, the earliest meaning of revelation in its precise historical context and, secondly, to proceed thereupon to apply and adjust this meaning to suit present historical circumstances.

Daniel Brown's chapter, "The Triumph of Scripturalism: The Doctrine of Naskh and its Modern Critics," deals with the attrition of the naskh ("abrogation") theory among pre-modern and modern scholars, even its outright denial by some of them. Brown sees this phenomenon as largely, perhaps even exclusively, attributable to the Muslim world's encounter with the West, particularly in polemical encounters with Christian missionaries. Instinctively, this hypothesis appears to have the ring of truth to it. But one wonders if the average Christian missionary was sophisticated enough about Islam to have knowledge of the theory of naskh, something that the average Muslim is perhaps only dimly aware of. Western Orientalist scholars were better equipped to deal with the theory of naskh, but again, one wonders how widely their positions could have been known among Muslims, and if known, how influential they could have been, even among Muslim scholars. Without a full study of the range of attitudes towards naskh in the ce nturies intervening between the ninth and tenth and the nineteenth and twentieth, the periods of flowering and decline, respectively, of this doctrine, I am not sure we can confidently suggest, as Brown appears to, that "the modern repudiation of naskh serves to illustrate just how large a gap has grown between classical and modern understandings of the qur[contains]an" (p. 60). Also, one wonders why "humanization" of scripture is a desideratum in itself, as Brown suggests (p. 60), unless one subscribes to the notion that since this has been the fate of scripture in the Western world, this must be the denouement of all things scriptural. Given divergent scriptural traditions and different historical trajectories of religious communities, dare we assume uniform, linear consequences of hermeneutic ventures for all alike?

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Professor Rahman's insistence on the essentially egalitarian nature of qur[contains]anic precepts and on their adaptability to changing circumstances finds suitable reflection in the sphere of women's rights and feminist issues. Valerie J. Hoffman's article "qur[contains]anic Interpretation and Modesty Norms for Women," details the hermeneutic methodology of modernist qur[contains]an commentators, of whom Rahman is a prime example, which seeks to recover the original meaning of the Qur[contains]anic verses dealing with women, unencumbered by the commentaries of medieval exegetes. Suspicion of medieval commentary is rooted in a modernist awareness that "medieval Muslims tended to interpret the Qur[contains]an in light of their own social situations and prevailing concepts of the competence and danger of women" (p. 91). Donna Lee Bowen's article, "Interpretations of Family Planning: Reconciling Islam and Development," describes how modern Moroccan social workers are developing a viable planning program by "app lying Islamic principles to contemporary realities" (p. 160). Their efforts are based on ijtihad ("legal and personal reasoning") by which they seek to extrapolate broad social principles from the Qur[contais]an and hadith in tune with modern aspirations. Tamara Soon, in her article" Fazlur Rahman and Islamic Feminism," also focuses on the modernist hermeneutic enterprise, as best exemplified in the interpretive methodologies of Rahman and of another distinguished, contemporary feminist scholar and lawyer, Lebanese-American Azizah al-Hibri. Like Rahman, al-Hibri emphasizes the principle of ijtihad in deriving moral and legal injunctions from the Qur[contains]an consonant with modernist, especially feminist, expectations. All three articles convincingly show bow Rabman's interpretive methodology, applied and further extended by alHibri with regard to gender issues and by Moroccan social workers to implement family planning programs, has the potential of genuinely transforming Islamic societies.

The volume ends with Richard C. Martin's appraisal of "Fazlur Rahman's Contribution to Religious Studies." Indeed, many of Rahman's books have become classics in the field of Islamic studies and many of his students now hold academic posts in distinguished North American universities. However, as Martin points out, even a scholar of Fazlur Rahman's stature, with his broad-ranging mastery of several disciplines, could not integrate Islamic studies into a broader curriculum of religious studies at the University of Chicago or elsewhere. Martin shakes his head over the continuing confinement of Islamic studies to Middle Eastern, or to a lesser extent, South Asian area studies programs, undermining the possibilities of "a direct and fructifying relationship between the activities of Islamicists and those of historians of religions" (p. 252). It is a well-meaning caveat that should give all of us in the field pause.

The more frequent conjoining of "American" to "Islam" or "Islamic" today points to the entrenchment of Islam in the West and thus the extension of the Muslim umma outside its traditional heartlands. Fazlur Rahman remains one of the most influential articulators of what this development has entailed for Muslims in terms of their expanded collective identity and their increasing encounters with modernity and all its attendant issues. The volume under review is a suitable paen to this exceptional man and scholar and to his lasting legacy in the field of Muslim religious thought and its ancillary disciplines.

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Publication Information: Article Title: The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman. Contributors: Asma Afsaruddin - author. Journal Title: The Journal of the American Oriental Society. Volume: 120. Issue: 4. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 679.

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