Problems of Islamic Modernism with Special Reference to Indo-Pakistan Sub-Continent

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Problems of Islamic Modernism with Special Reference to Indo-Pakistan Sub-ContinentAuthor(s): Aziz AhmadSource: Archives de sociologie des religions, 12e Année, No. 23 (Jan. - Jun., 1967), pp. 107-116Published by: EHESSStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30117774 .

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PROBLEMS OF ISLAMIC MODERNISM

with special reference to Indo-Pakistan Sub-continent a

((THE fundamental malaise of modern Islam> remarks Wilfred Cantwell Smith with great insight < is a sense that something has gone wrong with

Islamic history. The fundamental problem of modern Muslims is how to rehabi- litate that history )> (2). This feeling has dominated the religious and political thought of Muslim India for over a century as it has of other Islamic peoples in other parts of the world.

The association of Muslim India with the West has been intimate through the British rule, and longer than that of any other Muslim people. In this given historical situation the nineteenth century Muslim intellectuals turned to rein- terpret their own history. Sayyid Ahmad Khan (3) successfully followed the tradition of Western scholarship in editing medieval Indian chronicles; but when it came to the sensitive point of defending Islam at its very source against the semi-polemical historiographical approach of Sir William Muir, he lost his balance of historical objectivity and turned to imaginative apologetics which was equally unacceptable to orientalists abroad and traditionalists at home.

Essentially Sayyid Ahmad Khan was not a historian; his primary interest was theology. But the movement he set in motion led to an intimate preoccupa- tion with history among some of his outstanding younger contemporaries. Shibli Nu'mini and Amir 'All (4) in their mass of scholarship, polemics and apologetics, arrive at two distinct and different conclusions on the crucial problem of the

(1) This article is part of a research project under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London).

(2) W. CANTWELL SMrrITH, Islam in Modern History, Princeton, 1959, p. 41. (3) S.A. KHAN (1817-1898), reformer, educationist, modernist and outstanding political

leader of Muslim India, is the author of a number of theological works including commentaries on the Qur'gn and the Bible.

(4) SHIBLI NU' MANI (1857-1914) was a moderate theologian who established a school of Islamic historiography in India. His more westernised contemporary, AMIR 'AL (1849-1928) is famous for his historical and apologetic writings including the Spirit of Islam.

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ARCHIVES DE SOCIOLOGIE DES RELIGIONS

situation of Islam in history. For Shibli it is the triumph of Ash 'arism and the traditional theology over the Mu 'tazalites under al-Mutawakkil and subsequently. For Amir 'Ali it was the failure of Arab advance against Constantinople and in France, which he regards as a tragedy not merely for the history of Islam, but for its civilizing mission in terms of the cultural history of mankind. Of the two Shibli, though much more a conservative, is closer to the core of the problem.

For the traditionalists and the Ahl-i hadith (5) the interpretation of Islamic history has remained relatively simpler in theological terms. The entire process of Islamic history is viewed as a continuous decline from the perfection of the golden age of the Prophet.

With this half-acknowledged sense of the failure of Islamic history the Muslim intellectual in the Indian Sub-continent, as elsewhere, faces the problem of the decadence of Islamic peoples in the modern world. Consciousness of this decadence is reflected in Sayyid Ahmad Khan's intellectual and political orienta- tions, and his programme of an attachment to the West and a detachment alike from pan-Islamic universalism and potentially aggressive Indian nationalism. HMli (6) epitomized and popularised sensitivity to the consciousness of decadence through his verse. It is interesting to compare his analysis of Muslim decline with that of the al-Mandr group (7) some years later. Whereas Hali lays the respon- sibility of this decline on the static lethargy of the Muslim community, the al-Mandr group blames the Muslim rulers who are ignorant of Islam and its laws and who have permitted evil-doing in the administration by substituting laws of human origin in the place of Divine laws, the theologians who have neglected the Qur'an and the sunna as the sources of law and have preoccupied themselves with the minutae (furi') of law and sectarianism, and the quietist and heterodox Sifis who have made religion e a sport and a means of entertainment > (8). This fundamentalist position is reiterated and considerably intensified by Mawdildi (9) in Pakistan whose JamS'at-i Islami is concerned not merely with the intellectual debate of Muslim reformism, but with the political platform of the a restoration > of < original > Islam as a cure for the malaise of modern decadence. His party calls itself a party of ( renaissance > and not of reformism. Among the modern Pakistani intellectuals most conscious of Islamic decadence is Parwiz who recommends this- worldly materialism, but whose terms of reference are again fundamentalistic, based on an extremely extravagent interpretation of the Qur'An.

All the same, modernists of varying backgrounds, Khayr al-din Pasha (10), HAli, 'Abduh (11), Iqbal (12) and Parwiz see a way out of the morass of decadence

(5) A fundamentalist group of theologians in modern Islamic India who based their creed principally on the dicta of Muhammad.

(6) A.H. HALI (1887-1914), an oustanding poet and biographer in Urdu whose political poem the Musaddas-i madd-u jazr-i Isldm, steeped in pan-Islamic vitalism, revolutionised the Urdu poetry.

(7) Fundamentalist syrio-Egyptian contributors to the journal al-Mandr in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

(8) Shaykh Muhammad 'ABDUH, Tafsir al-Qur'dn al-Hakim, Cairo, 1906-1927, II, p. 89- 90; al-Mandr, I, p. 606 et seq., 722-80.

(9) A.A. MAWDUDI is a rigid fundamentalist and a theoretician of religious control over politics in Pakistan.

(10) KHAYR AL-DIN PASHA (1810-1889) was prime minister of the Beylik of Tunisia and later of the Ottoman Empire. He is one of the pioneers in Islamic modernism.

(11) Shaykh Muhammad 'ABDUH (1849-1905) was by far the most eminent modern Egyptian theologian, reformer and fundamentalist modernist.

(12) Muhammad IQBAL (1875-1938) was a dynamic Indo-Muslim poet and philosopher and the theoretician of Pakistan.

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only through the application of the principle of change. Almost all of them have the Qur'Anic injunction at XIII, 12 as their starting point:

( God changes not what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves... >.

Nations are not condemned and destroyed by God only on account of unbelief, if they otherwise follow laws of justice and progress. Muslims are merely potentially, and by no means necessarily the < best among the peoples a (13).

Much of the modernist sensitivity to present decadence is counter-balanced by the complacency of the theologians, traditionalist and fundamentalist alike. For them ( retrogression ) rather than < decadence a is the key-word. For the Ahl-i had-ith tile entire history of Islam is a series of steps taken backward from a given state of perfection. The fundamentalist explanation of the retrogression is a continuous drifting away from the early simplicity of Islam through centuries of innovations (bida') incorporating extra-Islamic elements in Muslim canon law (14).

The basic difference of approach to the problem by the modernists and the theologians has had a paralysing influence on the elements of law, constitution and institutions in modern Pakistan. Modernists there have been finding it difficult to break from the past to accept the modern world on its own terms and according to its own values. Theologians, on the other hand, and especially the fundamentalist school of Mawdfidi have also found it difficult to break totally from the present and to take refuge in the past. The result is a confusion in terms of a theory of < change a required for cultural adjustments and an attempted compromise between opposite stances which are not entirely polarised. Pragmatic necessities of government and politics urge compromises from time in constitutions and amendments to constitutions, in double-edged machinery like the Council of Islamic Ideology and other formulae or institutions. These compromises cannot, in any case, bring about the change which the modernists desire in theory, but which they cannot bring about in practice due to the conservative pressure of the lower middle classes supported by masses on certain explosive issues and led by the theologians of all shades of opinion. And so in respect to Pakistan, as to many other Islamic countries, von Grunebaum's remark remains relevant: < Few culture areas have been subjected to so much and so violent change as that of Islam; none perhaps has so consistently refused to accept the ontological reality of change > (15).

Much of traditionalist conservatism is rooted deeply in the Ash'arite theology (16). To some extent modern Islam's lack of resilience and real rather than theoretical or apologetic adjustment with the scientific conception of universe, which is the basis of modern civilisation, lies in the Ash'arite school's denial of the law of causality which is one of the primary sources of all rational knowledge.

(13) Cf. RASHID RIDA, Td'rikh al-ustddh al-imdm al-Shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh, Cairo, 1908-1910, II, p. 323-4.

(14) For parallel arguments in Egypt see al-Mandr, XXIX (1928), 63-4. (15) Gustave E. von GRUNEBAUM, Modern Islam, Berkeley, 1962, p. 209. (16) Based on the writings and on the school of Abu'l Hasan al-Asha 'ari (873-936)

who used a scholastic method to affirm an externalist creed of Islam and profoundly influenced the subsequent growth of dogma in Islam.

109




Instead of arriving at a law of natural causality, the Ash'arites have deduced only a law of custom ('dda). (( It is not law ) observes Goldziher, <( but simply the habit laid upon nature by God, that makes certain things follow others; this succession is not, however, necessary , (17). Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Chirigh 'Ali (18) are perhaps the only few among Indo-Muslim modernists who have subscribed to the concept of natural laws as superseding the cult of 'dda. For Amir 'All as a Shi'i it is easy to preach a reform of the Ash'arite Islam, but his own writings hardly reflect any trace of that reform. Ash'arism is placed back at the very core of Islamic modernism by Iqbil, while the elphasis on the value of power in Iqbsl's thought is traceable to Ibn Taimiyya (19).

Wali-Allhi (20) fundamentalism, though it paved the way for the emergence of modernism by challanging much of the superficial, polemical or divisive data in Islamic jurisprudence is, when all is said and done, a movement aimed at reorganising future in terms of an idealised past. Basically, therefore, it has a great deal in common with Wahhtbism (21) which, as Goldziher bluntly observes, (( has its gaze fixed on the past, denying the justification of the results of historical development, and recognising Islam only in the petrified form of the seventh century , (22). This verdict is even more appropriate to Mawdfidi's fundamentalism today.

*

It is significant that Pakistan chose to call itself, under pressure of theological groups allied tactically to political factions, an

( Islamic a state in its First Consti-

tution (1956), and in the Amendemnt (1963) to its Second Constitution. Tunisia on the other hand chose to describe itself as an (( Arab Muslim State s in its Consti- tution. The difference between the concepts of an ( Islamic * state and a < Muslim a state is noteworthy. An < Islamic a state commits itself in its very conception to the continuing and developing of the historical process of law as developed by classical jurists. On the other hand a s Muslim * state can be a secular or secularised state, < the majority of whose citizens are Muslims of varying degrees of observance or non-observance, but attached to Islamic culture and history, to the ethics of the Qur'An and the many considerable achievements in all fields of human endeavour,) (23). This is precisely the sense which modernists in Pakistan would ascribe to their concept of an < Islamic State s. But the modernists are confined to a class, i.e. higher or upper middle class, and to a particular kind of training and education, i.e. Westernized. The creative minority which they constitute is

(17) Ignaz GOLDZIHER, Muhammed and Islam (Engl. tr. K.C. Seele), New Haven, 1917, p. 138.

(18) A speculative modernist of Islamic India and a close associate of Sayyid Ahmad Khln.

(19) Taql al-dIn Ahmad ibn Taimiyya (1263-1328) is eminent for his theological dialectics which influenced the growth of subsequent schools of Islamic fundamentalism. Cf. H. LAOUST, Le traitd de droit public d'Ibn Taimiya, Beirut, 1948, p. 173-74; also L. GARDET, La Citd musulmane, Paris, 1954, p. 107.

(20) SHAH WALI-ALLAH was the great eighteenth century fundamentalist in Islamic India who influenced the later fundamentalist and modernist movements alike.

(21) The creed of the fundamentalist Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhib of Nejd, which originated in the eighteenth century and is still the state religion in Sa 'udi Arabia.

(22) GOLDZIHER, op. cit., p. 311. (23) E.I.J. ROSENTHAL, The role of Islam in modern national state ,, The Year Book

of World Affairs (London), 1962, vol. 16.

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challenged by another creative minority of the lower middle classes led by the fundamentalists and supported by the traditionalists, closer to the souls of the masses because of the rich emotional appeal of religion. In the rural areas especially the fundamentalists seem to be consolidating their position. In a Survey carried out in 1963 through Pakistani students, 451 villagers from 52 villages in West Pakistan were questioned on the treatment to be meted out to those who did not conform to the religious ritual, 45 thought the delinquents should be severly punished, 168 were of the view that they deserve some punishment, 125 held that they should be persuaded by argument and instruction, only 66 were in favour of laissez-faire, and only 47 did not express any opinion (24).

Fundamentalism is by no means the exclusive misfortune of Islam. As Marthelot points out:

( On se plait, au contraire, en gCndral a dresser la liste des pr~ceptes islamiques en apparence peu favorables au d~veloppement 6conomique: certains, en effet, fondamentaux, se r~ffrent a l'affirmation de la Toute Puissance de Dieu; mais laquelle des trois grandes religions, juive, chr~tienne ou islamique, n'a pas ce m~me principe en t&te de son credo ? De mbme, I'6thique impos~e a la vie 6cono- mique, notamment l'interdiction du riba, du prgt a int~r~t, n'est-elle pas commune a l'Islam et au Christianisme ? Enfin, le refus de la novation (bid'a), avec cette surprenante idbe que le progrbs est dans le passe, ne se retrouverait-il pas dans le r~flexe souvent enregistr6 en Chr~tientk, et pas seulement sur le plan religieux, qui opposait les Anciens aux Modernes... . (25).

And yet the Report of the Constitution Commission of Pakistan is histo- rically wrong in arguing on this basis the ( liberal secularism of the West... is itself based on the traditional discipline which was developed when religion was a force in those countries a (26). This view has to be weighed against the point made by H.A.R. Gibb, one of the most sincere friends of Islam in the West :

(( ...while the constitution of Islamic society was still based on medieval conceptions and its outlook governed by medieval ideas, Western Europe had swung right away from its medieval moorings and that between the two civili- sations, once so uniform in spite of religious antagonisms, the gulf had gradually widened until their common elements and principles seemed insignificant in comparison with their difference s (27).

If not in the Indo-Pakistan Sub-continent, elsewhere in the Islamic world there have been categorical rejections of theocracy, or as Mawdfidi would like to call it ( theo-democracy ,. Turkey has been for a generation a secular ( Muslim > but not an << Islamic > state. Khalid Muhammad Khalid's (28) views form the very anti-thesis of the thought and programme of Mawdfidi or even 'A1i al-Fisi (29). He rejects theocracy for its lack of clarity regarding the source and location of

(24) As reported by A.W. EISTER, < L'Islam au Pakistan ,>, Arch., 15, 1963, p. 39-40. (25) P. MARTHELOT, < L'Islam et le d~veloppement >, Arch., 14, 1962, p. 134. (26) Report of the Constitution Commission of Pakistan, Karachi, 1961, p. 121. (27) H.A.R. GIBB, Introd. to Whiter Islam ? London, 1932, p. 48-49. (28) A young Egyptian theologian who is an advocate of the separation of politics from

religion. (29) Cf. ALA AL-FAsI, Al-harka al-istiqldliyyah fi'l Maghrib al-'Arabi, Cairo, 1945. (Eng.

tr. H.Z. Nuseibeh, Washington D.C., 1954, p. 118).

111




authority, for its distrust of human reason, for its appeal to weaknesses of emo- tionalism, for its hostility to all reform, for its totalitarianism, for its static nature, for its inquisitorial suppression of all opposition and for its < brutality which thrives upon the confusion as to the proper limit of authority ) (30).

Idealisation of the Orthodox Caliphate of the first four holy Caliphs of Islam alike by the traditionalists, fundamentalists and some of the modernists including Shibli and Amir 'Ali but not Sayyid Ahmad Khan or Iqbil is a fundamentalistic trend crystallised in historical revivalism. This idealisation shared by the Indo-Pakistani Islam with similar emphasis in other parts of the Muslim world (31) is aptly described by von Grunebaum as the < classicism of return ); its object is ( in part at least, a decrease in cultural complexity; it is a < retractile ) movement advocating consolidation through shrinkage. A movement of this order characteristically overlooks the fact that the period of apostolic simplicity, which is chosen as authoritative and exemplary, was actually a period of expe- riential expansion ) (32).

Pan-Islamism and the Caliphate Movement of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century was a juxtaposition of R~shidiin-classicism (33) on modern circumstances and was therefore essentially revivalistic. Pan-Islamism itself is a modern development influenced, like pan-Turanianism and pan-Arabism later, by and analogous with such movements as pan-Germanism and pan- Slavism (34). But something like a feeling of the solidarity of the entire Muslim 'umma is discernible at crucial periods in medieval Islamic history. Al-Birfini was conscious of Islam as a cultural unity in comparing it with Hindu religion and culture (35). Ibn al-Athir (d. 1234) shows consiousness of the Muslim world as a single unity in dealing with the Mongol onslaughts in North-east Persia, which he regards as a calamity suffered by the entire world of Islam (36). YAqiit regards Mongol invasion as an unparalleled calamity for Islam (37). Ibn al-'Arabi's (1165-1240) efforts in the direction of a combined effort on the part of the Muslim princes of Syria and Anatolia to repel the Crusaders have an element of what came to be described as pan-Islamism in modern times (38).

Revival of emphasis on the concept of a universal Caliphate begins in the Indian Islam with Shah Wali-Allah (39) though he only theorises about it in the abstract and does not identify it with the Ottoman monarchy for which he had

(30) KHALID MUHAMMAD KHALID, Min huna nabda, (Eng. tr. I.R. al-Faruqi), Washington D.C., 129-34. - H.Z. NUSEIBEH, The Ideas of Arab Nationalism, Ithaca, 1956, 172-3.

(31) Cf. for instance al-Mandr, IV, p. 210, 215-6. (32) Von GRUNEBAUM, Op. cit., p. 81. (33) Expression used by some Western orientalists to denote the idealisation by modern

Muslims of the pietistic institutions of government under the first four Orthodox Caliphs of Islam (632-661).

(34) Hasan TAOHIZADE, ( Le Panislamisme et le Panturkisme s, Revue du Monde musulman,

XX, 1913, p. 192. (35) E.C. SACHAU, Introd. to Aleruni's India, London, 1910, I, 9-10. - AL-BIRUNI, Kitdb

al-saidana. (Eng. tr. M. Meyerhof, in Islamic Culture, XI (1937), 27). (36) InN AL-ATHIR, al-Kdmil, Leiden, C.J. Tornberg, 1851-76, XII, 233-35. Cf. F. GABRIELI,

Storia della letteratura araba, Milan, 1951, 232-4. (37) YAQUT, Mu 'jam al-bulddn, Leipzig, ed. Wiistenfeld, 1866-73, IV, 859. (38) Miguel ASIN PALACIOS, El Islam cristianazado, Madrid, 1931, 93-95. (39) SHAH WALI-ALLAH, Izdla al-khafd, 2 vol., Karachi, n.d., passim; Hujjat Alldh al-

bdligha, Karachi, n.d., II, 422-29.

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scant respect (40). This identification was, however, made in the 1840's by his grandson ShAh Muhammad Ishiq, an immigrant to the Hijaz and subsequently influenced the theologians and the blite of Muslim India from 1870 onwards. The development is paralleled by similar trends in the world of Islam elsewhere. In 1873 Ya'qib Beg, the revolutionary leader of Chinese Turkestan, sent his nephew Htji Turab to the court of the Ottoman 'Abd al-'Aziz who invested Ya'qfib Beg with the title of Amir. On Ya'qib Beg's coinage the Sultan's name was engraved on one side and his own on the other (41). Pan-Islamic and pro-Caliphate trends made their first appearance in Tunisia in the 1880's with the French occupation and culminated in the career and activities of 'Ali Bash Hamba and Al-Th'Alibi (42) during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In this very period a con- flict between the pan-Islamic and nationalist groups developed in Egypt and was reflected in the controversial articles in the al-Mandr (43) on the one side and al-'Alam and al-Siydsa on the other (44).

Like the Indian Muslim elite, the al-Mandr had strongly supported the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 (45) but unlike them it regarded Mustafa KamMl's abolition of the Caliphate and introduction of certain drastic reforms as acts of apostasy from Islam (46). Like the Indian Muslims, the al-Mandr placed high hopes in the rise of Ibn Sa'fid ; but unlike them upheld even the Wahhibi repudiation of such innovations as pilgrimages to sacred tombs (47). 'Ali 'Abd al-Riziq's advocacy of the abolition of the Caliphate is not very different from that of KhudA Bakhsh in asserting that the institution of the Caliphate had been and continued to be a misfortune for Islam and the Muslims and a source of corruption (48). There is similarity in his argument and that of IqbMl when he points out that the Caliphate was not an integral part of the Muslim creed; neither the Qur'gn nor the authentic hadith have anything categorical to say about it; and that the Muslim consensus has < never been solidly or consistently behind it > (49). Iqbil, however, avoids 'Ali 'Abd al-Rgziq's apologetics who asserts that the Prophet exercised religious but not civil authority; and as he did not exercise the latter, the question of its succession in the form of Caliphate does not arise (50). Iqbil, Zia Gdkalp and 'All 'Abd al-RAziq reflect in varying degrees an intellectual trend spreading over the greater part of the Muslim world in the 1920's, advocating a < family of Islamic nations, independently organised under civil governments, but all conscious of the heritage of Islamic culture.., an Islamic commonwealth , (51).

(40) SHAH WALI-ALLAH, Fuyi&d al-Harmayn (tr. Lahore), Urdu, 1947, 297 ff. (41) D.C. de KAVANAGH BOULGER, Life of Yakob Beg: Athalik ghazi and Badaulat: Ameer

of Kashgar, London, 1878. - The Times, March 16, 1874. - TSING YUAN, a Yakub Beg (1820- 1877) and the Moslem Rebellion in Chinese Turkestan s, Central Asiatic Journal, VI, 1961, 2, 1384-67.

(42) Tunisian political leaders who struggled against the French for the freedom of their country and were also supporters of pan-Islamism and the theory of Ottoman Caliphate.

(48) Al-Mandr, VIII, 478; XIV (1911), 36; XXVII (1926-27), 119. (44) Two modern Arab journals. (45) Al-Mandr, XIV, 43. (46) Ibid., XXVIII, 581. (47) Ibid., XIV, 43. - C.C. ADAMS, Islam and Modernism in Egypt, London, 1933, 185. (48) 'ALI 'ABD Al-RAZIQ, Al-Isldm wa usid al-hukm, Cairo, 1925, 36. (49) NUSEIBEH, op. cit., 153. (50) 'ALI 'ABD AL-RAZIQ, op. cit., pp. 64-5, 69, 79, 84. (51) GIBB, op. cit., 364. (52) Von GRUNEBAUM, Op. Cit., 19.

8 113




The quest for the rationalisation of Muslim law antedates the quest for the modernisation of the classical concept of Muslim statehood. In Muslim India it began with Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his colleagues. The two focal points of modernisation in the ,Aligarh system of thought are <( reason > and <( nature )>. In so far as its use of reason is concerned, von Grunebaum's general remark is quite pertinent: < ...human reason is charged not so much with discerning unknown areas of facts as with uncovering the insights and the directions implied in the divine or prophetic pronouncements * (52). This is what Shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh also affirms by remarking that reasoning has to be applied in examining and explaining the messages of the prophets in the light of the laws of nature as ordained by God (53). Sayyid Ahmad Khan's premiss on this problem is even more categorical: Between the word of God (scripture) and the work of God (nature) there can be no contradiction (54). 'Abduh, unlike Sayyid Ahmad Khan, forecasts IqbMl's distinction between intuitional and dialectical reason by admit- ting the latter's incompetence in certain theological spheres such as the interpretation of the Attributes of God or even full understanding of the nature and quality of human soul (55).

Through a rationalistic approach to the sources of Muslim law Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh both concentrate on the first one, the Qur'&n; and both as well as Azid do so by a neo-exegetical re-orientation of the Muslim scripture. In detail they arrive at very different conclusions, but the argument of approach is closely similar. In relation to the second source of law, the hadith, Sayyid Ahmad Khan's and Chiragh 'Ali's approach is sceptic and close enough to the scientific criticism developed later by Ignaz Goldziher and Joseph Schacht, though unlike them the two Muslim modernists do not hesitate to quote a had.ith uncritically when it suits them. 'Abduh's approach to the sunna is more cautious, recognising a small section of the hadith-corpus relating to matters of practice as an essential part of the basic data of law (56). On the whole the Islamic modernism in India followed 'Abduh's rather than Sayyid Ahmad Khan's orientation in this respect (57). Ijtihad (use of individual reasoning) as a substitute for the third classical source of law qiyds (analogy) finds the greatest emphasis in Indian Islam in the writings of the 'Aligarh group (58) and Iqbal; as well as in Arab Islam in the writings of 'Abduh: < there is no limit to what may be done within its limits, and there is no end to the speculation that may be conducted under its standards > (59). Despite its fundamentalism the al-Mandr group emerges more progressively modernist than Iqblil in suggesting that civil law which should be subject to change from age to age should be separated from religion which is sacrosanct, eternal and immutable (60).

Sayyid Ahmad Khan is solitary in his total denunciation of ijma' (consensus) as a source of law. He was conscious of it only in the classical sense, i.e. that of the consensus of the theologians. Outside India 'Abduh was perhaps the first to

(53) 'ABDUH, Al-Isldsm wa'l Nasrdniyyah. Cairo, 1923, 51. (54) Cf. Al-Mandr, VII, 292. - GOLDZIUER, Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung,

Leiden, 1920, 352-3. - ADAMS, Op. cit., 136. (55) 'ABDUH, Risila al-tawhid, Cairo, 1926-7, p. 52-4, 117. (56) Ibid., 224. (57) 'Abduh's Rislla was a prescribed text-book at the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental

College as well as several theological schools in the Sub-continent. (58) The associates and co-workers of Sayyid Ahmad Khan in his modernist reformist

movement in India. (59) 'ABDuH, Risdla, 177; Eng. tr. quoted from ADAMS, p. 131. (60) Al-Mandr, IV, 859, and passim.

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see in it an extended concept of <<consensus as applicable to all Muslims the seeds of something like modern democracy when he observed that representative government and legislation by the chosen representatives of the people was entirely in harmony with the spirit of Islam (61). In the Sub-continent the theory of popular consensus as the basis of democracy was developed by Iqbil. Soon it seems to have gained general currency in the entire world of Islam, in most cases developed locally. An Afghan writer, Niaz Ahmad Zikriya, regards the role of the consensus of the theologians in the classical Islam as a manifestation of delegated power, proving the sovereignty of the people to whom the direct right of consensus has reverted in modern times (62).

However liberal or radical the modernist interpretation of the basic classical sources of law may be, as long as the Divine word rather than human reason, experience and requirement is regarded as the ultimate source of law, an Islamic state cannot be sovereign in the modern sense of the word.

< Absolute restriction on the legislative power of a State is a restriction on the sovereignty of the people of that State and if the origin of this restriction lies elsewhere than in the will of the people, then to the extent of that restriction the sovereignty of the State and its people is necessarily taken away. In an Islamic State sovereignty, in its essentially juristic sense, can only rest with Allah a (63).

Nor can under the circumstances that state be democratic or even <( theo- democratic

, whatever broad meaning may be given to the term ijmX'.

The crux of the problem is humanistic. In its larger sense humanism is defined by Pierre Mesnard as <( toute conception thborique, toute attitude pratique qui affirment la valeur exceptionelle de l'homme n (64). Its starting point in the West is an < anthropocentrisme r6fl6chi >, an attitude unknown to classical Islam (65). In classical Islam, in the totality of the traditionalist and fundamentalist stances of today and in all Indo-Muslim modernist thought except in Iqbal, God and not man remains the key-figure of the universe dominating man's political, social, economic and cultural life. Iqbil alone takes a position which is not very different from Jacques Maritain's concept of < humanisme int6gral a which tends:

((...essentiellement a rendre l'homme plus vraiment humain, et ? manifester sa grandeur originelle en le faisant participer A tout ce qui peut l'enrichir dans la nature et dans l'histoire (...), il demande tout i la fois que l'homme dtveloppe les virtualit~s contenues en lui, ses forces crbatrices et la vie de la raison, et travaille L faire des forces du monde physique les instruments de sa libertk a (66).

(61) RASHID RIDA, Td'rikh, II, 71 et seq. (62) Niaz Ahmad ZIKRIYA, Les principes de l'Islam et la ddmocratie, Paris, 1958, p. 41-5. (63) M. MUNIR and M.R. KAYANI, Report of the Court of Inquiry constituted under Punjab

Act II of 1954 to enquire into the Punjab disturbances of 1954, Lahore, 1954, p. 210. (64) Pierre MESNARD, < L'humanisme chr~tien >, Bulletin Joseph Lotte, juin 1939, 7. (65) Louis GARDET, H RIumanisme musulman d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. Element culturels de

base >, Ibla, 1944, 1. (66) Jacques MARITAIN, Humanisme intdgral, Paris, 1936, 10.

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The humanism of Iqbil's thought is what Gardet describes as < humanisme avec Dieu a (67). Man's vicegerency of God is within certain moral bounds auto- nomous in the abstract in the thought of Iqbil, but when it comes to the theory of the government of an Islamic, even a Muslim state, he too harnesses religion with politics. Gardet is right in asserting that in the view of IqbAl and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, if the humanistic renaissance in the world of Islam accumulates anthropocentrism and an absolute naturalism it would do itself considerable damage for which the West would also be responsible (68). Thus, Iqbal's position though more radical than that of other Indo-Pakistani modernists in asserting the creative autonomy of man remains fairly close to the consensus which favours maintaining the traditional balance between spiritual and material values, and to affect the conquest of nature with this balance.

This fine theoretical position has not worked out so well in practice anywhere. This is the tragedy of modern Islam. From within itself it has been able to re- create elements of a renaissance, but not of a reformation. Much of the content of Islamic modernism is a Westernisation of the given data of Islamic juristic law and custom. In this Westernisation the process of apologetics blurs the historical perspective. As von Grunebaum describes the psychological logic of apologetics, ( it is a characterstic tendency on the part of the receiving community to interpret heterogenetic change (usually experienced as achievement or advance) as orthogenetic * (69).

In the modern Islamic world's reactions to the West the opposites of attraction and repulsion have been working simultaneously and continuously. Western liberalism is the cause of attraction, western colonialism, neo-colonialism and parochial insularity the reason for repulsion. < Comment concilier a comments Muhammad Husayn Haykal, < les deux esprits contraires, la libert6 et la coloni- sation ? C'est difficile B concevoir n (70).

Though the initiative for a real reformation of Islam has to continue to come from within it, and has to be thought out and translated into practice by the Muslims, perhaps the West may eventually help. One may conclude on Gibb's optimistic note:

( ...Islam cannot deny its foundations, and in its foundations Islam belongs to and is an integral part of the large Western society. It is the complement and counterbalance of European civilization, nourished at the same springs, breathing the same air. In the broadest aspect of history, what is now happening between Europe and Islam is the reintegration of Western civilization, artificially sundered at the Renaissance and now reasserting its unity with overwhelming force ,, (71).

Aziz AHMAD

University of Toronto

(67) GARDET, Op. cit., 5-6; also La Citd musulmane, 278-94. (68) GARDET, Humanisme musulman, 88-9. (69) Von GRUNEBAUM, Op. cit., 14. (70) M.H. HAYKAL, . Les causes de l'incompr~hension entre l'Europe et les musulmans

et les moyens d'y remdier *, L'Islam et I'Occident, Cahiers du Sud, Paris, 1947, 55. (71) GIBB, op. cit., 376.

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Documents

Problems of Islamic Modernism with Special Reference to Indo-Pakistan Sub-Continent