After all, it is not easy to stand up to criticism based on ignorance and prejudice.
Some of them persuaded the doctor to resign. Meanwhile, the administrators at the centre and the provinces got cold feet. This sort of argument is just the grist he wants for his mill. These clarifications would have satisfied any honest critic, but the mullah, who regards any original and objective thinking on Islam as his deadly enemy, was not going to be pacified. When the criticism gained momentum he held two press conferences refuting all the allegations. This book is a highly scholarly work written for a European audience and is an attempt to remove some false impressions about Islam. The allegations, which were totally false, were made against some remarks made in his book, Islam, which he wrote some years ago and which was later published by the Oxford University Press. Fazlur Rahman, director of the Islamic Research Institute, came under countrywide adverse criticism fanned by the ignorant and politically motivated mullahs. Only seventeen months later, on 5 September 1968, Ayub Khan noticed the rise of bigotry in the country and made a prediction which, sadly, came true:
(Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan 1966-1972 Edited and Annotated by Craig Baxter Oxford University Press, Karachi 2007 p 90). The requirement of simplicity of language is necessary to make it easily intelligible even to the man of limited education.” I am sure that this book, when written, will be a real contribution in the service of Islam. The doctor can then review it to ensure that his theme has been properly brought out. It has been arranged to attach a couple of knowledgeable people with him so as to discuss the theme of each chapter and then put it in simple language. It is fascinating, but the language he has used is scholarly and difficult. He was engaged in writing a book on the ideology of Islam. Fazlur Rahman of the Islamic Research Institute came to see me. Fazlur Rahman and the Islamic Research InstituteĪn entry of 30 April 1967 in the diary of President Mohammed Ayub Khan reads: In spelling out the necessary and sound methodology, he is at once courageous, serious and profound."-Wadi Z.Dr. Over the voices advocating a return to Islam or the reestablishment of the Sharia, the guide for action, he astutely and soberly asks: What and which Islam? More importantly, how does one get to 'normative' Islam? The author counsels, and passionately demonstrates, that for Islam to be actually what Muslims claim it to be-comprehensive in scope and efficacious for every age and place-Muslim scholars and educationists must reevaluate their methodology and hermeneutics. "In this work, Professor Fazlur Rahman presents a positively ambitious blueprint for the transformation of the intellectual tradition of Islam: theology, ethics, philosophy and jurisprudence. By teaching and interpreting the Koran in such a way as to admit of no change or development, the dogmatists had created a situation in which Muslim societies, faced with the imperative need to educate their people for life in the modern world, were forced to make a painful and self-defeating choice-either to abandon Koranic Islam, or to turn their backs on the modern world."-Bernard Lewis, New York Review of Books This very rigidity gave rise to the second major error, that of the secularists. The first was committed by those who, in reading the Koran, failed to recognize the differences between general principles and specific responses to 'concrete and particular historical situations.'. In Professor Rahman's view the intellectual and therefore the social development of Islam has been impeded and distorted by two interrelated errors.
#DR FAZLUR RAHMAN TAMIL BOOKS SERIES#
"As Professor Fazlur Rahman shows in the latest of a series of important contributions to Islamic intellectual history, the characteristic problems of the Muslim modernists-the adaptation to the needs of the contemporary situation of a holy book which draws its specific examples from the conditions of the seventh century and earlier-are by no means new.