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    New Thinking in Islam: The Jihad for Democracy, Freedom and Women’s Rights
    New Thinking in Islam: The Jihad for Democracy, Freedom and Women’s Rights
    New Thinking in Islam: The Jihad for Democracy, Freedom and Women’s Rights
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    New Thinking in Islam: The Jihad for Democracy, Freedom and Women’s Rights

    By Katajun Amirpur

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    About this ebook

    In Rethinking Islam, Katajun Amirpur argues that the West’s impression of Islam as a backward-looking faith, resistant to post-Enlightenment thinking, is misleading and—due to its effects on political discourse—damaging. Introducing readers to key thinkers and activists—such as Abu Zaid, a free-thinking Egyptian Qur’an scholar; Abdolkarim Soroush, an academic and former member of Khomeini’s Cultural Revolution Committee; and Amina Wadud, an American feminist who was the first woman to lead the faithful in Friday Prayer—Amirpur reveals a powerful yet lesser-known tradition of inquiry and dissent within Islam, one that is committed to democracy and human rights. By examining these and many other similar figures’ ideas, she reveals the many ways they reject fundamentalist assertions and instead call for a diversity of opinion, greater freedom, and equality of the sexes. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGingko
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9781909942745
    New Thinking in Islam: The Jihad for Democracy, Freedom and Women’s Rights

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      New Thinking in Islam - Katajun Amirpur

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      On the Way to the Modern

      The Tradition of Reform Islam

      In the nineteenth century Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838/39–1897), Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who are today considered the founders of Islamic reform, were already urging an inner reform of Islam. Underlying their efforts was a sense of subordination to the West. For all three, the backwardness of the Islamic world had been caused, and exclusively so, by a fixed, inflexible understanding of Islam and the blind imitation of its forefathers. For this reason they demanded a modern interpretation of the Qur’an and of Islamic law that would be appropriate for the altered circumstances. This effort, in its essence, continues today and the same goes for the fundamental question that might be answered with its help: how can a Muslim be at once modern and genuine?

      Since then, reform Islam has developed the most diverse modes of approach. Thus, Islamic modernism emerged from it, as did Islamism, i.e., fundamentalism. The cogitations of ‘Abduh, Afghani and Rida led to a blueprint for an Islamic society, but they led also to the ideology of Islamism as a closed worldview. They took the position that pure and unfalsified Islam possessed all the answers to the questions of modernity. The reconciliation of Islam and modernity should therefore proceed with a return to the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet together with an inner renewal of the faithful. Fundamentalists and modernists could both subscribe to this, even if they drew different conclusions. Muhammad ‘Abduh in particular stands as the intellectual father of both forms of Islamic new thinking.

      Muhammad ‘Abduh grew up in a peasant family from Lower Egypt and studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo. In 1871 he got to know Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Jamal al-Din, an Iranian, called himself al-Afghani, that is, the Afghan, in order to avoid having his reformist ideas branded as Shi‘ite and thereby rejected by Sunnis from the outset. Afghani received his education first in Teheran and later in the Shi‘ite centres of learning in Iraq. After several stops along the way he wound up in Istanbul in 1870. There he quickly gained access to reform-minded circles. In 1871 he went to Cairo. When he got the opportunity to address the Ottoman Viceroy Tawfiq Pasha, al-Afghani suggested to him that he let the people share in governance. Egypt should build up its own governmental institutions in order to rid itself of British rule. A constitution would set limits to the despotism of rulers. Because of these ideas al-Afghani was expelled in 1879; he then went to India and from there, in 1882, to

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