Muslims' Need for Modern Men of Religion After reading my critiques of the educational and intellectual backgrounds of Muslim men of religion, one of my readers asked me about whom I see worthy of being religious scholars. In my response to the reader's inquiry, I told her that I have tackled this issue in many of my books. However, I will be pleased to give a brief statement about my perspective regarding this point. During the first five hijrī centuries, Muslims witnessed enormous intellectual breakthroughs across a broad range of subjects in Islamic thinking. These successes included topics such as the fundamentals of jurisprudence, linguistics, interpretation and historiography. These intellectual advances resulted in a revolution of opinions and interpretations that varied from the extreme conservative right, such as the Hanbalī school [in reference to the Ahmad Ibn Hanbal], to the utmost level of reason-based interpretation proposed by the great thinker Ibn Rushd [Averroes], and between those two extremes there were a multitude of other schools of thought. For example, at the time when Abū Hanīfah al-Nuamān accepted less than 100 hadīths [sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad], Ahmad Ibn Hanbal recognized more than 10,000 hadīths. Nevertheless, Muslims committed a grave mistake against themselves and their religion when they closed the door to ijtihād [interpretation] and stopped searching for new concepts and solutions. They became satisfied with simply taking from what their ancestors had produced, although those concepts and solutions were the outcome of an ancient era and the fruits of the conditions of a past time. Therefore, Muslims are living in a status quo environment where they ruminate on the thoughts of other men who exerted efforts to set concepts that suited their time eight centuries ago. In comparison to ancient Muslim men of religion such as Averroes, who is as important intellectually as Aristotle, current Muslim scholars read only in Arabic, they are not aware of modern sciences, and they find themselves in social environments that do not allow them to be intellectually open to the innovations of humanity in the different fields of social and human sciences. We are in dire need of a new generation of scholars who can comprehend the sciences, cultures and knowledge of the current age as well as understand the heritage of ancient Muslims. Seventy years ago, the grand imām of the Azhar, Dr. Mustafá Abd al-Rāziq, was a former professor of philosophy in a university. Which university you may ask? Not the University al-Riyadh or the University of Sana'a, but he was a professor at the University of Sorbonne. I have been engaged in meetings with a number of scholars from the Vatican. I always bemoan and wonder why the Vatican abounds with men of religion with such splendid educational, intellectual and encyclopedic cognitive backgrounds in their various areas of knowledge, while our scholars know nothing about the great fruits of human creativity in many of the different branches of social and human sciences. At a conference held seven years ago, I saw a scholar who is considered by some as the greatest Muslim jurist and preacher of his time. He was an Egyptian with Qatari nationality who fled from Egypt during the clashes between the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamāl Abd al-Nāsir in 1954. At the conference, he used more than one interpreter, and never got involved in discussions about modern streams of thought. On the other hand, the Vatican scholars were using four or five languages in their discussions that covered vast fields of knowledge. I will not hide the fact that I felt ashamed of him that day. He seemed so primitive in his thoughts and approaches. It appeared as if he was a primeval human from the forests of ' Borneo Island.' We need a generation of Muslim religious scholars who have studied other religions, human history, world literature, philosophy, sociology and psychology and can speak a number of languages; the languages of civilization. Until this happens, our Muslim scholars will remain primitive and stay at their level of naivety, shallowness and isolation from the path of civilization and humanity. Before I reached 20 years of age Father George Qanawātī, a monk who headed the Dominican Monastery in al-Abbāsīyah, Cairo, had taught me about Greek drama and ancient Greek philosophy. Another monk taught me some simple things that have made many people nowadays think that I am an academic expert in Judaism. However, never in my life have I seen a Muslim man of religion who had encyclopedic knowledge in a number of fields of interest. In conclusion, just as we are underdeveloped in all of the fields of science, we are in the same respect, underdeveloped in the sciences of our Islamic religion. Our backwardness in Islam is the same as it is in medicine, engineering, information technology and space research. We are nothing but a 'parasite' of humanity. Even the weapons used by the militias of the groups calling themselves jihādīs [related to Islamic jihād] are made by others who work hard at a time when we are insipid. We need to see the emergence of a generation of this type of men of religion, which I have just described in the article, who combine the zenith of Islamic sciences and modern sciences at the same time. Without them, Muslims' isolation from the progress of humanity will increase. Campaigns of criticism will be escalated against them. I can also imagine that a huge number of them will be driven out of the European communities and from North America. In addition to that, Islam-West clashes, such as the war against the Tālibān in Afghanistan, may reoccur. Muslims (or to be more precise, large sectors of the Muslim population) will become the primary enemy of Western civilization or may become the first enemy of all of humanity. Despite the need, such long-pursued development within Islamic religious institutions is very unlikely to occur. The biggest Islamic institutions in the modern world, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are expelling any element that calls for the slightest renovations and changes. If so, what should we expect about demands for comprehensive change? One of the Islamic universities has dismissed Dr. Ahmad Subhī Mansūr when all he has done is rejected the recognition of prophetic hadīths as a source of jurisprudential principles. The university should have discussed the differences in viewpoints using a scientific method that would be performed within the framework of a dialogue, and organized arguments where the differing scholars can exchange opinions. Strangely enough, Abū Hanīfah al-Nuamān, one of the great-four Muslim jurists, was in the same situation as Dr. Ahmad Subhī Mansūr when he decided to recognize only a few of the hadīths at a time when other jurists accepted all prophetic hadīths. To be more precise, if Abū Hanīfah had seen a book like 'Sahīh al-Bukhārī' [al-Bukhārī's Authentic], he would have rejected more than 90% of its contents. In this situation some modern Islamic university would have deemed Abū Hanīfah kāfir [apostate] although he was the first of the great four Islamic jurists and was entitled 'The Great Imām.' As a matter of fact, conditions in today's Islamic religious institutions do not allow those institutions to produce men of the quality of Abū Hanīfah and Averroes. They are more and more isolated and occupied with 'yellow' religious references. For centuries, their role in the interpretation of Islam has been restricted to the texts of books and not their contexts. It became rare to find one scholar at these institutions who read even one book in a language other than Arabic. Therefore, the long-sought for change among the Islamic establishment is now contingent upon a political leadership that is willing to lean toward a rational interpretation of history and a vision for the future. Unfortunately, these qualifications are not easily found within Islamic communities. Nevertheless, we need to demand a political leadership that works towards achieving radical procedural change within the structure of the Islamic scholarly community and that is willing to herd this community into harmony with the age of science and the progress of humanity. Without this driving force, Muslims will be heading for a massive confrontation with humanity which will be as disastrous as a collision between two celestial bodies.
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