MC: Critical Islam: History and Tradition Reconsidered

Muslim tradition and history face a crisis in modernity. The epistemes of modernity and post-modernity pose formidable challenges to the inherited self-understanding of the Muslim tradition. Furthermore, Muslim accounts of history are also subjected to modernist, post-modernist and, postcolonial criticisms. One way to engage the complex and variegated Muslim tradition is to dwell on a series of moral questions Muslim communities face in both majority and minority contexts. This requires a critical engagement with tradition and history.

The Master Class Critical Islam: History and Tradition Reconsidered will endeavor to open up some questions by analysing a section of Muqaddimah, the magnum opus of the Tunis-born scholar Ibn Khaldun who lived at the beginning of early European modernity and died in Cairo. This will be followed by an exposition, in largely a schematic manner, of the elements of Muslim historical traditions. This exposition will make use of exemplary moral questions involving Muslim family laws in diverse contexts such as India and South Africa or ethical and moral questions in bioethics and political theology.

The term “Critical Islam” or what I prefer to call “Critical Traditionalism” is different from modernism since it takes tradition as a referent point to materialise new intelligibility and reasoning of tradition. With appealing to Ibn Khaldun, I will try to reveal how early Muslim scholars use the texts of tradition to find new sensibilities and how alternative views on various issues can be extracted. The master class also will examine the category of dīn, in order to historically appreciate the unfolding of the concept and surface how and when it morphed into the modern category of “religion.”

Readings:

 - Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol.3 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD, 1958) 148-151

 - Ebrahim Moosa, “Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam” in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism edited by Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003) 111-128

 - Mohammed Arkoun, “Belief and the Construction of the Subject in Islamic Contexts,” in The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (London: Saqi Books, 2002) 126-169

- Reinhart Koselleck, “Historik and Hermeneutics” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2018), 41-59

Readings can be accessed online through the following link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GwZXiq7gGgM8eSl0SJSM5Nh3_v43mWJ9?usp=sharing

// Ebrahim Moosa (University of Notre Dame, USA) is a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He was previously professor of Religion and Islamic Studies at Duke University. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a particular focus on Islamic law, history, ethics, and theology. Today, he is regarded as one of the most prominent scholars of Muslim thought.