Thread by @HaroonSidat

You know you always have a book that you wished you had read before submitting a piece of writing; something that might add credence to the argument you were making. This is another one of them.

Contrary to the modern matter of fact imaginings, the author argues that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Muslim world was vibrant with creative and ground-breaking intellectual undertakings that restructured Islamic thought.

And all of this happened not because of European so-called ascendancy but in spite of it; “without Europe”.

Utilising everything that the Islamic tradition had bequeathed, these great thinkers - spread all over the Muslim world - were rearticulating and reworking the intellectual world of the Muslims.

This book, in other words, challenges the revisionist thesis that Muslims were responding to European encroachment (pg. 135).

It also takes on the constructed narrative, that the Muslim world was in decline and it was the Europeans, beginning with the 1798 French invasion of Egypt that “saved” the Muslim world:

Thirdly, and importantly for us today in some ways, it shows that taking the Wahhabi movement as somehow representative of Muslim “intellectual” life at the time is dishonest and historically inaccurate. If anything, this movement was actually an exception.

The author argues that had more to do with regional politics (the decline of Ottoman rule and rise of British influence) which was favourable to the Wahabbis at the time. This influence was then bedded by the discovery of oil in the twentieth century.

In a telling passage worth quoting at length the author states this:

The author musters a rich repertoire of engagement with primary texts to show a creative engagement with and scrutiny of usul al-hadith (theory of hadith) and legal theory (usul al-fiqh) by great Muslim thinkers.

Thinkers include the following:

Faced with the challenges of zealous partisanship (tamadhhub) and calling fellow Muslims unbelievers (takfir), they worked within their own regional traditions and local modes of learning to mould creative and transformative approaches to Islamic intellectual disciplines.

This was undergirded by a desire to endow more Muslims with participatory authority (pg. 57).

To stem the tide of ignorance and stale allegiance to unthinking authority these writers were “advocates of a democratic notion of knowledge without compromising the quality of this knowledge; they were anti-elitist without being anti-intellectual” (pg. 130).

These great thinkers, a legacy we claim to belong to, were concerned about pressing social and political problems both in theory and in practice:

For our times, this book shows how our intellectual forebears had no qualms with engaging critically with a received tradition to open up and unearth theoretical and practical solutions to the most pressing concerns facing Muslims of their time.