A difficult Muslim predicament:
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and till today, there were many major ambitious Arab intellectual projects of religious reforms that sought to build from the ground up a whole new foundation of Quranic hermanutics that can open /1
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and till today, there were many major ambitious Arab intellectual projects of religious reforms that sought to build from the ground up a whole new foundation of Quranic hermanutics that can open /1
the sealed gates of Muslim reason and humanism. The best and brightest minds of the Muslim ME, Mohamed Arkoun from Algeria, Nasr Hamed Abou Zaid from Egypt, Mohamed Shahrour from Lebanon, and many more, spent their lives toiling in linguistics, philosophy, theology, etc. /2
trying to achieve this noblest and most urgent of causes. All those amazing minds were seeking to do is to start a Muslim version of the reformation to liberate Muslim thinking from the chains of dogmatism, superstition, and literalism, and it's exactly here that their problem /3
is. When the theologians and thinkers of the EU reformation, and later the enlightenment, were embarking on their journey they were engaging in innovative and original hermeneutical work that helped unlock new potentials of scripture and reaching new conclusions. When /4
the Muslim reformers embark on their journey, even before you pick any of their hefty volumes, you know all the conclusions in advance; human rights, equality between the sexes, freedom of expression, freedom of belief, etc. You don't read to know any of their works to know /5
they are headed with their hermeneutical innovations to the same development goals set by the IMF and human rights organizations. No matter how original and cohesive their intellectual edifice is, and they are that, the fact that the destination is already set in advance /6
and adds nothing to what's already been known for over 100 years leaves most people ambivalent at best. Those who read those books are either those who are convinced with the destination in advance and happy to know there is a way to get there or those who seek to write /7
polemics legitimating the reality of not being there. I'm not taking sides in anything just wanted to describe what I think is a truly difficult predicament. Those intellectuals are truly heroic and the ambivalent faithful audiences are right to be suspicious of intellectual /1
explorative ventures that seek to reach destinations that were long predetermined.
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