The ZamZam Cooler

"The rule of law, equal citizenship, universal suffrage, the accountability of elected
leaders before the people who elected them, and the separation of church and state." These, he says, are the most precious assets of Western democracy. "Do we have, as Muslims, a problem with these five principles? No."

Read the whole thing here. Its a piece in the Independent Newspaper from Britain.


I'm a big fan of Tariq Ramadan just like most Muslims in the West are. He has a good grasp of the positives of Western life and the structural failures of Muslim societies, and doesn't shy away from the faults of Muslim engineered "Islamic" thought which often is one of the main culprits for the backwardness seen in Muslim countries. But the thing is, Ramadan isn't an apologist to the West either. He sincerely believes Muslims are in a rut. That their scholarly advances need to mature in an age of globalization, just like everyone else but colonial rule and political interference and repression from the West have exacerbated problems. He courageously argues against certain streams of conventional Muslim scholarship and literal legalists on their own turf, espousing that their rulings and understandings don't have a sound scriptural basis. A lot of which, he says, is the product of the heavy influence of medieval interpretations that came at the zenith of Islamic civilizations, and are now misused to try and solve modern problems. And of course, he is one of the first to recognize and publicly advocate that a lot of the "Islamic" practices which are under the greatest scrutiny today, actually are very much composed with that "bad" cholesterol of culture and not so much of reflective of Islamic principles.

What I take from Ramadan is that our thought need be dynamic. It must be fluid enough to be in harmony with completely new scientific discoveries and to adjust to accommodate new techniques to deal with the new social ills that communities will face a hundred years from now. This is not to say that we must accordingly adjust our thought to perfectly model these parameters, no--but it will do so simply by virtue of being dynamic. Islam inherently has this quality, it just needs to be allowed to re-surface. Unfortunately, the current disconnect comes from at least in part, the understanding of Islamic law, which Ramadan in many of his works refers too. So from here on out I'm going to leave myself to the sharks and give my 2 cents (not adjusted for biased inflation) about Islamic law. If I'm thinking out loud too loud, don't hesitate to tell me ;).

Anyways, I've observed that Islamic law is described by a few banner terms, two of the most prominent being fiqh (فقه) and shari'ah (شريعة). The latter term is meant to describe, literally, the pathway. It refers to an immutable, eternal way to God. A code of ethics and life which is prescribed by God for the complete social, political and spiritual perfection of the Muslim world, if not for mankind. The former term, fiqh is often used interchangeably with the latter, shar'iah. That is, at least where I see the beginning of the problem.

Fiqh is not immutable. It is not the pristine, unchanging reality of shari'ah, but rather, fiqh is our best approximation to shari'ah and because of that, the methods of approximation will always differ and be changing. They will improve, be refined and updated to deal with new challenges that society will gradually come to face. Its not a contradiction that shar'iah is unchanging and that fiqh isn't. Shari'ah represents to us that eternal truth or haqq (حق), and is something defined and ordered by God, while fiqh is something designed and arranged by us, in order to reach that perfection. Maybe its the process of improving and amending fiqh that is spiritual, that is to be religiously observant or cognizant of God's law. If Shari'ah is a constant reality, then when we search for the only constant reality that exists in human society or human endeavor the only equivalent that we will be able to find is that of change. In this discussion we can be ease because we do not pollute the purity of truth with our own shortcomings nor do we create a rigid arena of religion in which we are bound by the time and space in which thoughts are developed.

Do I mean that we should burn all the legal codexes of Islamic scholars, past and present? Should we open the gates of ijtihad to every single Ahmad, Ali and Mahmoud? No. Lets begin to listen to the Tariq Ramadans of the world. The sincere people who have done the research and who want nothing more than for the Muslim world to be empowered and free once again. Scholarship is a big part of our religion. But scholarship has quality controls, its always engaged in debate and a technical battle of the best ideas but willingly (and happily) reconciles itself against the great moral and ethical message of the Qur'an and Sunnah. And it has a very important responsibility to lead and educate the people in order to strengthen their belief and to show them the path of righteousness and piety. That effort in itself must consider the element of time and circumstance. Contextual approaches need to considered more than ever and acontextual properties need to undergo a rigorous re-examination.

Muslims are amongst the few faithful communities that have in them an inherent integrity when it comes to discussing and practicing their faith. We walk into the halls of power and academia confident that Islam is in complete harmony with rationalism and science. We are not constrained by being inherently sinful, unable to right our own wrongs unless we blindly accept a certain mystical premise. For us, God isn't an obstacle in our way to greatness and prosperity but the great encouragement and the ethos of motivation. This is the spirit of Islam. We need to find it (as it relates to understanding our laws and customs). A great scholar once told me that when the light coming from a lamp is dim, when you go investigate why that is so, you will find on the surface of the bulb (the source of light) some dust. It is not the problem of the light itself that it is dim, its simply a matter of removing the dust for that light to illuminate naturally. We too need to realize that maybe, just maybe, that there might be a thin, or even a thick layer of dust on our legal understanding of Islam.