Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988): Reforming Islamic Intellectual Tradition

Born in pre-partition India, Fazlur Rahman was instructed in traditional Is­lamic sciences by his father/⁶ then went on to study Arabic and Islamic studies at Punjab University in Lahore, and Islamic philosophy at the University of Ox­ford. After graduation in 1958, he taught at universities in the United Kingdom and Canada until 1961, when he was invited by the President of Pakistan, Gen­eral Ayub Khan, to help with reforming religious education in Pakistan. He be­came director of the Islamic Research Institute, recently created to provide intel­lectual backing for Ayub Khan’s modernization project and to steer the path of reform in ways that would not offend the religious establishment/⁷ He became entangled with the politics of modernization and reform in Pakistan, and his re­formist ideas and approach to Islamic tradition from a critical perspective made him a target for Ayub Khan’s influential religious and political opponents. The fiercest opposition came from religious conservatives, and was centred on the question of women’s rights and the reform of family law. Rahman began to re­ceive death threats, and eventually decided to return to academic life in the West.

Unlike Haddad, Rahman did not write a book about women’s rights, nor did he offer specific proposals for reforming Muslim family law. But his writings are permeated by a critique of patriarchal readings of Islam’s sacred texts, and his framework for interpreting the ethico-legal content of the Qur’an has been cru­cial to feminist scholarship in Islam?^[147] He considered the reform of Muslim fam­ily laws to be on the whole moving in the right direction, and he saw the weight of conservatism in Muslim contexts as the main obstacle to bringing about rad­ical reform. In ‘A survey of modernization of Muslim Family Law’, an article pub­lished in the 1980s, Rahman opens the discussion by pointing to the fate of Had­dad, and the harsh reaction his book and his proposals for family law reform received from the very clerics who were not perturbed by his earlier quasi-Marx- ist book on the rise of trade unionism and the interpretation of history.^[148]

In his approach to Islam’s sacred texts, Rahman shares Haddad’s historicism and gradualism in revelation and legislation. The Qur’an ‘is the divine response, through the Prophet’s mind, to the moral-social situation of the Prophet’s Ara­bia, particularly to the problems of commercial Meccan society of the day.’ Not all these solutions are relevant or applicable to all times and all contexts. What is immutable and valid are the moral principles behind these solutions. These moral principles shows us the way, the Shari‘a, how to establish a society on earth where all humans can be treated as equals as they are equal in the eyes of God.

But Muslims betrayed this trust as, in the course of the historical develop­ment of Islam, the moral principles behind Qur’anic laws were distorted. This distortion has its roots in political developments after the Prophet’s death and in the subsequent decay and stagnation of Islamic intellectualism, which pre­dates Islam’s encounter with Western colonial powers. Muslims failed to create a viable system of Qur’an-based ethics, and from the outset jurisprudence has overshadowed the science of ethics in Islam; in developing the latter, Muslim scholars relied more on Persian and Greek sources than on the Qur’an itself. The link between theology, ethics and law will remain tenuous as long as Mus­lims fail to make the crucial distinctions in the Qur’an and the Prophet’s Sunna, between essentials and accidentals, and between prescriptive and descriptive. They mistakenly view the Qur’an as a book of law, and take its legal and quasi-legal passages to be relevant to all times and places.

To revive the Qur’an’s ‘elan’, Rahman argues, Muslims need two things. First is a fresh engagement with the Qur’an and a critical reassessment of the entire Islamic intellectual tradition: theology, ethics, philosophy and jurisprudence. The second is a realistic assessment and understanding of the contemporary socio-political context. It is only then that Muslims can overcome centuries of decadence and backwardness and meet the challenges of modernity. The inter­pretative process that Rahman proposes for this revival is a ‘double movement’, which entails a movement ‘from the present situation to Qur’anic times, then back to the present’. In the first movement ‘general principles, values and long-range objectives’ of the Qur’an are elicited and separated from the socio- historical context of the revelation. In the second, these principles are applied to issues at hand, taking into consideration the current context and its impera­tives.⁴² In his words, this:

...

ct Sonn, ‘Fazlur Rahman and Islamic feminism’, 128.

42 Fazlur Rahman, Islam & Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5.

mentality of the social scientist is obviously indispensable, but the actual ‘effective orien­tation' and ‘ethical engineering' are the work of the ethicist.^{[149] [150] [151] [152]}

In ‘The status of women in Islam: a modernist interpretation',44 Rahman suggests what ‘effective orientation' and ‘ethical engineering' entail when it comes to the issue of gender equality and family law. This is the only place where Rahman fo­cuses his attention on this issue (apart from his 1980 article on family law re­forms, already cited); elsewhere he mentions it only in passing. Published in 1982, the same year as his last major work (Islam and Modernity), this article can be seen as the application of his ‘double movement' theory in the area of gender rights and family law reform. Rahman begins by identifying himself as a ‘Muslim modernist', one who pursues social reform through a new interpreta­tion of Islamic sources and ‘in contradistinction to the stance taken on most so­cial issues by Muslim conservative-traditionalist leaders'. Islamic modernism, Rahman argues, ‘developed under the impetus of modern Western liberalism but contains within it tangible differences on sexual issues, but is to be sharply distinguished from secularism.^⁵ He is equally critical of social reform without reference to Islam, which he calls ‘secularism (a la Mustafa Kemal Ataturk)', the ‘apologetic aspect' of Islamic modernism that rationalises and justifies gen­der inequality (p. 285)?⁶

The legislation in the Qur'an on the subject of women, Rahman contends, is part of the effort to strengthen the position of the weaker segments of the com­munity, which in pre-Islamic Arabia were the poor, orphans, women, slaves and those chronically in debt.

What the Qur’anic reforms achieved was ‘the removal of certain abuses to which women were subjected’: female infanticide and window-inheritance were banned, laws of marriage, divorce and inheritance were reformed. As with slavery, however, these reforms did not go as far as abolishing patriarchy. But they expanded women’s rights and brought tangible improvements in their position — though not social equality. Women retained the rights they had to property, but they were no longer treated as property; they could not be forced into marriage against their will, and they received the marriage gift (mahr); they also acquired better access to divorce and were allocated shares in inheritance.

The essential equality between the sexes is clearly implied in the Qur’an; both men and women are mentioned separately ‘as being absolutely equal in vir­tue and piety with such unflinching regularity that it would be superfluous to give particular documentation’ (p.

The Qur’an speaks of the husband and wife relationship as that of ‘love and mercy’ adding that the wife is a moral support for the husband (30:21). It describes their support for each other by saying, ‘they (i.e. your wives) are garments unto you and you are garments unto them’ (2:187). The term ‘garment’ here means that which soothes and covers up one’s weak­ness (p. 293).

Such sayings also contradict what we know of the Prophet’s own conduct, thus must be rejected.

The Prophet’s wives, far from worshiping him — with all his religious authority — wanted from him the good things of life, so that the Qur’an had to say, ‘0 Messenger! Say to your wives: “If you want to pursue this-worldly life and its good things, then I will give you wealth, but let you go in gentleness (i.e. divorce you)”’ (33:29).^[153] What the Qur’an required from a woman was to be a good wife, adding, ‘Good women are those who are faithful and who guard what is their husband’s in his absence as God wants them to guard’ (4:34) (p. 293).

The Qur’an does speak of inequality between sexes. But when it does, it gives the rationale, which has to do with socio-economic factors.

In 2:228 we are told, ‘For them (i.e. women) there are rights (against them), but men are one degree higher than women.’ That is to say, in the social (as opposed to religious) sphere, while the rights and obligations of both spouses towards each other are exactly commen­surate, men are, nevertheless, a degree higher. The rationale is not given in this verse which simply adds ‘And God is Mighty and Wise.’ The rationale is given later, in verse 4:34 (p. 294).

This verse, Rahman continues, begins by saying that men are ‘managers over (i.e., are superior to) women because some of humankind excel others (in some respects) and because men expend of their wealth (for women)’ and then goes on to give them the authority to discipline their wives when they do not obey them. Thus the two rationales that this gives for male superiority in so­cioeconomic affairs are: ‘(1) that man is “more excellent”, and (2) that man is charged entirely with household expenditure’, but not any inherent inequality between sexes. (p. 294).

What the Qur’an appears to say, therefore, is that since men are the primary socially oper­ative factors and bread-winners, they have been wholly charged with the responsibility of defraying household expenditure and upkeep of their womenfolk. For this reason man, be­cause by his struggle he has gained more life-experience and practical wisdom, has become entitled to ‘manage women’s affairs’, and, in case of their recalcitrance, admonish them, leave them alone in their beds and, lastly, to beat them without causing injury (p. 294 - 5).

Having given his interpretation of Verse 4:34 and the rationale behind the gender inequality in the Qur’an, Rahman then poses two questions: Are these socio-eco­nomic roles on which gender inequality is based immutable, even if women want to change them? If they are changeable, how far can they be changed? His an­swer to the first question is a definite no, these inequalities are not inherent in the nature of the sexes; they are the product of historical socio-economic de-

velopments. Once women acquire education and participate in society and econ­omy, the ‘degree’ that the Qur’an says men have over women also disappears. But the answer to the second question, Rahman contends, is not that simple, and he is hesitant whether ‘women should ask or be allowed to do any and all jobs that men do’ — although he admits that ‘if women insist on and persist in this, they can and eventually will do so’ (p. 295).

But he has no doubt that law reforms must give women equality in all other spheres; classical fiqh rulings in marriage, divorce and inheritance can and must be reformed because ‘it is the most fundamental and urgent requirement of the Qur’an in the social sector that abuses and injustices be removed’ (p. 295). These inequalities are now the cause of suffering and oppression and go against the Qur’anic spirit, which is that of the equality of all human beings.

He then goes on to discuss in detail the laws of polygamy, divorce, inheri­tance and hijab, and reiterates the gist of his framework:

One must completely accept our general contention that the specific legal rules of the Qur’an are conditioned by the socio-historical background of their enactment and what is eternal therein is the social objectives or moral principles explicitly stated or strongly im­plied in that legislation. This would, then, clear the way for further legislation in the light of those social objectives or moral principles. This argument remains only elliptically hinted at by the Modernist, who has used it in an ad hoc manner only for the issue of polygamy, and has to not clearly formulated it as a general principle (p. 301).

Rahman ends by stressing that legal reform can only be effective in changing the status of women in Muslim contexts when there is an adequate basis for social change. It is only then that the Qur’anic objective of social justice in general and for women in particular can be fulfilled; otherwise its success will be limited, transitory and confined to certain social groups (p. 308).