I didn't refer to Sardar's thesis for this particular book as postmodern b he does generally adopt a hermeneutical approach and has referred to himself as such.
Ah OK, thanks.
His postmodernist and deconstructivist paradigms, which I think he developed in the 1980's and matured in the 1990's, makes him unique amongst the Muslim apologists. He accepts that there are violent verses in the Qur'an, but they are violent only because we fail to understand their deeper, spiritual significance.
Sounds exactly like what I did a couple of years ago when I tried to read Derrida, Lacan, Heidegger, etc... into the qu'ran.
But then you realise that islam is praxis and nothing more. It isn't a detached thinking Cartesian cogito.
He falls in to the camp of 'I'm not trying to say that most Muslims are wrong when they interpret the Qur'an, but they are wrong when they interpret the Qur'an because they haven't read or understand the Qur'an in the same way that I have read or understood the Qur'an.'
Again, sounds like the approach I used to attempt to rekindle my loss of faith. I've graduated from that avenue, thankfully, or not.
Such an approach was refreshing to me when I was a teenager hoping to reconcile Islam with my modern sensibilities, but the facade is quickly revealed when you reflect upon the whole vacuity of such statements. They mean nothing.
I wouldn't call the statements vacuous but sorely lacking at the point of praxis. You can't realistically believe in a postmodern and hermeneutically deconstructed islam and expect for it to take hold for the collective, which, contrary to what most muslims say, is entirely Islam's raison d'étre. So yeah, bourgeois posturing.
He is postmodernist in that he accepts that you can 'pick' and choose' certain verses that you like and believes that there are a myriad ways of receiving and practising the message. He wrote a book about it. He is a deconstructivist in which he thinks he has found the correct way to peel away the layers of the 'apparent' and the 'immediate' to grasp at the 'unseen', the 'hidden'. Airy-fairy, namby-pamby Sufi tosh.
Surely he's just following Ibn Arabi's lineage? Or let me rephrase: the dialectic between islam and the man divorced from the herd shatters the concept of the unity of opposites and leads to negation of negation.
Thanks for that post, mate. Very informative.
Topic: What book are you reading?