Imo Tailor is of the opinion that those who approach Quran from the perspective which sofian86 is employing (from a perspective of a rational person who is capable of having knowledge) are effectively using a tool provided by European Enlightenment which is basically foreign to Islam and thereby in a way self-defeating. That is not to say that rational thought is foreign to Islam though.
What it does mean is that there might be ways to approach certain issues that are superior to rationality as defined by European Enlightenment and are authentically Islamic to boot. At least that's how my limited intellect sees it.
Right, Kenan -- how nice of you to have read through my piece on this! (It is rather long and off-puttingly academic sounding.)
http://thegoodgarment.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/a-christmas-nasheed-saba-mahmood-progressive-islam-postcolonialism-and-hajar/I would argue that the much of progressive Islam (including some of its very best and able thinkers) -- are being less sincere to the Qur'an in talking about an "extrapolation" of the "intent" of shariah from past to present.
For example, I am sure you are familiar with the idea that the verses concerning slaves and women are all about being nicer to them than before -- RADICALLY nicer, within the context of 7th century Arabia. Beating wives only after trying many other tactics, for example -- or only selling slaves into prostitution only if they agree -- and, at that, many verses espousing the virtue of freeing slaves. The progressive interpretation is to say -- well, that was a radical jump THEN -- what is the equivalent radical jump NOW? For wives -- no beating at all, but an understanding of different gender roles. For slaves -- well, we don't own them now as such -- but we have all kinds of sanctioned forms of slavery (e.g., all the Chinese and Bangladeshis that sew our clothes) -- the most radical thing we could do today would be to abolish their slavery by paying them better for their goods and services, moving to a socialism etc.
Or that the command to wear hijab is, in fact, a form of women's liberation because it means people focus on a woman's mind rather than her exterior appearance.
Or, more complicated cases, such as the argument (cited in my piece) that the verses of polygamy are in a context of a war that left many widows -- and in a time when having a husband meant having financial support -- so might be better treated as mounting a case for a better social security infrastructure today for women, particularly victims of war. So the verses might mean getting more active in helping out the widows of Palestine or Chechnya -- but of course not actually marrying them as the nature of social security and infrastructure has changed.
The problem with all these positions is that they (often unwittingly) adopt a subjectivity that is "foreign" to Islam (or, for that matter, Medieval Christianity). There's nothing morally wrong with that -- just insincere in its claim to authenticity.
You'd have to read my piece to get the full details. But I could give you two examples.
* There is a different (Islamic) subjectivity in which God's commands are not justified with respect to some exterior system. That subject does not say "I wear hijab because it literates me from being forced to appear the way the fashion industry wants me to (essentially forced consumerism)" -- because that justification is related to an exterior ("modern") feminist/socialist discourse. The different (Islamic) subject would instead say "I wear hijab because God commands me to". That is, there is very little foregrounded "God" in the progressive stance -- there is, instead, an individual, a Qur'an (admittedly from backgrounded God), a set of discourses (feminism, socialism, etc), interpretative trajectories that draw a line from Qur'an to the discourses.
* This gets more serious when we consider the very basic tools by which the progressive operates. Notice that all their arguments -- their interpretative trajectories -- are based on ONE idea of
history and
time -- a linear concept of history that came into perfection mainly through the European Enlightenment.
Let me put it this way -- a progressive will argue their case by investigating precedents in the distant past and throughout later caliphates. Here the "past" is pretty much what we are taught it to be, growing up in a modern, Westernized world.
An Australian Aboriginal 400 years ago, on the other hand, will have a concept of the distant "past" (dreamtime, a time/zone that is linked to the actual state of dreaming) as well as stories about previous generations -- but that is a completely different notion of past to our modern one. In a sense, the Aboriginal's time is not "progressive" -- it does not involve saying 100 years ago we were like this, an improvement on how things were 200 years ago -- there is not a notion of progress here. Instead, previous generations are kind of blurred -- and the past is not a means to establish precedent for future progress. And I'd argue that Islamic subjectivity is much closer to that of the Aboriginal (not exactly the same, but just as different). This is a simple fact, speaking with a Western historical perspective here -- because ALL subjectivities were different before the modern creation of "history". Look at the way the ancients wrote down their history -- it's radically different from the way we describe history today -- because their sense of time was different (again, not exactly like the Aboriginal, but just as different from ours).
I am of course aware that I am speaking in a progressive mode, because I can't escape the Western, post-Enlightenment subjectivity I was raised in. But that self-awareness of my discursive position allows me to "displace" my subjectivity in anything I say about the Qur'an. Foucault made a career out of doing this with looking at other topics (crime, punishment, sexuality). The Sufis also make this their life, but it is called a process of fana/baqa in our terminology.
I could get more detailed if you want -- but I laid it out in relation to the Sa'ee of Hajar in that article
Love and Light,
TT
Topic: Progressive Islam