Jedi, I had wanted to refer you and others to another discussion on CEMB specifically on the matter of reforming Islam from within and the authenticity problem all reconstructivist approaches to Islam face. I did not because I wanted to see if this topic was going to yield anything invigorating or plain new. Now that the possibilities of such an intellectual profit seem to be ebbing away, I give you the link to that similar discussion:
http://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=29301.0My views, as expressed in this thread, remain unchanged. That is, external forces like us, Ex Muslims, cannot convincingly appropriate any interpretation of scriptural Islam as our own fluffy flavour, having, as we would, our reformist desires and wishes as this New Islam's frame of reference.
Of course we can do this make-believe Islam ourselves for ourselves, making it fit for our own consumption. Nobody can object to this actual ability per se (after all, at least in the West, we live in free countries). However, that New Islam is intransitive and wouldn’t convince anyone else beside ourselves, until of course we grow fat and fool and start recruiting and trying to dishonestly pass it on as something objective and or supported by Islamic texts.
Words belong to their community of speech and they are communally owned. The meaning of any word is not owned by an individual. In fact, meaning does not reach the state of wordhood until it is comprehended as well as used by
other people beside yourself or the coiner.
Sure, you can invent brand new words, words which look English because they adhere to its phonotactical rules; something like fondoggle and defultramental. Granted, you can then prance around insisting these two mean a lot and mean things only you can designate and discern. Chomsky’s “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” comes to mind. But this freedom was never in question.
Further, the circular subjectivity of saying “the notion X as defined by me is mine and true because I say so and live so” is inimical to a conducive learning exchange because of its territorial finality and proprietorial exclusivity.
Also it is worthy of note that this is not an argument against raiding the traditionalist tafsir books for the purpose of locating and adopting all the inoffensive, conducive to modernity interpretations of the Quran. No, let’s not conflate things.
My argument is not against that approach because that approach is honest about its expurgating purpose. Whatever pacifying role this approach may play, it is likely to be truly inspired by the Quranic text (2:185). Inspired also by ahadith such as
Yassir Wala Tu’assir and “
treat people with ease and do not be hard on them; give them glad tidings and don’t make them run away from Islam” – narrated by Bukhari and Muslim. Therefore, this approach has its proponents as traditional Muslims and actual believers in the ultimate truth of Allah and the Islamic texts; their said textual expedience is still operating with propriety, thus its products I’d argue to be Islamically authentic.
If agreed, this expurgating approach is already catered for within Islamic
Figh (الإستئناس أو عدم الشذوذ بالرأي). That is to say, examining the books and sayings of previous religious practitioners and ulama in order to find favourable views, however fringe and not persuasive these may be, to match and support your own desired ones. This utilising evidence manipulation is nothing new in Islam. It is nothing new outside of Islam either, as any lawyering first year student can tell you all you need about the
obiter dicta in common law reasoning; all the sayings, arguments and rulings that are not binding.
What you are saying is very legitimate, Jedi, indeed rudimentary in any respected academic setting and for anyone who wishes to convince others. Call it a Muhammedian. Call it an
Ash'ari. Call it a Muslim. The frontier of this objective identity might throughout the Islamic history be shifting but is nevertheless always recognisable.
You are not indulging in intentional self-deception which practically is what the view differing from yours seems to advance. If you ask me to conjecture why, I’d say it’s perhaps because the differing view has grown tired of the daily diet of insulting Islam for the heck of it
and because it now wants to re-join by adding something positive to the damn faith that couldn't be beaten on its own objective terms. This latter, then, is more like the negotiation stage of the Five Stages of Grief.
I often find it a great source of laughter more than anything else that I take anti-depressant medication to stablise my mood swings, to chase off anxiety and longish bouts of ennui. To fight back anhedonia, in other words. Thus, I know most if not all of my buzz and clappiness is induced by 'happy' pills and psychoactive drugs. But what I try not to do then is to turn around attaching my merrymaking to myself or to a change of scenery, or to lots of things too far removed from the causative nature of these drugs, all that simply because I cannot live with and am trying to escape the inconvenient truth of my clappiness being manufactured in a scientific lab.
In relation to the Islamic reconstructivism or ‘reclamation’ advanced by a few lovely individuals here, it is nothing entirely new if you think about those hadith narrators, towards the end of the Umayyad and throughout the Abbasid Caliphates, who deliberately fabricated a lot of ahadith (plural) not for destroying but to actually spread the message of Allah and His messenger. These narrators were lying
for the prophet, not against him. They were lying
for, not against, Islam. Still, this well-intended dawa project was rightfully met with failure; and, a whole new and (seemingly) vigorous tradition of Islamic hadith narration was organically invented,
Mustalah Al-Hadith, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Sticking with the Quran, the thorny issue of
Majaz in interpreting certain verses is something which is regularly discussed at length in any thorough, systematic approach to tafsir in Arabic. We have fully-fledged
Manahij Al-Mufassirin — The Methodologies of Quranic Commentary. Evidently, there’s a method to this madness.
Wising up to how slippery this
Majaz road was, the danger this non-literal and metaphor based approach was, who else was it but Ibn Taymiyyah who brought out the machine gun strongly arguing against its Quranic occurrence altogether.
I cite him, perhaps to the immediate chagrin of some, because he is
the Shaykh of Islam in
Aquidah and
Figh as far as traditionalist (NB not necessarily literalist) Sunnis of today are concerned. For this great panjandrum and for lots of the Sunni scholars, dead and contemporary scholars whose works I had assiduously studied, the Quran is true in its literality and they deem this maxim self-evident until there's another adducible, authentic, sufficient textual evidence to justify differently interpreting anything, to justify unusually departing from whatever its closest literal meaning was.
Thus,
Majaz-based approaches, as you would agree, have more textual kinship, however far-fetched, to scriptural Islam as to resist our summary dismissal on grounds of wilful inventiveness — in this case, lying
against scriptural Islam as opposed to the misguided hadith narrators above.
As such, there is nothing authentic to be gained by any serious Islamic learner from entertaining the imposed, necessarily anodyne reformist wishes on the Quranic text which it could not linguistically, historically or logically support them.
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Edited to remedy spelling and other solecisms.
Topic: Why must Maryam Namazie take on the left in her critiques of Islamic extremism?