What do you think?
Sceptics of Islam: Revisionist Religion, Agnosticism and Disbelief in the Modern Arab World
Arab debates about the critical relationship between religion and modernity began in the early nineteenth century. Such debates are now integral to the struggle for power between a variety of political groups and their opponents, and are vital to understanding the modern Middle East. This unique volume introduces writings of Arab Christian and Muslim revisionist and radical "free thinkers" who have tried to redefine the relationship. It challenges the deeply entrenched idea that the contemporary Islamic world has been impermeable to a critique of religious ideas and practices. Authors from the nineteenth century to the present are included. Some are avowed believers, even if they adopt positions many might regard as heretical; others are openly agnostic and atheistic. Despite their differences, all have been united in disputing the notion that life should conform exclusively to a system of values and laws based upon the Qur'an or the Bible, or, in some cases less radically, upon these as they were widely understood before the onset of modernity. They have also rejected many of the standard religious 'liberal' assumptions that are regularly invoked against traditionalism. The book's originality lies in its evaluation of the social and cultural impact of these thinkers.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published May 30, 2018
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 11, 2022
A beautiful anthology of critical literature that has defied traditional norms of religious expression, ranging from benevolent reformism to outright atheistic denial.
The book is divided into 17 chapters, each portraying the intellectual output of a certain thinker through an excerpt of their work. First and foremost, we start with Muhammad ‘Abduh, the well known pioneer of Islamic modernism and former Grand Mufti of Egypt, who seeks to mesh the achievements of modern science with traditional religious understanding, placing emphasis on the God given intellect that every believer has recourse to. Then, on the opposite side of the spectrum, we encounter the materialist thought of Shibli Shumayyil who, drawing on the work of German Darwinist Ludwig Buchner, sets out a scathing critique of supernatural and spiritual belief, affirming the primacy of matter over all else (i.e. matter always existed and shall exist indefinitely). Following this agnostic train of thought, Ameen Rihani presents us with a humorous allegorical story (with obvious reference to Christian doctrine) of a donkey, a mule and a horse interrogating a fox on his disbelief in God (who is represented by a lion) and trying to execute him, only to have the deity intervene and chastise them, and as a result they are run over by trains which leads to "Their heads and the rest of their bodies fly into the air and their various limbs are ‘scattered on the road of modern civilisation’." (p.54). The eminent dean of Arabic letters, Taha Hussein, later joins us in his critical analysis of the Qur’anic story relating Abraham and his son Ishmael, denoting its similarity with the Torah, thus positing a theory in which the Quraysh might have used this myth as a means of strengthening the bonds between Arabs and Jews, while in another passage he affirms the inevitable conflict between science and religion, setting them up as non-overlapping magisteria (to use Stephen Jay Gould’s term). Isma’il Mazhar as well as Isma’il Adham, both exhibiting irreligious tendencies, attempt to give an answer to the question of causality and whether or not God/Deity can be used as a suitable explanation for the origins of the universe, the former using a mix of evolutionary science and philosophical naturalism while the latter tries to ground his assumptions on the law of probability and chance. Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi, a well known author of neo-classical poetry, expresses his religious views through the prism of a work which tells of the story of a man sent to the depths of hell and meeting all kinds of intellectuals and great thinkers (from Socrates to Ibn Rushd and of course, Darwin) as well as an estranged woman, who then rise up in revolt against the status quo in order to reach heaven, only for the narrator to wake up and realize it was all but an eventful dream. A controversial figure, Muhammad Ahmad Khalaf Allah, marked his place in history when he published his dissertation, in which he alleges that Qur’anic stories are meant to be taken as literary narratives and not historical documents, as a means of solving the often ambiguous and outright contradictory reports such as the story of Moses and the staff, provoking the ire of al-Azhar and their supporters. Moving to more obscure personalities, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha initiated a movement with his publication of the “The Second Message of Islam”, alleging that the Meccan phase of the revelation represented the truly universal and egalitarian spirit of Islam, with the later Medinan phase being adapted to the Prophet’s lifetime and thus being no longer relevant in our age, a declaration which unfortunately led to his eventual demise by the Sudanese state. Both ‘Ali Ahmad Sa’id (better known as Adonis) and Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm represented a challenge to the religious obscurantism and political instability that were engulfing the Arab world in their time, with the latter publishing two works (“Self-Criticism After the Defeat” and “Critique of Religious Thought”) severely putting to task the prevalent religious justifications for the poor campaign in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and calling for social change and the former helping express a new intellectual movement through his poetry, highlighting the virtues of the pagan past and the modern world with a blend of surrealism and Sufism. The works of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Mohammed Arkoun helped bring about a revolutionary understanding in Qur’anic hermeneutics, highlighting the importance of the mode of communication in revelation in the former with the latter taking on the approach of categorizing the oral origins of religion and contrasting it with the latter written form it takes. In the same spirit, Muhammad Shahrur endeavors to re-examine the notion of revelation by understanding the occurrences of the word “Kitab” (i.e. the celestial book in God’s possession) in the Qur’an in order to fully comprehend the message that was promoted by the Prophet, thus reconceptualizing the notion of Sunnah (i.e. prophetic sayings and deeds) in its entirety. ‘Abdallah al-Qusaymi, and similarly Nawal El Saadawi, represented a very radical strain in religious critique, with the Saudi former cleric first lashing out against the established order to then harshly discarding the notion of God altogether, while the Egyptian feminist took to task the prevailing patriarchal abuses of religious authority culminating in her satirical play in which God is visited by a group of important women (Eve and Isis figure in as well) as well as commoners who ask questions regarding the state of the world and how hard life is, with Satan chiming in to pin the blame on the deity, to which God replies that He empathizes with their concern and wishes to become a human like them.
Overall, a commendable and timely effort on the part of the author who tried their best to bring us a representative sample of freethinkers among the Arab world, thus putting to rest the myth of lack of intellectual novelty in allegedly religious societies.
The book is divided into 17 chapters, each portraying the intellectual output of a certain thinker through an excerpt of their work. First and foremost, we start with Muhammad ‘Abduh, the well known pioneer of Islamic modernism and former Grand Mufti of Egypt, who seeks to mesh the achievements of modern science with traditional religious understanding, placing emphasis on the God given intellect that every believer has recourse to. Then, on the opposite side of the spectrum, we encounter the materialist thought of Shibli Shumayyil who, drawing on the work of German Darwinist Ludwig Buchner, sets out a scathing critique of supernatural and spiritual belief, affirming the primacy of matter over all else (i.e. matter always existed and shall exist indefinitely). Following this agnostic train of thought, Ameen Rihani presents us with a humorous allegorical story (with obvious reference to Christian doctrine) of a donkey, a mule and a horse interrogating a fox on his disbelief in God (who is represented by a lion) and trying to execute him, only to have the deity intervene and chastise them, and as a result they are run over by trains which leads to "Their heads and the rest of their bodies fly into the air and their various limbs are ‘scattered on the road of modern civilisation’." (p.54). The eminent dean of Arabic letters, Taha Hussein, later joins us in his critical analysis of the Qur’anic story relating Abraham and his son Ishmael, denoting its similarity with the Torah, thus positing a theory in which the Quraysh might have used this myth as a means of strengthening the bonds between Arabs and Jews, while in another passage he affirms the inevitable conflict between science and religion, setting them up as non-overlapping magisteria (to use Stephen Jay Gould’s term). Isma’il Mazhar as well as Isma’il Adham, both exhibiting irreligious tendencies, attempt to give an answer to the question of causality and whether or not God/Deity can be used as a suitable explanation for the origins of the universe, the former using a mix of evolutionary science and philosophical naturalism while the latter tries to ground his assumptions on the law of probability and chance. Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi, a well known author of neo-classical poetry, expresses his religious views through the prism of a work which tells of the story of a man sent to the depths of hell and meeting all kinds of intellectuals and great thinkers (from Socrates to Ibn Rushd and of course, Darwin) as well as an estranged woman, who then rise up in revolt against the status quo in order to reach heaven, only for the narrator to wake up and realize it was all but an eventful dream. A controversial figure, Muhammad Ahmad Khalaf Allah, marked his place in history when he published his dissertation, in which he alleges that Qur’anic stories are meant to be taken as literary narratives and not historical documents, as a means of solving the often ambiguous and outright contradictory reports such as the story of Moses and the staff, provoking the ire of al-Azhar and their supporters. Moving to more obscure personalities, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha initiated a movement with his publication of the “The Second Message of Islam”, alleging that the Meccan phase of the revelation represented the truly universal and egalitarian spirit of Islam, with the later Medinan phase being adapted to the Prophet’s lifetime and thus being no longer relevant in our age, a declaration which unfortunately led to his eventual demise by the Sudanese state. Both ‘Ali Ahmad Sa’id (better known as Adonis) and Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm represented a challenge to the religious obscurantism and political instability that were engulfing the Arab world in their time, with the latter publishing two works (“Self-Criticism After the Defeat” and “Critique of Religious Thought”) severely putting to task the prevalent religious justifications for the poor campaign in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and calling for social change and the former helping express a new intellectual movement through his poetry, highlighting the virtues of the pagan past and the modern world with a blend of surrealism and Sufism. The works of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Mohammed Arkoun helped bring about a revolutionary understanding in Qur’anic hermeneutics, highlighting the importance of the mode of communication in revelation in the former with the latter taking on the approach of categorizing the oral origins of religion and contrasting it with the latter written form it takes. In the same spirit, Muhammad Shahrur endeavors to re-examine the notion of revelation by understanding the occurrences of the word “Kitab” (i.e. the celestial book in God’s possession) in the Qur’an in order to fully comprehend the message that was promoted by the Prophet, thus reconceptualizing the notion of Sunnah (i.e. prophetic sayings and deeds) in its entirety. ‘Abdallah al-Qusaymi, and similarly Nawal El Saadawi, represented a very radical strain in religious critique, with the Saudi former cleric first lashing out against the established order to then harshly discarding the notion of God altogether, while the Egyptian feminist took to task the prevailing patriarchal abuses of religious authority culminating in her satirical play in which God is visited by a group of important women (Eve and Isis figure in as well) as well as commoners who ask questions regarding the state of the world and how hard life is, with Satan chiming in to pin the blame on the deity, to which God replies that He empathizes with their concern and wishes to become a human like them.
Overall, a commendable and timely effort on the part of the author who tried their best to bring us a representative sample of freethinkers among the Arab world, thus putting to rest the myth of lack of intellectual novelty in allegedly religious societies.
Read
February 28, 2020297.1 S289 2019
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews