Asghar 'Ali Engineer's Quest for a Contextual Islamic

YOGINDER SIKAND ASGHAR ‘ALI ENGINEER’S QUEST FOR A CONTEXTUAL ISLAMIC THEOLOGY In coming to terms with the challenges of the modern world, Muslims have had to deal with their own religious traditions to develop responses to what are seen as novel circumstances. Issues such as secularism, democracy, human rights, gen- der parity, religious pluralism and the nation state, and the relation between each of these and the broader Islamic tradition have been hotly debated and various different understandings have emerged. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a breed of what Farish A. Noor calls “new Muslim intellectuals,” distinct from the traditional ‘ulama and the Islamists, on the one hand, and secular Muslims, on the other, who, while rooted in their own traditions, seek to develop visions of Is- lam that take the questions posed by modernity seriously. They are, Noor remarks, often branded as “heretics” and “outsiders’ in their own societies and as apologists for Islam in the West, straddling the seemingly “precarious border between different worlds” (Noor 2002: 1). One such scholar is the well-known Indian Muslim writer-activist, Asghar ‘Ali Engineer. Engineer’s principal concern is to evolve a theology of Islam that seeks to grapple with while at the same time being firmly rooted in the modern condi- tion. Engineer’s main contribution is the articulation of a contextual hermeneutics of the Qur’an, one that, he believes, can help guide Muslims in dealing with the challenges of contemporary life. Asghar ‘Ali Engineer: The Man Asghar ‘Ali Engineer was born in 1939 in the town of Salumbar in the Udaipur district of the western Indian state of Rajasthan. His father, Shaikh Qurban Hus- sain, was the priest of the town’s Shi’a Isma’ili Bohra community. From his father he learnt the Arabic language, Qur’anic commentary (tafsir), Islamic jurispru- dence (fiqh) and the sayings of or about the Prophet Muhammad (hadith) as con- tained in the books of the Bohras. Alongside this, he was also provided with a secular modern education. He earned a degree in engineering from the University of Indore and then worked for some twenty years as a civil engineer with the Bom- bay (now Mumbai) Municipal Corporation. In 1972 Engineer quit his job and immersed himself in the struggle against the Bohra head priest, Sayyedna Burhanuddin, protesting against what the reformers saw as his exploitative practices. Along with other reformers, Engineer was instru- mental in setting up the Central Board of the Dawoodi Bohra Community to carry 211 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 15 (2005) 2 on the reform campaign. The reformers did not seek to challenge the Bohra religion as such. Rather, they defined themselves as believing Bohras and argued that their sole concern was that the Sayyedna and his family should abide strictly by the principles of the Bohra faith and end their tyrannous control over the community, which they branded as “un-Islamic” (for details see Engineer 2000c and 1991). In the course of the struggle against the Sayyedna, Engineer developed his own understanding of Islam as a means and a resource for social revolution. One can discern in his thought and writings a multiplicity of influences: Mu’tazilite and Isma’ili rationalism, Marxism, Western liberalism, Gandhism, and Christian liberation theology and the impact of the Iranian Ali Shari’ati as well as Indian Muslim modernists such as Sayyed Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal. His active involvement in the Bohra reformist movement led Engineer to establish contact with other progressive groups working for social transformation in India. Gradually, the focus of his activity broadened from activism within his own community to embrace several other causes. Of particular concern to him was the growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. Engineer wrote extensively on Hindu-Muslim relations, insisting that new understandings of religion were needed to help promote better relations between the two communities. In 1980, in order to promote new, more progressive understandings of Islam, he set up the Institute of Islamic Studies in Mumbai, through which he established links with progressive Muslims in other parts of India and elsewhere. In 1993 he established the Centre for the Study of Secularism and Society, also in Mumbai, in order to investigate incidents of Hindu-Muslim conflict, to promote new interpretations of both Hinduism and Islam as a means to promote communal harmony and to network with activists and the media. Engineer is best described as a public intellectual or as a scholar-activist. Lacking a traditional Islamic education, his understanding of Islam grows out from his close involvement with movements struggling for social justice and reform and from his own study of the Islamic tradition. For him, new understandings of Islam must address themselves to changing social contexts and religion, if it is at all to remain true to what he sees as its inner spirit, must make a positive contribution to progressive social change. Muslims struggling for social transformation should, he insists, take their religion seriously and actively intervene in the struggle for discursive hegemony by offering progressive understandings of Islam. To abandon the task, he argues, would allow for “reactionaries,” including both the conservative ‘ulama as well as militant Islamists, to monopolise the terrain of Islamic discourse. Hence, progressive Muslim intellectuals must also seek to establish close and organic links with the masses and involve themselves in mass movements and activist groups working for social change. Islamic scholarship, then, is not to be seen as a mere intellectual exercise, but, rather, one deeply rooted in praxis. Engineer exemplifies this best himself. His own writings are geared to a mass readership, generally published in newspapers and popular 212 ASHGAR ‘ALI ENGINEER’S QUEST magazines, and use a simple and easily understandable language that can readily appeal even to a non-Muslim reader with little or no previous knowledge of Islam. Engineer’s Hermeneutics of the Qur’an and the Islamic Tradition The Qur’an forms the basic source for Engineer’s hermeneutical project. In his writings, the hadith or the prophetic traditions and the formulations of medieval fiqh play only a very limited role. Occasionally, references to stray hadith are made to reinforce or legitimise a particular stance, but this is done on a very selec- tive basis. Hadith that go against his own position are ignored. As Engineer sees it, the Qur’an, like any other text, can be interpreted in diverse ways. It is not a closed book with only one set of clearly specified meanings. Being rich in sym- bolism, it can be interpreted in different ways by different people in order to promote different political projects. New ways of understanding the text also emerge as a result of and response to the development of human knowledge in other spheres and the maturation of human experience (Engineer 1998: 3). While the Qur’an itself is eternal and God-given, the interpretation (tafsir) of the Qur’an is always, he insists, a human product. Like all other human products, he argues, interpretations of the Qur’an carry the imprint of their times. They may, to varying degrees, reflect the truths of the Qur’an but cannot claim to represent the divine truth in its entirety. Since the interpreters of the Qur’an, like other human beings, are members of certain social groups, located in specific spatio-temporal and social contexts, their understandings of the Qur’an are naturally coloured by their own location. Hence, their own interpretations of the Qur’an cannot be said to be free from human biases. Indeed, to claim that one can gain access to the total truth of the Qur’an and to insist that the historical shari’ah, which is a product of human reflection on the divine commandments, represents the Will of God, has no justification in Engineer’s understanding of Islam (Engineer 1999e: 1-2). It is, he obliquely suggests, tantamount to committing the biggest sin in Islam, that of claiming infallibility, which is akin to shirk or the crime of giving God partners. Since all Qur’anic interpretation, which includes the formulation of the historical shari’ah, is, by nature, partial and therefore incomplete, reflecting the context in which the interpreter is located, the search for a total and complete understanding of the Will of God as expressed in the Qur’an is fruitless. Rather, Engineer con- tends, Muslims can only hope to gain further, but always limited, understanding of the Divine Will by engaging in constant reflection on the Qur’an in the light of new and unfolding circumstances. The hermeneutical key to this contextual understanding of the Qur’an is to be found in the distinction that Engineer makes between the “spirit” and the “letter” of the Qur’an, which he sometimes also refers to respectively as the “normative” and the “contextual” aspects of the divine revelation. The foundation of the Qur’an is provided by a set of values that infuses the entire revelation. Four key values are said to form the basis of the entire divine document: justice (‘adl), benevolence (ihsan), reason (‘aql) and wisdom (hikmah) (Engineer 1999a). The basic intention of the Qur’an, Engineer argues, is to bring 213 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 15 (2005) 2 human beings into close communion with God, while at the same time inspiring them to work actively for a society that is based on these cardinal values. Engineer notes that while the Qur’an is replete with general exhortations to believers to submit to God and to struggle actively for a just and peaceful social order, it contains only a few detailed legal statements as to exactly how the cardinal divine values should be actually implemented.

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