Download Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition AudioBook Free

"As Teacher Fazlur Rahman shows in the latest of a series of important contributions to Islamic intellectual background, the characteristic problems of the Muslim modernists—the version to the needs of the modern day situation of a holy booklet which attracts its specific cases from the conditions of the seventh century and earlier—are by no means new. . . . In Teacher Rahman's view the intellectual and therefore the social development of Islam has been impeded and distorted by two interrelated errors. The first was devoted by those who, in reading the Koran, failed to recognize the distinctions between general ideas and specific responses to 'concrete and particular historical situations.' . . . This very rigidity gave rise to the next major error, that of the secularists. By teaching and interpreting the Koran in such a way as to admit of no change or development, the dogmatists possessed created a situation in which Muslim societies, confronted with the crucial need to teach their people forever in the modern world, were forced to produce a agonizing and self-defeating choice—either to reject Koranic Islam, or to transform their backs on the modern world."—Bernard Lewis, New York Review of Books

"With this work, Teacher Fazlur Rahman presents a positively ambitious blueprint for the transformation of the intellectual traditions of Islam: theology, ethics, viewpoint and jurisprudence. Within the voices advocating a go back to Islam or the reestablishment of the Sharia, the guide to use it, he astutely and soberly asks: What and which Islam? Moreover, how can one reach 'normative' Islam? The author counsels, and passionately demonstrates, that for Islam to be actually what Muslims promise it to be—detailed in range and efficacious for each get older and place—Muslim scholars and educationists must reevaluate their strategy and hermeneutics. In spelling out the necessary and sound strategy, he is simultaneously courageous, serious and serious."—Wadi Z. Haddad, American-Arab Affairs

Category: Quran