ITS LUTHER LIVES IN DALLAS:

Tradition as seen by the Muslim faith, yesterday and today (Michel Cuypers, 9/07/09, Chiesa)

[T]radition also feeds the Islamic collective imagination in a larger way, providing historical and cultural references and bringing back to life the exemplary first generation of believers. It thus plays an important role in the current re-Islamization of the Islamic world, preoccupied with returning to its original purity.

In this regard, attention must be paid to the importance of the Sîra, "the life of the prophet," written by Ibn Ishâq (died in 678) and revised by Ibn Hisham (died in 833). Although it is not part of the corpus of the hadîth, this biography enjoys an almost canonical status, and plays a considerable role in believers' devotion to the prophet and the first Islamic community. Devoting a great deal of space to the prophet's exploits in battle, the Sîra also describes in detail his daily life, so that his "way," sunna, can serve as a model for the believer in his material, moral, and spiritual behavior. [...]

Since the end of the 19th century, two main attitudes toward the criticism of tradition can be distinguished in Islam.

On the one hand, some official institutions have perpetuated, up until our day, the classical positions. We cite Ali Merad, a modernist Muslim author: "In many Islamic universities, the role of the teaching body seems to be limited to ensuring the continuity of a form of knowledge validated by a sort of community consensus. As for tradition (and also the biography of the prophet), the near sacralization of the ancient authorities in this matter is the rule. To discuss these authorities, to open new avenues of research, means breaking with a cultural model that has functioned for more than a millennium, and that points the community back to the image of its identity, of its socio-cultural equilibrium, in continuity with its first sources."

But on the other hand, a reformist current emerged with Sayyid Ahmad Khân (died in 1898) in India, al-Afghânî (died in 1897), and Muhammad 'Abduh (died in 1905) in Egypt, and their disciples. In the name of the purity of the faith, for which God is the sole legislator, these thinkers supported only two normative sources of Islam, the Qur'an and tradition, thus excluding consensus and the ijtihâd. They subjected the tradition to a more severe criticism of the chains of transmitters, and above all of the text itself. They kept only a small number of hadîth, rejecting the traditions that offend reason or good sense. They employed the model of the ancients, the salafi – the first three generations of Muslims – to restore dynamism to religion, but without closing it up in its past: their aim was to allow Islam to find its identity and independence in a modern world undergoing complete transformation.

After this, the reformist position evolved in two divergent directions: one legalist and neo-fundamentalist, and one of secularist modernism, which abandoned tradition as a normative source.

For the former, the decision not to consider the two secondary normative sources – consensus and rational effort – leads to increasing the normative role of tradition, and at the same time of idealizing the ancients, the salafi, the first transmitters of tradition. In reaction to modernity – and accepting only its material progress – the idealized primitive era became the model to imitate, in a closing off of identity. The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1929) are the main representatives of this tendency.

For the latter, tradition loses its normative character: the authenticity of most of the traditions, which are subjected to more severe rational criticism, is brought into doubt (according to the model of the work of the famous Islamologist Ignaz Goldziher, who died in 1921). Otherwise, only the ethical and spiritual aspect is retained, as a form of wisdom and a source of inspiration. The Qur'an therefore becomes the only truly normative source for Islam. This is a "sola Scriptura" that is not without influences from the Protestant model (some modernists are happy to be called the "Luthers of Islam"). This liberation from the shackles of tradition permits the hypothesis of a new exegesis of the Qur'an, which is being called for today by some Muslim intellectuals. The "occasions of revelation," drawn from the hadîth, are no longer the privileged method of exegesis as they were in the past. A critical exegesis has now become possible.

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