Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism by Omid Safi Read Free Book Online Page A

can sound like a bunch of whiners who sit around and complain. For some, the term “critical Muslim” also implies pontificating about Islam without the attempt to change realities in Muslim societies on the ground level.
    It is not just that the other terms had problems. There is something about this term “progressive.” It is more than anything else an umbrella term that signifies an invitation to those who want an open and safe space to undertake a rigorous, honest, potentially difficult engagement with tradition, and yet remain hopeful that conversation will lead to further action.
    We felt adamant that the title of this work should be “Progressive Muslims,” and not “Progressive Islam.” The distinction may be irrelevant to some, but it matters a great deal to us. On one hand, as one of the contributors to this volume has stated, “Islam has always been progressive. It is Muslims that have not always been so.” On the other hand, we are also wary of falling into the easy dichotomy of “I love Islam, it is those darn Muslims that I have a problem with.” For better or worse, in truth and ignorance, in beauty and hideousness, we call for an engagement with real live human beings who mark themselves as Muslims, not an idealized notion of Islam that can be talked about apart from engagement with those real live human beings. Even if we take Islam in the most ordinary sense of submission to the Divine, there can be no Islam without the humanity who is doing the submitting. Take humanity out of the equation, and all we are left with is the God who stands prior to and beyond Creation. About that understanding of God no human being is perhaps qualified to speak, since for them to speak they would have to exist, thus implying by necessity the very act of creation. But in terms of a relationship between humanity and the Divine, Islam cannot be interpreted, experienced, or articulated without engaging with real live human beings. To keep the focus on the responsibilities of human beings, we have titled this volume “Progressive Muslims,” rather than “Progressive Islam.”

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    The volume you hold in your hand is the result of almost an entire year of conversation, dialogue, and debate among the fifteen contributors. It had its real genesis in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in what we saw as the urgent need to raise the level of conversation, and to get away from the standard apologetic presentations of Islam. During the past year, we have exchanged some six hundred email messages and spent countless hours on the telephone in an effort to harmonize our endeavors.
    One of the key points about this volume is that it represents Muslim intellectuals and activists whose understanding of Islam has been shaped by the
    academic study of Islam in Western institutions. To understand the significance of this point, it is important to recognize the wider ramifications for the Muslim world of the decline of the traditional Islamic universities ( madrasas ).
    One of the real challenges facing Muslim communities around the world has been the marked decline of the madrasa system. Many scholars have directly attributed this decline to the impact of European colonialism, positing that the colonial system undermined the relevance and prestige of Islamic education in favor of more technological and scientific institutions. In places like North Africa, the colonial powers actually shut down some of the most prestigious institutions of higher Islamic learning. This much is certainly clear: in many places around the Muslim world, madrasa institutions are no longer the center of creative, critical thinking. In the pre-modern world, the very brightest Muslim minds (at least the male ones, since the females were usually relegated to education at home 24 ) were to