Preliminary Discourse

A candid and honest appraisal of Islamic intellectual history will no doubt reveal how much this tradition has been influenced by the surrounding intellectual milieu. But for over-zealous adherents who claim to ‘purify’ the entire tradition from any external accretions, to return the religion as it were to its pristine purity unadulterated by any ‘outside’ influences, the whole religion must be kept strictly self-referential. That means all that savors of Islam must be identifiable back to the Qur’an (and Sunnah) alone. If indeed there are elements of, say, Greek, Hellenistic, Hindu, Jewish or Christian origins in the tradition, this must be replaced with an entire system based squarely on the Qur’an. In doing so, what the so-called ‘reformists’ have done, unbeknownst to them, is to replace a system of intellectual inquiry made up of hundreds, if not thousands of learned men and women, with a new-born ‘system’ born of the narrow confines of their own ego.