Renewal, Not Rupture: Waris Mazhari on Reconstructing Islamic Thought

A New Book, an Old Question

Why did a civilisation that once led the world in science, law and philosophy fall behind? That question has occupied Muslim scholars for roughly two centuries, and it sits at the centre of a new book by the Delhi-based Islamic scholar Dr. Waris Mazhari, Fikr-e-Islami ki Tajdeed (“The Renewal of Islamic Thought”), a sequel to his earlier Jadeed Ilm-e-Kalam (“Modern Islamic Theology”). In a long conversation for Nous, Mazhari laid out competing answers to the question of Muslim intellectual decline, and, more pointedly, staked out his own position between two camps he regards as equally mistaken.

One camp, which he calls traditionalist, treats the crisis as purely moral: Muslims have simply stopped following Islam correctly, so innovation and doubt crept in, and the remedy is stricter practice, not new thinking. The opposite camp, largely secular modernists, argues that Islam's core teachings have been made obsolete by changed times, and that Muslim thought must be rebuilt on the model of the European Enlightenment, which sharply narrowed religion's authority in favour of reason. Mazhari rejects both. Islam's foundational commitments, he argues, are fixed; but the human interpretation of those commitments, built up over fourteen centuries, is legitimately open to revision. “We can differ with our predecessors,” he said, “whether that is Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyyah, or anyone else.”

Tajdeed and Tajaddud: Renewal Within, Rupture Without

Much of Mazhari's book turns on a distinction between two Urdu terms that sound alike but describe opposite moves: tajdeed, renewal that operates inside the boundaries of the textual tradition — the Quran, hadith, and the interpretive tools historically used to read them — and tajaddud, a rupture that imports an entirely external framework, typically derived from Western secular modernity, and lets it override revelation. The distinction is not about how radical a thinker's conclusions are. Islamic intellectual history, Mazhari pointed out, is already full of scholars who radically disagreed with one another: Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah read the tradition in opposite ways, and the mystic philosopher Ibn Arabi went so far that a large body of scholars branded him an unbeliever, while his admirers still call him Sheikh al-Akbar, “the greatest master.”

What separates these bold disagreements from tajaddud, in Mazhari's account, is epistemology rather than boldness. Islamic epistemology recognises two independent sources of knowledge: revelation and reason. A thinker remains inside the tradition, however unorthodox, as long as revelation retains its own independent authority. Tajaddud occurs when reason or contemporary science is installed as the senior partner, and revelation is accepted only insofar as it can be verified against that external standard. “You are placing science above and religion below,” he said of this move, warning that it collapses religious truth into whatever today's shifting scientific consensus allows.

Sir Syed, Iqbal, and the Line Between Them

Mazhari's clearest example of tajaddud is Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the nineteenth-century Indian Muslim reformer. Sir Syed denied the physical existence of angels and a literal heaven and hell, and reinterpreted revelation itself as an internal psychological process within the Prophet rather than an external communication delivered by an angel. For Mazhari, this makes reason, and specifically a science-first reading of “the work of God,” the final judge over “the word of God,” inverting the proper relationship between the two. He extends the same judgment, with more reluctance, to the Egyptian scholar A.A. Fyzee and to a cluster of contemporary Arab thinkers — Mohammed Arkoun, Hassan Hanafi, Muhammad Shahrur, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd — whom he says are numerous in the Arab world though rare in South Asia, and who go further still, wanting to historicise even core eschatological beliefs.

Muhammad Iqbal receives a more generous hearing, despite building his 1930 lectures, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, out of Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein and William James — borrowings that drew fierce criticism, including from Iqbal's own student Burhan Ahmad Farooqi, who accused him of turning the Quran into “science's slave.” Mazhari's defence rests less on Iqbal's conclusions than on his posture: Iqbal opened his lectures by conceding that future generations had every right to reject his reconstruction outright. “Every coming generation has its own right,” Iqbal wrote, a disclaimer Mazhari treats as evidence of sincerity rather than weakness. He also situates Iqbal alongside earlier scholars who imported the reasoning tools of their own age — al-Ash'ari and Ghazali built their theology on Greek philosophy and were denounced for it in their own time, yet remain inside the tradition today. Why, Mazhari asks, should a twentieth-century thinker be judged by a stricter standard than a tenth-century one?

The Gates of Ijtihad: Closed in Practice, Never by Decree

A second major thread in the conversation concerns ijtihad, independent legal reasoning, and its supposed opposite, taqleed, or conformity to an established school of law. Mazhari traced the emergence of the four Sunni legal schools to a specific historical problem: by the third and fourth Islamic centuries, a proliferating body of scholars and hadith reports had produced contradictory rulings on the same questions, and consolidating legal opinion around four recognised schools was a practical fix for that chaos, not a theological verdict. “This was a need of that particular time,” he said. No caliph or scholar ever formally announced that the door of ijtihad was closed; it hardened shut through unspoken convention, until conformity with one's own school came to feel as binding as scripture itself.

That convention came under sustained pressure once colonialism exposed the scale of the Muslim world's material decline. The Lebanese writer Shakib Arsalan's early-twentieth-century tract, Why Did Muslims Fall Behind While Others Progressed?, crystallised a generation's anxiety, and reformers from Yemen's Muhammad al-Shawkani to Egypt's Rashid Rida, through the al-Manar movement, argued for reactivating ijtihad. Iqbal devoted his sixth lecture in the Reconstruction to exactly this, describing ijtihad as “the principle of movement” within Islam. Mazhari argues that reviving this principle, not abandoning the four schools altogether, is the more urgent task facing contemporary scholars — not least because, as he noted, other traditions within Sunni Islam, such as the Zahiri school, or Shia schools such as the Jafari, never accepted the four-school framework as exhaustive in the first place.

The Politics of ‘Establishing Religion’

Asked about Maulana Abul A'la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb, two of the twentieth century's most influential Islamist ideologues, Mazhari offered a respectful but pointed critique. Maududi's concept of iqamat-e-deen, establishing God's rule, treated the founding of an Islamic state as religion's central and unconditional demand — a reading Mazhari calls exaggerated, and one he attributes partly to the trauma of colonial rule, which had dismantled Muslim political structures and shaped how Maududi framed the response. “Politics is certainly part of religion,” Mazhari said, “but making it the central point is wrong.” In Qutb's hands the same logic hardened further, casting secular governments as jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic “age of ignorance,” and feeding the breakaway Takfir wal-Hijra movement, which declared even ordinary mosque-goers unbelievers.

Mazhari notes that this line was contested from within Islamist ranks itself: Hasan al-Hudaybi, the Muslim Brotherhood's second leader, wrote an entire book, Du'ah la Qudah, arguing “we are preachers, not judges,” rejecting the practice of pronouncing other Muslims outside the fold. Mazhari's own objection is practical as much as theological: with over 40 percent of the world's Muslims now living as minorities in non-Muslim countries — a share projected to keep rising — a framework that treats every compromise with secular governance as a betrayal of faith leaves most Muslims permanently at odds with their own citizenship. “This becomes a double standard,” he said, and one that Islam cannot coherently demand of its followers.

The Failed Promise of ‘Islamizing Knowledge’

A parallel twentieth-century project, associated with the scholars Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas and Ismail al-Faruqi, sought to “Islamize” the modern social sciences, which they argued had quietly replaced a God-centred view of the universe with a human-centred, anthropocentric one, stripping revelation of any explanatory role. Al-Faruqi built an institutional movement around the idea in the 1970s and 80s. Mazhari is unsparing about its record: by his account, even the movement's own senior figures, such as Taha Jabir al-Alwani, later acknowledged that it had failed to advance. Mazhari goes further, arguing the project was never practically achievable or theologically necessary in the first place. Historically, he points out, Muslim scholars borrowed astronomy from India and philosophy from Greece without first “Islamizing” those disciplines; building a sealed, parallel epistemic island today, he argues, only forecloses the possibility of genuine dialogue with scholars outside the faith, since a tool relabelled as exclusively Islamic ceases to be persuasive to anyone who does not already share the label.

Kalam After Science

Mazhari devoted considerable attention to ilm al-kalam, the discipline of rational theology, and its fraught relationship with science. Kalam itself was born controversial: early hardline traditionalists wanted its practitioners flogged, yet Ghazali, in al-Mustasfa, ranked kalam as the highest of all Islamic sciences, since it alone supplies the rational foundation on which law and every other discipline depends. The modern chapter of this history, Mazhari says, begins with Sir Syed's attempt to rebuild Islamic belief entirely within a scientific paradigm, and diverges sharply with Shibli Nomani, who coined the term “jadeed ilm-e-kalam,” modern theology, in the very title of his landmark book. Where Sir Syed made science the arbiter of faith, Shibli insisted that science and religion occupy separate domains that need not compete.

That separation runs through later scholarship Mazhari cites approvingly. The early-twentieth-century hadith scholar Anwar Shah Kashmiri argued, in Faid al-Bari, that when the Quran speaks of rain falling “from the sky” or the sun in motion, it describes the world the way people perceive it rather than objective cosmological fact, because its purpose is ethical, not scientific. “The Quran is a book of ethics,” Mazhari said, paraphrasing an argument he shares with the Pakistani-American scholar Fazlur Rahman, “not a book of science.” He cites the Deobandi scholar Ashraf Ali Thanvi making the identical point: if the earth's rotation is one day confirmed and matches the Quran, well and good, but if it were not, the Quran's authority would be unaffected, because that was never its subject.

Rethinking Fiqh: Gender, Citizenship and the Ends of Shariah

The conversation's most detailed case studies came from Islamic law, or fiqh. Mazhari pointed to Ibn Taymiyyah's ruling on triple talaq — breaking with all four Sunni schools by reviving a report from Ibn Abbas that a triple pronouncement in one sitting counts as a single, revocable divorce — as proof that departing from settled madhhab positions has ample precedent. He also argued that conditions for what he calls “collective ijtihad” have never been better: digitised, searchable hadith collections and instant global scholarly communication give today's jurists resources no single classical mujtahid ever possessed, alongside modern maqasid al-shariah scholarship — the study of Shariah's higher objectives, developed by the Tunisian scholar Tahir ibn Ashur — as a tool for reasoning beyond any one school's literal boundaries.

On women's status, Mazhari was most direct. He traces the classical fiqh position that women possess “half the intellect” of men, cited from a hadith, less to scripture itself than to the absorption of Greek philosophy's outright misogyny — he cites Plato's disparagement of being “born of woman” and Ibn Rushd's claim that women play no active biological role in reproduction — into Islamic legal reasoning during the medieval period. He argues the same hadith used to bar women from heading a state, about a Persian queen's ill-fated rule, was addressed to a specific historical situation of unchecked absolute power, not to modern consultative governance, following the Egyptian scholars Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Muhammad al-Ghazali, and even the conservative Ashraf Ali Thanvi's later writings. On inheritance and the Quranic description of men as “qawwamun,” financially responsible for women, Mazhari argues the underlying logic is functional — tied to who bears a household's financial burden — and open to reconsideration as growing numbers of women become primary earners themselves.

He was equally direct about dhimmi status, the historical framework under which non-Muslims paid a special tax, jizya, in exchange for protection within a Muslim-ruled state. That entire framework, Mazhari argues, has lost its force under the modern nation-state, in which citizenship, not religious affiliation, defines legal equality, and Muslim scholars today broadly agree, in his telling, that jizya and dhimmi status no longer apply. He pressed the point into a consistency argument: Muslims who insist on full and equal citizenship as minorities in non-Muslim countries cannot simultaneously defend a framework at home that would deny the same to others. “You want full rights there, so you must give full rights here,” he said.

A Living, Not a Frozen, Tradition

Mazhari closed by returning to the method he borrows from Shah Waliullah's eighteenth-century work Hujjat Allah al-Baligha, which describes prophetic reform as operating through three simultaneous moves: izala, removing practices entirely, such as the Quran's blanket prohibition on wine; ibqa, retaining sound existing customs largely unchanged; and izafa, adding new obligations altogether. Applied to the present, he argues, this framework licenses removing the parts of classical kalam tied to a defunct Aristotelian physics, retaining the large body of epistemological reasoning that remains sound, and adding engagement with the genuinely new philosophical and scientific questions of the present.

His larger claim is about what tradition itself is. Treating Islamic thought as a closed, already-completed inheritance, he argued, misreads its actual history: a living tradition has always absorbed the tools of its era and been reconstructed by each generation working within it, and its guiding objectives — justice, equity, human dignity — are not unique to Islam so much as differently named across traditions, though he insists Islam's textual sources give them their own distinct shape. What has gone missing, in his account, is not the tradition's internal resources but the collective will and institutional capacity to use them. The conversation, framed as the first of two parts, ended with a promise: future episodes devoted separately to Shah Waliullah's method and to Iqbal's Reconstruction, each judged substantial enough to merit an episode of its own.