Professor Ebrahim Moosa is currently based at the Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University. Originally from South Africa, he was forced to relocate to the United States when the working conditions he faced in his own country badly deteriorated. Over the years he has written extensively on the subject of Islamic thought and Muslim intellectuals in the modern world and is regarded as one of the leading experts on the developments within contemporary Islamic scholarship. His forthcoming book is entitled Ghazali of Tus: The Poetics of Imagination . In this interview, Ebrahim Moosa talks about the difficult role of the Muslim intellectual, Islamic hermeneutics and the need to extend the boundaries of Islamic discourse in the light of present-day realities.

Farish

: You are mostly known for the work that you have done on contemporary Muslim thought and Muslim thinkers of the 20th century. Yet despite the enormous changes that have taken place all over the Muslim world, we see that Muslim intellectual activity has arrived at an impasse. Muslim societies seem to be caught between the so-called 'Traditionalists' and Modernists' and the space of Islamic discourse itself seems to be split thanks to the policing of discursive frontiers between the two. How and why have we come to this?

Ebrahim

: Well, part of the problem lies in the fact that the momentum of change and development among the Muslim reformers and modernists itself has died down. Over the years, we have seen how even the Islamic modernists have become sacralized and how the ideas of progressive Muslim thinkers and scholars have been turned into canonical bodies of thought that seem immovable and static.

That such a development has come to the fore today is not all that surprising when we look at how the modernist school of Islam first developed in the 19th century through people like Jamaluddin al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and others. It must be remembered that these Muslim thinkers were themselves located between two traditions: Islamic conservatism and secular

modernity. In their attempt to modernize and reform Islam, many of these reformist thinkers ended up internalizing the values of the modernist project. So it is hardly surprising for us to read how people like Al-Afghani, Abduh and Maudoodi were concerned about economic development, material progress and catching up with the Western world. But in the process, many of these modernist thinkers also ended up inheriting the prejudices and biases of the modern era. So much of their work and so many of their ideas are shaped by notions of modernity, enlightenment, rationality, and progress that were guided by the tradition of positivism.

Because the Western modernist project was grounded on a colonial discourse, many of the Islamic modernists of the 19th century also ended up internalizing and reproducing these prejudices. Their views towards folk beliefs, ancient traditions, the status of women, etc., were all shaped by this.

The Islamic modernists of the 19th century were thus a hybrid constituency and they were liminal figures both in Western secular and conservative Islamic circles. The conservative ulama opposed them because they were seen as too 'Western-oriented' while the secular Westerners saw them as apologists for Islam. Today, those who want to defend the Islamic modernist project are at a loss over how to defend some of the ideas and positions held by these modernist thinkers. As a result, much of what they said and wrote has been taken at face value, and the impulse towards critical thinking and self-reflection has been sidelined.