Islam and Modernity

A study by the Pakistani-born scholar Fazlur Rahman of Islamic education and intellectual life, from the medieval schools to the twentieth century; its subtitle is Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Rahman argues that classical Islamic learning lost its vigour when theology, law and philosophy hardened into closed systems and the curriculum came to rely on commentaries. He is equally critical of modernist reformers who adopted Western ideas piecemeal without a coherent method, and of the newer fundamentalism. His proposal is a method of reading the Qur'an as a whole, which he calls a double movement: first from present problems back to the Qur'an's own time, to grasp the moral principles behind its specific rulings, then forward again, applying those principles to present conditions. Much of the book surveys educational reform in several Muslim countries. Traditionalist critics object that his historical approach weakens the authority of established law and interpretation.

It is the clearest statement of Rahman's double-movement method, which remains central to debates about reading the Qur'an ethically and historically.