Waris Mazhari: Reviving Islamic Thought Without Breaking From It

A Second Conversation, A New Book

Dr Waris Mazhari has spent much of his scholarly career asking an uncomfortable question: why did a civilisation once responsible for major advances in philosophy, law and science come to see itself as intellectually stagnant? Returning to Nous Podcast for a second, extended conversation, Mazhari used the release of his new book, "Fikr-e-Islami ki Tajdeed" (The Renewal of Islamic Thought), to revisit that question in detail. The book follows his earlier "Jadeed Ilm-e-Kalam" (Modern Theology), which had opened a debate about what a contemporary Islamic theology would need to look like. This time, Mazhari narrows the lens to specific, contested episodes in roughly two centuries of Muslim intellectual history, from the colonial-era shock of civilisational decline to present-day debates over law, gender and citizenship.

His starting observation is that explanations for Muslim intellectual decline tend to split into two camps. One camp, which Mazhari calls traditionalist, treats the crisis as essentially moral and spiritual: Muslims strayed from correctly practising their faith, and heresy and innovation followed. A second camp, which he identifies with secular modernist scholars, argues that Islamic thought's basic categories have simply become irrelevant with the passage of time, and that Muslims must adopt the same rationalist, Enlightenment-derived framework the West used to reform Christianity, then rebuild Islamic thought on that foundation. Mazhari stakes out a third position: some rethinking is necessary and overdue, he argues, but it has to happen inside the boundaries of Islam's own foundational commitments, not by importing an alien one.

Foundations Versus Interpretations

The distinction that organises Mazhari's whole argument is between what he calls foundations (the matters of belief, or imaniyat) and interpretation (ta'beer). Certain claims, he says, are simply not subject to human reasoning: the existence of God, prophethood, angels, the afterlife, revelation itself. These are accepted as matters of faith, whether or not unaided reason can fully grasp them. Everything else, in his framing, is interpretation, layered onto those foundations over roughly fourteen centuries, and interpretation can always be revisited, debated and, where warranted, discarded.

He uses Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as a cautionary example of where that line gets crossed. Sir Syed's biblical-critical reading of the Quran denied the literal existence of angels, treated heaven and hell as psychological states rather than places, and reduced revelation to an internal process within the Prophet's own mind rather than an external communication. Mazhari, who says he holds Sir Syed's broader contribution in great respect, nonetheless argues that this specific move subordinates revelation to reason so completely that Islam's foundational claims dissolve into relativism -- reducing scripture, angels, God and revelation to culturally particular constructs with no claim to universal truth.

Tajdeed Versus Tajaddud: Where Is the Line?

Mazhari's book turns on a distinction between two Urdu terms that are often used loosely and interchangeably: tajdeed (renewal) and tajaddud (modernism, in the sense of a rupture). He insists the Islamic intellectual tradition already contains enormous internal disagreement -- Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah, for instance, read the tradition in almost opposite ways, and Ibn Arabi's metaphysics were controversial enough that a substantial body of scholars accused him of unbelief, even as his admirers call him "Shaykh al-Akbar," the greatest master. None of that internal argument, Mazhari says, counts as tajaddud. What counts as tajaddud is a complete break with the discursive tradition -- adopting an entirely external interpretive framework, untethered from what the texts themselves can support, the way postmodern hermeneutics or Arab modernists such as Mohammed Arkoun and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd have effectively declared the classical framework's authority void and rebuilt from outside it.

Asked to test the framework against a living, contested figure, Mazhari discusses the Pakistani scholar Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. He disagrees with Ghamidi on many specific points, he says, and thinks some of his positions are simply wrong. But he resists classifying Ghamidi as having stepped outside the tradition altogether, pointing out that canonical figures such as Shah Waliullah held equally idiosyncratic minority positions -- denying certain reported miracles, or holding that matter is eternal -- without being read out of the fold. "We cannot build a framework," Mazhari says, "that applies fully to twentieth-century scholars but exempts scholars already absorbed into our own tradition." Disagreement conducted with textual argument, in other words, stays inside tajdeed; disagreement that discards the texts' authority altogether becomes tajaddud.

Iqbal's Unfinished Reconstruction

Much of the conversation returns to Muhammad Iqbal's 1930 lectures, published as "The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam." Mazhari credits Iqbal with two distinct achievements: building an epistemological defence of religious knowledge against the logical positivism then fashionable in Western philosophy, and reviving the idea of ijtihad, independent legal reasoning, as what Iqbal called Islam's own "principle of movement" -- the subject of his celebrated sixth lecture.

Mazhari does not treat Iqbal as beyond criticism. Iqbal leaned heavily on contemporary Western thinkers -- Bergson, Einstein, William James -- to make his case for religion's rational credibility, and critics, including his own student Burhan Ahmad Farooqi, accused him of effectively making the Quran subordinate to science. Mazhari's response is that this criticism, while understandable, misses a pattern that recurs throughout Islamic intellectual history: Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari and Ghazali built classical theology on the back of Greek philosophy, using its logical tools to defend the same core religious claims their own contemporaries said could not be rationalised at all. Ashʿari, Mazhari notes, had to write an entire book defending the very legitimacy of theological reasoning against scholars who considered it heretical. Iqbal's use of early twentieth-century science and philosophy, in this reading, is simply the latest iteration of a very old method, not a departure from it -- and Iqbal himself, in his preface, explicitly invited future generations to disagree with him.

The Long Closing, and Reopening, of Ijtihad

A large section of the conversation traces how ijtihad came to be seen as closed. In the third and fourth Islamic centuries, Mazhari explains, the sheer volume of scholars issuing contradictory rulings from often-conflicting hadith created what he calls real social confusion -- a practice deemed permissible by one authority and forbidden by another. Consolidating around four major Sunni schools of law was, in his account, a pragmatic, temporary containment measure for that disorder, not a permanent theological verdict. No caliph or council ever formally declared ijtihad closed; it simply calcified through centuries of practice into an assumption that reasoning outside the four schools' settled positions was illegitimate.

The jolt that revived interest in reopening it, Mazhari argues, was colonial-era humiliation. The Lebanese thinker Shakib Arslan's tract asking why Muslims had fallen behind other civilisations crystallised a widespread sense that something in Islamic thought itself needed correcting. Yemen's Muhammad al-Shawkani, the Cairo-based Al-Manar movement associated with Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, and eventually Iqbal's own chapter on ijtihad were all attempts, across several decades, to reactivate a tool Mazhari says had been effectively discarded. Reopening it, he stresses, does not mean discarding the four schools; it means drawing more widely on positions preserved outside them too -- the Zahiri, Jaʿfari and Zaydi schools, or precedents from among the Prophet's companions and their successors that later jurists simply did not incorporate into the four schools' settled rulings. He cites the Ottoman Empire's late nineteenth-century Majalla codification project as one earlier attempt to draw on this wider inheritance for commercial law.

When Politics Became Theology

Turning to twentieth-century Islamism, Mazhari discusses Abul A'la Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb with evident respect for their scholarship and influence, while sharply disputing their political theology. Their doctrine of iqamat-e-deen, establishing God's rule, made building an Islamic state the near-obligatory centre of what it means to be a practising Muslim, in Mazhari's reading -- a doctrine he says was shaped disproportionately by the trauma of colonial rule dismantling Muslim political structures worldwide. Politics, he argues, is genuinely part of Islam, but elevating it to the defining axis of the faith is an exaggeration the texts do not support.

He traces how this played out organisationally: Hasan al-Hudaybi, the Muslim Brotherhood's second leader, broke publicly with Qutb's framework in a book titled "Du'up la Qudah" -- "we are preachers, not judges" -- rejecting the idea that Muslims could declare secular governments and the societies that accept them to be in a state of jahiliyyah, pre-Islamic ignorance. Qutb's more radical readers pushed that logic further into the al-Hijra wal-Takfir movement in Egypt, which held that ordinary mosques were themselves un-Islamic and that emigration and armed struggle against the surrounding society were obligatory.

Mazhari's own alternative reading returns to the chronology of the Prophet's life. The Meccan period, when Muslims lived as a persecuted minority with no political power at all, is as legitimate a prophetic model as the Medinan period that followed it, he argues -- yet Islamic political philosophy has almost entirely been built on the Medinan, state-building phase, treating it as the template rather than one contextual response among several. That imbalance matters urgently today: an estimated 40 to 45 percent of the world's Muslims already live as minorities in non-Muslim countries, a share Mazhari expects to keep rising, and a political theology that treats anything short of an Islamic state as an unfinished religious obligation leaves that growing population permanently, and unnecessarily, in crisis.

The Failed Promise of "Islamizing Knowledge"

Mazhari is equally critical of a different twentieth-century reform project: the Islamization of Knowledge movement associated with Naquib al-Attas and, more systematically, Ismail al-Faruqi, who built an institutional movement around the idea in the 1970s and 1980s, aiming to reconstruct entire disciplines, from history to the social sciences, on explicitly Islamic epistemological foundations. Mazhari notes that even the movement's own later leaders, including Taha Jabir al-Alwani and Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman, eventually acknowledged in their own writing that the project had stalled.

His objection is both practical and historical. Practically, he argues, no coherent programme for actually "Islamizing" mathematics, physics or economics ever materialised. Historically, he points out that classical Islamic civilisation never demanded such a filter in the first place: Muslim scholars absorbed Greek astronomy, Indian mathematics and Persian statecraft directly, without first converting them into an "Islamic" version, and nobody at the time asked Ashʿari, Ghazali or Ibn Arabi to justify borrowing from Aristotelian logic before they used it. Tagging every field of knowledge with a confessional label, Mazhari argues, walls Muslims off into what he calls an island, since a body of knowledge stamped "Islamic" becomes, by definition, something non-Muslims have no reason to accept -- destroying the common ground genuine intellectual dialogue requires. He notes that Fazlur Rahman made much the same criticism of the movement in his own writing.

Rebuilding Theology: What to Remove, Keep and Add

For the constructive half of his argument, Mazhari borrows a three-part framework from Shah Waliullah's "Hujjat Allah al-Baligha," originally used to describe how prophetic reform relates to existing custom: some practices are abolished outright (izala, as with the Quran's total prohibition of wine), some are retained essentially unchanged, and some are reformed and adapted (islah) while their underlying spirit survives, as with blood-money law or the restructuring of prayer and pilgrimage around pre-existing Arabian rites.

Applied to theology, Mazhari argues that the portions of classical kalam built on Aristotelian physics and cosmology -- a fixed hierarchy of celestial spheres, a physical "sky" that can be pierced or cannot be, debates over whether matter is infinitely divisible -- are now simply irrelevant and should be shed, since the science underneath them has been superseded. The epistemological core of the discipline -- how knowledge is acquired, how reliable different sources of knowledge are, what role reason plays -- remains fully valid and should be retained. And new material, particularly from modern linguistic philosophy and contemporary science, needs to be added to address questions the classical scholars never faced.

He is unsparing about one popular response to this challenge: tafsir 'ilmi, the practice, associated with the Egyptian writer Tantawi Jawhari, of reading modern scientific findings directly out of Quranic verses. Mazhari calls this methodologically mistaken, since today's science routinely revises itself, leaving yesterday's "proof text" attached to a theory that no longer holds. He prefers the older position associated with Allama Anwar Shah Kashmiri and, separately, Ashraf Ali Thanvi: the Quran is a book of ethics, not a book of science, and where it describes the physical world -- clouds, the sun's motion, the sky -- it speaks in the everyday idiom available to its first audience, without staking any claim on the underlying physical reality. Its purpose in doing so, Kashmiri argued, was always to establish that a creator exists and deserves gratitude, not to settle astronomy.

Fiqh's Overdue Reconstruction: Women, Inheritance, Citizenship

Mazhari applies the same removal-retention-addition logic to Islamic law. Rulings drawn directly and unambiguously from scripture -- the number of prayer cycles, fixed inheritance shares explicitly stated in the Quran -- are, in his account, simply fixed and not open to renegotiation. But a large portion of fiqh was built through ijtihad on matters scripture never addressed directly, and that portion, he argues, should be treated as genuinely open to reconsideration using today's available tools and knowledge, not treated as permanently settled by early jurists.

On women's status, Mazhari traces the classical doctrine that women possess "half reason" (naqisat al-'aql) -- drawn from a single hadith -- partly to Greek philosophical influence rather than scripture itself. He cites Plato's remark that being born of woman was a source of shame, and Ibn Rushd's claim that women play no active biological role in conception, as examples of how deeply the classical tradition's view of women was shaped by imported Greek assumptions rather than the Quran. He argues the hadith on women's reason needs to be read in its original legal context rather than generalised into a blanket judgment on female judgment as such. On whether women can lead a state, he notes that even the conservative jurist Ashraf Ali Thanvi and, more recently, Yusuf al-Qaradawi revisited a hadith long read as a categorical bar, arguing it responded to a specific Sasanian context of unchecked, semi-divine monarchical authority rather than to the collective, consultative decision-making of a modern political system.

On inheritance, he acknowledges the frequently raised objection that women's shares are often smaller than men's despite many now working and contributing financially, but argues the calculation has historically balanced against men's exclusive, non-negotiable obligation to financially support the household -- a balance he says needs to be revisited, not dismissed, now that many women earn and increasingly share or carry that burden themselves. On the treatment of non-Muslim minorities, Mazhari argues that the classical dhimmi framework, and the jizya tax historically levied on non-Muslims under Muslim rule, belonged to a medieval political order without a concept of equal citizenship anywhere in the world, Muslim or otherwise, and is now obsolete under the modern nation-state, where non-Muslims took an equal part in winning independence and are due equal citizenship as a result. He points to an inconsistency he thinks Muslim communities need to confront honestly: demanding full, equal citizenship in India or Western countries while continuing, elsewhere, to defend a historical framework that denied exactly that to non-Muslim minorities under Muslim rule.

A Tradition Wide Enough to Draw From

Mazhari closes by distilling the conversation into two linked failures that need correcting. The first is treating tradition itself as something already finished, requiring only implementation rather than the ongoing engagement every generation is entitled to bring to it. The second is the specific atrophy of ijtihad, which he says needs to be reactivated collectively, ijtihad ijtima'i, rather than left to scattered individual muftis issuing the kind of inconsistent, sometimes embarrassing fatwas that circulate online today and invite ridicule. He argues that collective reasoning is far more achievable now than in earlier centuries, given instant digital access to the full hadith corpus and centuries of accumulated legal opinion that once sat scattered across thousands of separate manuscripts.

His closing image is of a buffet rather than a fixed plate: the Islamic tradition, across fourteen centuries, already contains far more material, and far more internal argument, than most Muslims today realise is available to them. The task Mazhari sets out is not to invent a new cuisine from imported ingredients, but to serve more of what is already on the table.