Chapter One

TIME

View the world otherwise, and it will become other.

Muhammad Iqbal, Javid-Nama, no. 2019

Repeating is neither restoring after-the-fact nor re-actualizing: it is “realizing anew.” The creative power of repetition is contained entirely in this power of opening up the past again to the future.

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, 380

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Fazlur Rahman was born in 1919 in prepartition India, in a family that had deep roots in Islamic scholarship. After completing his M.A. in 1942 from Punjab University in Lahore, he moved to England in 1946, and in 1949 received his Ph.D. from Oxford. From 1950 to 1958 he taught at Durham University in England and from 1958 to 1961 at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. In 1962, after sixteen years abroad, he returned home, to the new nation of Pakistan, to serve as the director of the Central Institute of Islamic Research, whose mission was to interpret “Islam in rational and scientific terms” that met “the requirements of a modern progressive society.”1 In this capacity he provided support to the modernization reforms of Pakistan’s ruler, General Ayyub Khan, whose opponents ultimately forced Rahman to resign and immigrate to the United States in 1968, after one of his English-language books, Islam, was translated into Urdu. The central charge against him had to do with the Qurʾan: he was accused of denying its uncreated and divine nature—arguably a tone-deaf reading of what he actually proposed. The longest and most productive phase of his career took place in the United States, where, while teaching at the University of Chicago from 1969 until his passing in 1988, he solidified his reputation as a Muslim scholar of global importance.²

Rahman’s impact was most pronounced in the academic study of Islam. At the University of Chicago, he was the teacher to dozens of students who became well-known scholars of Islamic studies in the United States and Canada. Through his books and students, he contributed to a dramatic transformation in how Islam came to be studied at American universities and colleges.³ Yet what was his influence among American Muslims? I asked this question often during my research. A typical answer came from Sayyid M. Syeed, a longtime leader in the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was the largest Muslim American organization. Like many people who knew Rahman personally, Sayeed considered him an intellectual giant and remembered him fondly. But, he noted, echoing many other respondents, “regretfully, [Rahman’s] influence [was] limited to academics.”4

Syeed’s evaluation was understandable: unlike other prominent American Muslim intellectuals of his day, such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) and Ismail Raji al-Faruqi (1921–1986), the Iranian American and Palestinian American philosophers, Rahman was rarely seen or heard at the gatherings of American Muslim organizations. One possible reason for this was that ISNA, like many other American Muslim institutions of this era, had significant South Asian constituencies, and many people in these groups allied themselves with the ideology of one of Rahman’s opponents in Pakistan, Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi (1903–1979), an exegete, journalist, and the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Indian subcontinent’s predominant Muslim political movement. Therefore, Rahman and this group stayed out of each other’s way. This made his influence less visible. But it does not mean that it did not exist.

In many ways Rahman’s position in American Muslim history is akin to the role of Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) in American Catholicism. Like Rahman, Maritain was a foreigner, in his case French, and an academic. In the 1940s and 1950s, he taught at Princeton University and was known as a global Catholic intellectual. He was a philosopher and a student of Henri Bergson, whose name will appear in this chapter. His central contribution to international Catholic discourses was in articulating “more nuanced understandings of the challenges posed by modernity.”⁵ In the post–World War II context, when the Catholic Church had to overcome widespread misgivings about its affiliation with antidemocratic regimes, he formulated the language of Catholic participation in democratic societies. This global proposition became American through the efforts of Maritain’s local followers, such as John Courtney Murray (1904–1967), a Jesuit priest, theologian, and public intellectual, who used Maritain’s insights to develop a new vision and language of American Catholic politics.

In a way similar to Maritain’s, Rahman’s influence in American Muslim discourses was embodied in the works of local intellectuals such as Amina Wadud, who followed in his footsteps (see chapter 2). Here, I will situate Rahman in the American Muslim context of the post-1965 era and then examine his American masterpiece, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, a book he published in Chicago in 1980. In the 1980s and 1990s, Major Themes was perhaps the most widely used text on the Qurʾan at American colleges and universities. Its impact was more than academic. For many young American Muslims, it served as their first significant introduction to the Qurʾan. What made it appealing was how naturally it harmonized the scripture with their sensibilities, including their concepts of justice and ethics (which, like the notion of time, tend to appear constant but, historically speaking, are not). The significance of Major Themes for my study, however, is broader than the tracing of Rahman’s influence on those who acknowledged it directly. His exegesis was unique in one specific way: its author was also a historian. Because history was for him a central interpretive tool, his work highlighted what most exegetes typically skip: the dilemmas that arise when a premodern text is translated into a meaningful guide for its modern believers. An understanding of what this entails is imperative for all of this book’s case studies.

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In the year 2000, twelve years after Rahman’s death, a group of American Muslim academics and activists published a book, Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar Activists in North America. Its aim was to “give evidence of, and voice to, the diversity of expressions that constitutes contemporary Muslim women’s scholarship and activism in the United States.”6 The range and depth of its articles certainly fulfilled this goal. But it did something else as well. Its language, both in terms of its conceptual vocabulary and internal logic, demonstrated the depth of Rahman’s influence on American Muslim discourses of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Indicative of this was an article by Nimat Hafez Barazangi, a Syrian American professor at Cornell University. One of Barazangi’s arguments was acutely controversial: she challenged her Muslim colleagues to embrace the term “feminism.” As is often the case with daring propositions, she presented it as grounded in uncontested sources, which, to her, were the Qurʾan and Fazlur Rahman. She proposed that “the basis of feminism lies in the Qurʾan” because the principles of feminism correspond with “the Qurʾanic concept of justice.” She added that it was not her intention to “read history backward,” that she was “merely reinterpreting what Rahman stated: The basic principle in the Qurʾanic view of Islamic justice is the equality between sexes.”⁷

A telling illustration of Rahman’s broader influence is an autobiographical vignette by Ingrid Mattson, a Canadian convert to Islam who spent much of her career in the United States and from 2006 to 2010 was the first female president of ISNA. On the website of Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, where she was a professor of Islamic Studies from 1998 to 2012 (and where I happened to teach as well), she chose to introduce herself in the following way:

In the summer of 1987, I was riding the train out to British Columbia to start a tree-planting job in the mountains. I had just finished my undergraduate degree in Philosophy and had only recently begun my personal study of Islam. I came across Fazlur Rahman’s Islam in a bookstore a few days before my trip. Reading that book as I traveled across the Canadian prairies, I made the decision to apply to graduate school in Islamic Studies…. Going a step further, I wrote a letter to Rahman…. I dropped the letter in a post box somewhere in the Rockies and forgot about it until I returned east in August. There I found a hand-written note from him, inviting me to come to the University of Chicago to study with him. Rahman died before I arrived in Chicago, but it was his book and his encouragement that inspired me to start on the path to scholarship that I have found so rewarding.8

Islam, the book that inspired Mattson, was the same text that stirred the controversy that forced Rahman to leave Pakistan. Mattson’s recollection glossed over this fact. In a way her sidestepping of this issue was natural because she encountered Islam in Canada. First published in England in 1968, its 1979 edition by the University of Chicago Press was one of the most widely assigned textbooks on Islam in North American colleges and universities. So it is not surprising that a recent graduate from a Canadian university just happened to “come across” it while not being cognizant of its somewhat controversial status in Pakistan. When Mattson recalled that story in the late 2000s, however, the situation was different. At that time, some twenty years after the incident she narrated, she was serving as the president of ISNA, whose membership was overwhelmingly South Asian. Her statement, therefore, risked ruffling feathers among some of her organization’s older members. Yet, many years after Rahman’s passing and beyond that specific constituency, his name was now safe and acceptable enough to be presented by the president of the largest North American Muslim organization as a kind of an ijaza, or a certificate that a student of a respected Muslim scholar receives to demonstrate the validity of his or her intellectual lineage.

While the passage of time and Rahman’s academic accomplishments contributed to the transformation of his image, more significant was that his overall arguments, reflected in Islam and other works, were quite at home in broader American Muslim discourses of the time. What he shared with many Muslim immigrants of his generation was the language of Islamic reform. As Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, a historian of American Islam, explained, for many American Muslim activists of Rahman’s generation, the “adherence to Islamic beliefs and practices was not only a religious duty but a transformative experience.”⁹ For many of them, religiosity was tied to political activism. This combination was reflected in their conceptual vocabulary, which took on such modern political notions as “nation” and “progress” and reformulated them as Islamic and even Qurʾanic. They often derived the language of their religious and political activism from the works of Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), an Egyptian writer, exegete, and one of the ideological fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world’s parallel to Jamaat-e-Islami. Although there were many differences between Rahman and these two Muslim thinkers, what they had in common was an understanding of modern Islamic reforms as necessitating a return to Islam’s original texts, the Qurʾan and Hadith, which, they felt, had to be interpreted anew and often in contradiction to established exegetical traditions. In this context the overall direction of Rahman’s interpretation of the Qurʾan was not particularly contentious. America, for many of Rahman’s immigrant Muslim contemporaries, held the promise of a new beginning. It was a modern nation, where they could build a new Muslim community that would be free from the politics they left back home. Besides, Rahman’s interpretation had another element in common with Mawdudi and Qutb: like them, he explained the Qurʾan thematically, which was an acutely modern methodology. Qutb, for example, who was originally a literary critic and journalist, borrowed his methods from the literary studies of his day.10

Of course, such resonances would not matter had Rahman been still absorbed in local Muslim politics. By immersing himself in the academy, he avoided unwelcome political exposures. This was reflected in the decidedly academic style of his writing: his works came across as objective and above the politics of the day. Yet even this element was not unusual among immigrant Muslim intellectuals of his generation. Another person who maintained the same seemingly detached approach was Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was often perceived as a direct opposite to Rahman. Another commonality Rahman and Nasr shared was that they highlighted the serious nature of the challenges faced by individual Muslims and their societies in the postcolonial era. Rahman’s solution was to formulate new and decidedly modern strategies of rethinking Islam, including the Qurʾan. Nasr’s response was different: he rejected modernity itself. He wrote and spoke about it as a civilizational disease, accompanied by hypermaterialism and secularism. He argued that Islam was a “traditional” religion, which to him meant premodern. Because of this heritage, it and other old traditions—such as Catholic and Orthodox Christianities, as well as some forms of Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism—had the depth of knowledge necessary to overcome the modern predicament. Like Rahman, he wrote academic and more popular books, which addressed secularly educated Muslims around the globe and especially in the West.¹¹ Their disagreement was profound: while Nasr viewed modernity as godlessness, Rahman embraced what he saw as its positive streams.

In spite of this, both of these authors shared yet another stylistic commonality: they avoided writing about politics and concentrated instead on “essential” meanings of Islam. In Nasr’s books the phrase that conveyed such principles was “integral Islam.” Another term he and Rahman used frequently was “normative Islam.” While what they meant by these phrases was somewhat different, their rhetorical choice of stressing—and thus defining—some core aspects of Islam was pedagogically productive in a similar and telling way. During their careers in Iran and Pakistan, both Nasr and Rahman were close to the political centers of power that intruded into the domains of religious authorities. In Iran and Pakistan their “integral” and “normative Islam” reflected their attempts to avoid direct confrontation with guardians of orthodoxy and their institutions. In the United States, however, these same words had a different utility. They resonated with how many American immigrant Muslims of the post-1965 era spoke about themselves—because they were a very diverse conglomeration of people, who did not agree on what was “orthodox” but needed to work together. To Rahman and Nasr’s immigrant Muslim audiences, “normative Islam” was a godsend. In 1968, for example, the year Rahman immigrated to the United States, the Muslim Student Association included among its members individuals from thirty-six countries, and described itself as an organization of “Muslims first, Muslims last, and Muslims forever.”12 This sort of pan-Islamic rhetoric was not unique to the MSA. It was shared by many national and local groups: many mosques established in this period, for instance, included both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims.

“Normative”—as opposed to the stern-sounding “orthodox”—Islam appealed to some converts as well. This was the time when many Americans—and Canadians—were searching for spiritual alternatives and were finding them in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. For some of them Rahman and Nasr’s essentialist language provided an opening into an Islam that was at once exotic and relatable. In this respect Mattson’s remembrance of Rahman’s Islam was quite telling. He had written it, after all, for Western audiences, as well as for secularly educated Muslims all over the world. Its language appeared unfettered by local politics, either in Pakistan or North America. Practically speaking, it presented a vision of Islam that was essential enough to be readily translatable into new sets of local realities.

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Wendy Cadge, an anthropologist specializing in contemporary American Buddhism, noted that “[with] the exception of Native American religions, Mormonism, and a few other religions started in the United States, American religious history is a story about how religions started in one place are carried along global networks and constructed and reconstructed in new ways on American shores.”¹³ The story of Islam becoming an American religion is complex. It is undeniable, however, that Muslim intellectuals have been pivotal in this process. By serving as authoritative voices of Islam, they contributed to its cultural translation into an American reality. Their role was in formulating conceptual vocabularies and grammars of American Muslim discourses, which helped their readers and listeners make sense of themselves as Americans and Muslims.

In the post-1965 period, this process of cultural translation unfolded in three overlapping stages. In the first movement of this progressive spiral, Islam’s cultural interpreters—typically immigrants, like Rahman and Nasr—distilled foreign Muslim discourses from such places as Pakistan or Iran into general notions of “normative Islam.” Following this development, their American students and audiences, who included immigrants, African Americans, and others, appropriated such “normative” ideas and developed their own, more tangibly American interpretations. After this they were able to address global concerns not as generic “normative” Muslims but as Muslim Americans. Key in this process was American Muslim institutional life: the transformation in the rhetoric of public intellectuals was tied to the development of locally resonant institutional practices and articulations, which became particularly pronounced after 9/11.

This dynamic is reflected in the works and words of two American imams, Muhammad Abdul Rauf (1917–2004), a prominent Egyptian American Muslim leader, and his son, Feisal Abdul Rauf (b. 1948), a New York City–based imam who gained national renown in 2010 during the controversy surrounding the establishment of Park 51, a Muslim community center a few blocks from the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which some called “The Ground Zero Mosque.”14 Abdul Rauf the elder was a contemporary of Fazlur Rahman. Unlike Rahman, he was prominently engaged in the building of American Muslim institutions. Yet, like Rahman and many Muslim leaders of that generation, he often talked about Islamic essentials. For instance, during the 1957 opening ceremony of the Islamic Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., in whose founding he played a key role, he declared, “May this Islamic Center in Washington serve its purpose of shedding the light of truth about Islam as a universal religion, as a way of life, and as a culture which is essentially creative and humane.”¹⁵ His son, Feisal Abdul Rauf, often wrote and spoke in a similar vein—until September 11, 2001. Before 9/11 he wrote Islam: A Search for Meaning and Islam: A Sacred Law. In these books one could detect subtle connotations that hinted at the author’s American cultural location. To notice them, however, one would have to read between the lines, because their overall language was of “normative Islam.” After 9/11 he wrote What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America and Moving the Mountain: Beyond Ground Zero to a New Vision of Islam in America, which formulated an explicit vision of an American Islam.

Feisal Abdul Rauf’s transformation was part of a broader shift in American Muslim articulations, which occurred in the aftermath of 9/11. I will explore one such example in chapter 4. What is important to note here is that, while his and many other American Muslim intellectuals’ emphasis on the American character of Islam was novel, their overall language was not altogether new. Many African Americans had established such articulations earlier. But even those who would begin to speak and write in this way after 9/11 followed the logic that can be traced to the earlier, pre-9/11 period. Many of them arrived at speaking and writing about “American Islam” through the language of “normative Islam.” The notion of “normative Islam” allowed them to put distance between their own interpretations and the discursive streams that had developed in other contexts. In the post-9/11 era, they filled that gap with the phrase “American Islam.”

In this respect Rahman’s role as an American Muslim cultural translator was momentous. But it was not obvious. At about the same time as his Major Themes, for example, another American Muslim intellectual, Ismail Faruqi, published a text, Toward Islamic English, that aimed explicitly to serve as a blueprint for how American Muslims had to speak. He presented in it, after a short introduction, a glossary of Arabic terms, which, he argued, English-speaking Muslims had to adopt to be properly Muslim. The impact of Faruqi’s book, however, was limited: its audience was narrow, and it was too technical—a dictionary of sorts. Dictionaries, however, do not shape languages. It is, rather, spoken languages, and their ongoing transmutations, that prompt constant upgrades of dictionaries.

Rahman’s Major Themes was different and its influence more lasting. It addressed a broad audience, Muslims and non-Muslims, academics and otherwise. For Muslims specifically, it provided a path through which they could revitalize Islam in new contexts. And it did this is a way that was at once direct and subtle: rather than teaching vocabulary, it instilled a conceptual grammar, an invisible logic of contemporary Muslim thought. Step by step, it engaged its audience in a particular method of reading and interpreting the Qurʾan. It embodied a carefully developed logic designed to enable its Muslim readers to articulate new ways of speaking and thinking about their past and present as they worked toward a better future.

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“The Qurʾan,” wrote Rahman in the first sentence of the first chapter of Major Themes, “is a document that is squarely aimed at man.” Its goal, he argued, was to enable humans to live their lives successfully, toward a successful end. For each individual, it meant cultivation of God-consciousness, or taqwa. For God-conscious societies, it entailed striving toward the attainment of “a moral social order on earth.” Because of this practical orientation, the Qurʾan, in Rahman’s reading, was not a theological treatise but a book of signs. It “does not ‘prove’ God,” he explained, “but ‘points to’ Him from the existing universe.” To guide humans toward God, the Qurʾan, in his view, presented a cosmology, a depiction of the universe, whose aim was to remind them about their “unique position in the order of creation.”16 Therefore, he structured his book to direct his readers toward recognizing how the Qurʾan communicated with them: he began it with a chapter on God and then immediately proceeded with essays about human beings and societies, nature, processes of God’s revelation, eschatology, the problem of evil, and, only at the end, the history and lessons of the first community of Muslims.

From the beginning, Rahman identified the goal of his book: it was an intervention into how the Qurʾan should be read in the modern era, which to him went beyond the discipline of tafsir. The “innumerable Muslim commentaries on the Holy Book,” he observed, “often take the text verse by verse and explain it.” This customary approach, however, “cannot yield insight into the cohesive outlook on the universe and life which the Qurʾan undoubtedly possesses.” He further explained that most interpreters of his time “lack[ed] … a genuine feel for the relevance of the Qurʾan today” and “fear[ed] that such a presentation might deviate on some points from traditionally received opinions.” These two characteristics, he argued, prevented his colleagues from presenting the Qurʾan “in terms adequate to the needs of contemporary man.” His book, on the other hand, responded “to the urgent need for an introduction to major themes of the Qurʾan.” Such thematic reading, he proposed, was “the only way to give a [contemporary] reader a genuine taste of the Qurʾan, the Command of God for man.” Rahman described his “procedure … for synthesizing themes” as “logical rather than chronological,” which was a clear indication of his trespassing on the rules of traditional tafsir. He further insisted that he used interpretation “only [when it was] necessary for joining together ideas,” and added, “Apart from this, the Qurʾan has been allowed to speak for itself.”¹⁷

Rahman’s style was at once academic (in the modern sense of this word) and religious. His writing—expressed in the passive voice and “logical” presentation—came across as “normative.” It concealed the agency of the man who “allowed [the Qurʾan] to speak for itself.” This posture of objectivity reflected Rahman’s position as an in-between intellectual, one trained in both Muslim and secular traditions of Islamic Studies, and because of this he could evaluate and utilize what he deemed to be their most productive approaches. Western academic study of Islam was useful to him and, he hoped, to his Muslim colleagues as well because it provided the tools necessary for rethinking the historical contexts of Muslim texts. Of course, he urged his coreligionists to apply such tools carefully, so as not to disrupt the vital dimensions of the Islamic intellectual traditions. Major Themes reflected this line of thought. In it Rahman attempted to reread the Qurʾan with the help of the methods developed by Western academics—as they had been applied to the historical exploration of the Bible, for example—in a way that was also faithfully Muslim, because the Qurʾan to him was “the Command of God.”

Such a delicate balancing act was characteristic of Rahman’s overall scholarship. A telling example of it is the book Rahman published in Pakistan in 1965, Islamic Methodology in History. Its subject was the Sunna, or Muslims’ collective memory of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Rahman took seriously Western academic critiques of the historicity of the hadith literature, the scriptures that communicate the Prophet’s Sunna, while refusing to allow such evaluations to devalue the Muslim traditions of engagement with the Prophet’s legacy. He conceded that many accounts of Muhammad’s words and acts were misremembered by generations of Hadith collectors. But that, he argued, did not negate the value of the Hadith for discovering the “normative” message of the Sunna. As a professional historian, he knew that human memory is not exact and that contexts always influence how the past is remembered. His solution to this fundamental feature of memory was to search for the themes that would be consistent throughout the Hadith. Such themes, he proposed, represented the Sunna as a “concept,” which reflected the ethical principles behind the Prophet’s actions and words.18

Major Themes built upon Islamic Methodology. In both books Rahman did not just interpret the scriptures, but theorized about the tools of their interpretation. Like many other exegetes, he read the Qurʾan and Hadith in tandem. But whereas customary exegeses used the Hadith to comment on and verify meanings of individual Qurʾanic passages, he reversed this order and used the Qurʾan to authenticate the Hadith. Rahman’s basis for this reversal was academic: the Qurʾan, to him, was an accurate recording of the revelation, while much of the hadith literature was not. In addition, Islamic Methodology and Major Themes employed a particular methodology of rereading the scriptures. In Major Themes it became more developed and yet less obvious—perhaps because too detailed an explanation of its author’s role as an interpreter would have distracted its readers from paying attention to how the Qurʾan spoke “for itself.” This was likely the reason why Rahman reserved the technical explanation of his method for a subsequent book, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition, which he published in 1982. It was there that he finally gave his method a name: he called it a theory of “double movement.”¹⁹

Rahman’s “double movement” is akin to a choreographic composition, an outline of a dance. It is a method that encourages other interpreters to follow a particular pattern of movement, to step carefully into the past and then into the present, and then keep repeating variations of these moves over and over again, because the present and therefore perceptions of the past change constantly. The first movement in this dynamic outline entails stepping into the past to understand the “micro and macro” contexts within which the Qurʾan was revealed.²⁰ This requires a historically sensitive examination of how the Qurʾan made sense to its initial audience, the Arabic speakers of seventh-century Mecca and Medina. It necessitates a study of their history and language, including their contextually specific understandings of words and concepts. The second step is equally contextual. It entails cultural translation of the Qurʾan’s lessons into the logics and words understandable to modern human beings. To do so, interpreters have to be attuned to what is sound to their own contemporaries; they have to study the realities of their audiences. Otherwise, how would they make sense of the Qurʾan for those who need it now? This task of constantly moving across time is so complex that Rahman imagined his “double movement” as a collective endeavor: the first step is “primarily the work of the historian, [while] in the performance of the second the instrumentality of the social scientist is obviously indispensible.”21

The general parameters of Rahman’s proposition were not entirely new. On the surface his methodology resonated with the standard premodern method of interpreting the Qurʾan through the Hadith. Like other exegetes, Rahman relied on what Muslims call “occasions of revelation”: records, contained in the Hadith, of particular situations within which individual segments of the Qurʾan were revealed. He also employed naskh, or abrogation, the process through which interpreters have been traditionally sorting out contradictions among passages that had been revealed to the Prophet at different times between 610 and 632 C.E.²² Yet, Rahman did not just use such tools; he redesigned them almost completely.

His reformulations relied on the approach he had already developed in Islamic Methodology, where he interpreted the Hadith not as a collection of individual records but as the Sunna, a coherent representation of the Prophet’s life and message. Similarly, he did not interpret the Qurʾan one passage at a time, as most of his premodern counterparts did. Rather, he read it as coherent whole—somewhat in the way literary critics analyze novels. This too was not a new perspective. The emphasis on the coherence of the Qurʾan’s overall message had been present in some medieval exegeses as well, such as the tafsir of the twelfth-century Persian scholar al-Zamakhshari. In the modern period it was developed into a methodology of interpretation by the Pakistani interpreter Amin Ahsan Islahi (1904–1997) and the Iranian Shiʿi scholar Seyed Mohammad Hossein Tabatabai (1904–1981). Rahman’s competitors, Mawdudi and Qutb, followed this understanding as well.²³

What Rahman did with both the occasions of revelation and naskh—in light of his reading of the Qurʾan as one coherent text—was immensely productive. He refashioned the occasions of revelation into a concept, which verified that the Qurʾan was forever relevant: during its period of revelation, it responded to specific and changing situations, and it continued to speak in subsequent settings as well. Behind the Qurʾan’s chronologically revealed statements, Rahman perceived a coherent network of narratives. As the Qurʾan was gradually and dialogically revealed, he argued, it communicated—in various ways that were tied to specific contexts—a set of core ethical lessons. He called these lessons the Qurʾan’s “major themes.”

Based on this understanding, Rahman transformed naskh into a particularly time-sensitive tool of cultural translation. His naskh, unlike the one his predecessors had used, was thoroughly thematic. By emphasizing “major themes,” he deemphasized those scriptural lessons that, to him, were not so central. Surely, he did not neglect any passages. But he read them thematically in light of more “major” passages and ideas. In this way he reformulated the Qurʾan as a whole into a “normative” text whose meanings went beyond the specifics of many of its individual utterings. In this process he culturally translated both the Qurʾan as a whole and its individual passages. Technically speaking, from the customary definition of naskh, he abrogated nothing. In his interpretation even those passages that had been nullified by some of his colleagues were still communicating. But they did so thematically and thus spoke, across time and cultures, to Rahman’s contemporaries on occasions when they needed the revelation.

Rahman, of course, did not call what he did “naskh” because, technically, it was not it—just as his tafsir, narrowly speaking, was not a tafsir. While it is possible to interpret his versions of naskh and tafsir as mere contemporary upgrades of their premodern versions, such a perspective would not be entirely sound. What drove Rahman’s effort was a reality that, to him, was commonsense: his and his contemporaries’ contexts were modern, and the modern period of human history is fundamentally different from what had transpired before. This was the reason for his redesigning of the very art of interpretation—to the extent that its tools, even if he were to give them “traditional” names, would still have to be modern. Without such modern devices, Rahman hinted, the Qurʾan could not speak and make sense to modern humans. Or, as he put it, “[To] the extent that we achieve both moments of this double movement successfully, the Qurʾan’s imperatives will become alive and effective once again.”24 This phrasing was uplifting, but one does not “become alive … once again” without being otherwise previously.

Rahman’s “double movement” was his attempt to answer the most vital dilemma of any modern engagement with the Qurʾan, which is too commonsense to be noticeable and hence is almost always ignored. It stems from the modern sense of time, which assumes that history—societal or individual progression through time—is irreversible: today is never like yesterday; things always change and can never be repeated; history is not a circle. His “double movement” was a response to a temptation that afflicts many religious and other nostalgic people who want to somehow revert to the past of their mythologies—such as the supposedly wholesome American 1950s or, for Muslims, the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Repeating the past, Rahman was certain, was impossible, and he saw those who employed such rhetoric as intellectually immature and irresponsible. His own interpretation was a cultural translation of a particularly productive kind. He did not merely translate Qurʾanic words, phrases, and concepts into a contemporary language, but he also choreographed a series of steps for future human engagements with the Qurʾan.

Rahman’s Major Themes invited other interpreters to keep engaging in faithful and responsible dialogue with the eternal revelation. Their attempts to hear “the Qurʾan speak for itself” would take place in their own contexts, in response to their own struggles—such as overcoming the logic of dehumanization embedded in the peculiarly American notions of something called “race,” or striving to live justly according to a sense of justice in which gender inequality is felt as somehow essentially unjust. Practical connotations of “race,” “justice,” and other commonsense concepts, it must be remembered, change constantly: we often forget that the right to vote, an inviolable right of every American citizen, did not apply to women until 1920 and that before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 all American banks denied credit or loans to married women because, in the banks’ common sense, financial decisions belonged to husbands. The real significance of Rahman’s interpretation was that it charted a course for the Qurʾan’s future rereadings. His Qurʾan was the Qurʾan of the future, perhaps even more than the Qurʾan of the distant past or the ever-disappearing present. Of course, in the commonsensically modern fashion of his time, he perceived “the future” as being somehow always better than “the present” and “the past.”

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The following passage illustrates how Rahman carried out his “double movement” in Major Themes. It translates the Qurʾanic concept of taqwa, which literally means a “fear of God,” into the twentieth-century vocabulary of “human rights.” I quote it at length to give, as Rahman would put it, “a genuine feel” of the style and logic of his argument:

The essence of all human rights is the equality of the entire human race, which the Qurʾan assumed, affirmed and confirmed. It obliterated all distinctions among men except goodness and virtue (taqwa):

Oh you who believe! Let not one group of men among you deride another, for they may be better than them; nor one group of women deride another, for they may be better than them, no slander each other, nor call each other names—how bad it is to call [each other] bad names after all of you became Believers … So fear God—indeed, God is forgiving and merciful. O people! We have created [all of you] out of male and female, and we have made you into different nations and tribes [only] for mutual identification; [otherwise] the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one most possessed of taqwa [not one belonging to this or that race or nation]; God knows well and is best informed. (49:11–13)

The reason the Qurʾan emphasizes the essential human equality is that the kind of vicious superiority which certain members of this species assert over others is unique among all animals…. It is also true that the distance between human potentialities and their actual realization displays a range exemplified by probably no other species of living beings…. To offset all these artificial but powerful sources of discrimination between man and man, it is necessary that man constantly reminds himself that we “are all children of Adam and Adam was of dust” (as the Farewell Pilgrimage address of the Prophet has it)…. With perfect justification have the lawyers of Islam emphasized four fundamental freedoms or rights—life, religion, earning and owning property, and personal human honor and dignity…. Through its more specific social reforms, the Qurʾan aimed at strengthening the weaker segments of the community: the poor, the orphans, women, slaves, those chronically in debt. In understanding the Qurʾan’s social reforms, however, we will go fundamentally wrong unless we distinguish between legal enactments and moral injunctions. Only by so distinguishing can we not only understand the true orientation of the Qurʾan but also solve certain knotty problems with regard, for example, to women’s reform. This is where the Muslim legal tradition, which essentially regarded the Qurʾan as a lawbook and not the religious source of law, went so palpably wrong.25

The structure of this passage embodies Rahman’s “double movement.” It begins with a statement about the guidelines, or dynamic principles, that the Qurʾan had established for the sake of the human progression toward God-conscious forms of societal life. He called these principles, which appeared jurisprudential, “the Qurʾan’s social reforms.” He noted, however briefly, the Prophet’s experiment with actualizing these “social reforms” in his community: this was likely his reason for quoting Muhammad’s last sermon. And then he delivered a lesson to contemporary Muslims by contrasting, through an example from “the Muslim legal tradition,” what they had done previously with what they must do from now on.

What this excerpt also provides is a sense of Rahman’s rhetoric, his art of persuasion. The text of the Qurʾan, in Rahman’s translation, is framed by his introduction and explanation. Through this arrangement some of the apparently Qurʾanic words come across as naturally in sync with the conceptual vocabulary of Rahman’s readers.26 In fact, for a book where the Qurʾan is “allowed to speak for itself,” it is remarkable how this seventh-century text incorporates in its vocabulary the language of the post–World War II era, the time of the United Nations, overthrow of colonialism, and the American civil rights movement. In Rahman’s rephrasing the Qurʾan speaks about “freedom” and “rights.” These words appear Qurʾanic, but, technically speaking, they were not—at least not in the sense of the network of connotations that was commonsense to Rahman’s audiences in the 1980s. For his readers these words would resonate, for instance, with the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its insistence on the fundamental right of all human beings, men and women of all races, to be “free and equal in dignity and rights.”²⁷

Another telling example is Rahman’s late-twentieth-century rendition of an excerpt from Qurʾan 2:228, which he translated as “for women there are rights [over against men] commensurate with the duties [they owe men]—but men are one degree higher.”²⁸ The beginning of this Qurʾanic uttering, in Rahman’s interpretation, would appear promising for the readers accustomed to including women’s rights under the umbrella of the concept of “rights.” Yet, for such readers the end of this passage would likely be quite problematic. This was precisely the kind of incongruity that necessitated for Rahman a “double movement.” He proposed, therefore, that this Qurʾanic ruling was quite “normative” but not in the way that many of the custodians of “the Muslim legal tradition” would think. Rather, he said, the passage as a whole reflected “the usual procedure of the Qurʾanic legislation”: “Generally speaking, each legal or quasi-legal pronouncement is accompanied by a ratio legis explaining why a law is being enunciated. To understand a ratio legis fully, an understanding of the sociohistorical background (what the Qurʾanic commentators call ‘occasions of revelation’) is necessary. The ratio legis is the essence of the matter, the actual legislation being its embodiment so long as it faithfully and correctly realizes the ratio; if it does not, the law has to be changed.”²⁹

Based on this perspective, Rahman argued that the first half of Qurʾan 2:228 was “normative”: it instituted that women had rights. But then he upped the ante by producing the ratio legis behind all Qurʾanic legal rulings that involve men and women: “Religiously speaking, men and women have absolute parity.”³⁰ Women’s rights, therefore, must be determined by their status as human beings who, “religiously speaking,” have “absolute parity” with men. This trumps all else. Thus, Rahman concluded, the passage’s depiction of a hierarchy between men and women—“men are one degree higher”—could be safely de-emphasized, in effect abrogated, because it was specific to the context of seventh-century Arabia. If the Qurʾan is approached as the source of law and not “as a lawbook,” then the premodern notions of human hierarchies, based on gender or any other factor, must not be carried over into how the Qurʾan is applied in modern settings.

This example illustrates the practical nature of Rahman’s “double movement.” One of its outcomes is easily discernable: it makes ijtihad, the process of constant renewal of Islamic jurisprudence, inescapable. However, his methodology’s less obvious, yet more momentous insight had to do with the very nature of time and history. The reason why so many Muslim scholars had failed to relate the Qurʾan to “the needs of contemporary men,” Rahman argued, was because they feared “to deviate … from traditionally received opinions.” Those opinions came from premodern settings, when perceptions of history and the progression of time had been strikingly different from what would become commonsense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Premoderns saw history as either repeating itself in cycles or moving, along a downward spiral, toward an inevitable decay. Moderns, on the other hand, tend to perceive the movement of time as inherently progressive.31 In other words, the deeper consequence of Major Themes is that it challenged its readers to engage the Qurʾan as human beings who are aware of their limitations, including their historical location in modern time, which keeps distancing them from the time of the revelation. In this way Rahman made the Qurʾan “speak for itself” not just in the new, post–World War II vernacular but in the very grammar, the invisible logic, of his readers’ sense of the world. Without such updated grammar, how could the Qurʾan continue to speak and make sense?

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Behind Rahman’s exegetical movement was the thought of the Indian poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal.³² Rahman belonged to the generation of South Asian Muslims for whom Iqbal was the preeminent voice of renewal. He and Iqbal had much in common: they both came from devout Muslim families, received thorough religious and secular education, were enamored with the Qurʾan, and spent significant parts of their formative years abroad (Iqbal studied law and Persian literature in England and Germany). They also shared the belief that the future of Muslims depended on how they could embody the Qurʾan’s message in the modern era of history. For the sake of that future, they taught their audiences how to remember the Qurʾan anew by engaging their collective memory.

Maurice Halbwachs, the French philosopher who coined the term “collective memory,” perceived it as inseparable from language, which he understood as something deeper than mere vocabulary: “[It] is the language, and the whole system of social conventions attached to it, that allows us at every moment to reconstruct our past…. People living in society use words that they find intelligible: this is the precondition of collective thought. But each word (that is understood) is accompanied by recollections. There are no recollections to which words cannot be made to correspond. We speak of our recollections before calling them to mind.”33

How did Rahman, in conversation with Iqbal, attempt to shape his readers’ collective memory and language? Like all teachers of memory—storytellers, writers, or historians—Rahman and Iqbal projected through their rhetoric a common ground between themselves and their audiences, which for each of them were distinct. The fundamental purpose of memory is to make the present comprehensible by rendering the past meaningful.³⁴ Rahman and Iqbal used the past pedagogically, to direct the movement of Muslim thought and practice from a common past into a better future.³⁵ They re-membered the past not merely to indicate what had been possible before but to make sense of the present and articulate new ways of thinking, without which, they thought, a better Muslim future would never come. How they taught was also, to an extent, similar: they attempted to instill in their audiences particular biases, or seemingly commonsense perspectives—because biases are “what makes events knowable in the first place.”³⁶

Rahman’s methodology of interpreting the Qurʾan through its principles was a method of remembering. It was a strategy of teaching a common sense of “normative Islam,” which opened a way toward a future beyond the past and present realities of his Muslim readers. Their realities, for him, were too political, in the pedestrian sense of this word: they reflected “all these artificial but powerful sources of discrimination between man and man.” His role was to reiterate that we “are all children of Adam and Adam was of dust.” His readers’ task was to understand and embody this message, which was at once Qurʾanic and Prophetic. Therefore, he reminded them about the Qurʾan’s characterization of humans as unique creatures, who, unlike most other beings, had the capacity to consciously implement the lessons of God’s revelation. The catch, however, was that this capacity was potential: it was an ideal toward which humans, as individuals and societies, had to constantly progress. The Islam of real human history highlighted to him “the distance between human potentialities and their actual realization.” His “normative Islam” was a goal, which Muslims had to strive constantly to realize.

Rahman taught his “normative Islam” through emphases, not negations. This he learned from Iqbal, whose term for “normative Islam” was “Muslim culture.” Both Iqbal and Rahman recollected the past, most centrally the past of the Qurʾan, to emphasize its essential themes. They taught and related this message to their audiences by remembering anew the eternal lessons of “normative Islam” and “Muslim culture,” the background knowledge that their readers and listeners already possessed or were supposed to remember. Theirs, therefore, was a commonsense approach. Yet, how they carried it out was different, because Rahman was an academic writer, while Iqbal was a poet. What Rahman chose to emphasize from the Qurʾan paralleled Iqbal’s selections. But the purpose of his pedagogic remembrances was distinct. In Major Themes he borrowed Iqbal’s insights and then customized them to suit his agenda, which was to shape a modern discipline of Qurʾanic exegesis that, in his view, had to be both state-of-the-art academic and faithfully Muslim.

Iqbal’s influence was profound throughout Rahman’s career. Particularly impactful was the poet’s philosophical masterpiece, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, a book based on a series of lectures Iqbal delivered in English at several Indian universities in 1929. For example, Rahman began his Islamic Methodology by echoing Iqbal’s differentiation between mystics and prophets, as expressed in Reconstruction. And he ended that book by defending Iqbal’s theory of ijtihad. The defense, however, came with a caveat—he offered some key technical corrections. This move was indicative of Rahman’s overall approach to Iqbal. While referencing Iqbal, he typically corrected him from his own perspective, as an academic specialist in Islamic history, philosophy, and jurisprudence. Such corrections silenced—or half-silenced—those elements of Iqbal’s thought that Rahman found counterproductive.

His hushing of Iqbal, however, went even further. Those not familiar with Iqbal’s works would find it almost impossible to detect his influence in Rahman’s books, because he mentioned Iqbal very rarely: in Major Themes, he revealed Iqbal’s presence just once.37 This avoidance is understandable in some cases. For example, Rahman envisioned that the primary audience of his Islamic Methodology would be “traditionally-minded Muslims” in Pakistan, including some clerics, or the ʿulama.³⁸ For that particular audience, his reliance on Iqbal might have been an additional turnoff. But why did he need to conceal Iqbal’s name in Major Themes, which he wrote long after immigrating to the United States and for more general English-speaking audiences, including, of course, Muslims?

Sheila McDonough, one of Rahman’s students, recalled that he “wrestled intellectually with Iqbal all his life.” He loved Iqbal’s poetry but was also cautious about its potential to “distract Muslims from the seriousness of moral purpose.”³⁹ Poetry, to him, was a valuable but perilous art, because it surpassed reason: it could make its consumers too “drunk” on its energy, drunk enough to act before thinking. Therefore, for Rahman, Iqbal’s status as the national poet of Pakistan was problematic: his poetry was used to fuel raw nationalism, which Rahman saw as antagonistic to the egalitarian message of the Qurʾan. McDonough also remembered that Rahman was wary about Iqbal’s reliance on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, in part because of its association with nationalist ideologies.

Poetry and Nietzsche, however, were the surface indicators of Rahman’s much deeper anxiety about Iqbal. A major reason for it was that Iqbal’s poetry was mystical, and Rahman, like many Muslim intellectuals of his time, including Mawdudi and Qutb, was uncomfortable with Sufism, the Muslim mystical tradition: he saw it as a medieval vestige, problematic for “contemporary man.” Iqbal’s association with Nietzsche was also just the tip of the iceberg around which Rahman navigated with caution. It reflected just how thoroughly intertwined Iqbal’s insights were with the philosophical and scientific discourses of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was readily apparent in Iqbal’s Reconstruction, which presented the seventh-century Qurʾan as a text that crossed the boundaries of time, geography, and culture, and hence was a modern scripture as well. To make this point, Iqbal explicitly interpreted it with the help of insights he derived from the leading Western intellectuals of his time, including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Henry Bergson, and Alfred Whitehead, a British mathematician and philosopher who influenced Bergson. While making this argument, Iqbal utilized his fluency in Muslim and non-Muslim intellectual traditions. He did not hide his position as an in-between intellectual but rather used it to illustrate his argument, which called on Muslims to remember the Qurʾan anew in order to break beyond the habits of their thought.

Rahman, of course, was a similarly in-between individual. However, he chose to display his in-betweenness differently, especially when it came to his “normative” Qurʾan. Besides, had he emphasized his dependence on Iqbal, he would be hard pressed to avoid the impression that he too was influenced by such figures as Nietzsche or Freud, an intellectual pedigree he did not want to inherit. Therefore, he quoted Iqbal rarely. In Major Themes he erased Iqbal’s name almost completely.40 Yet, his conceptual grammar, the underpinning logic through which he “allowed [the Qurʾan] to speak for itself,” was unmistakably Iqbalian.

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How can one detect Iqbal’s influence in Major Themes? One does so by paying attention to Rahman’s vocabulary and trying to detect what informed it. An obvious place to start is with the word “God.” Rahman described God as “an organic unity.”⁴¹ In Reconstruction Iqbal also defined God as an “organic unity.” While Rahman did not acknowledge the source of his phrase, his echoing of Iqbal was likely not accidental because it was tied to how he and Iqbal presented the very purpose of the Qurʾan. For Iqbal it was “to awaken in man the consciousness of that of which nature is regarded as symbol.”⁴² For Rahman, it was “to shake [human beings] into belief” through reminders about the signs of the divine in nature and human history. “Organic,” for both authors, was an indispensible word because it evoked nature and, most important, the process of naturally occurring constant change, which they saw as essential to the entire creation, including processes undergirding human civilizations. The constant movement of and in nature was for both of them a sign of God’s ceaseless creativity. The concept that communicated change was time. Yet, how Rahman used the word “organic” and the connections it generated was acutely distinct—because Iqbal read the Qurʾan as a poet and translated it into a text of creative inspiration, while Rahman, inspired by Iqbal, translated it into a “normative” and practically applicable “document.”

Iqbal’s inspirational use of “organic” was far-reaching and, indeed, mystical: he employed it to guide his audiences toward overcoming what he saw as a debilitating perception of an impenetrable boundary between human beings and God. Based on the Qurʾan, he understood God and human beings to be unique, because God is creative and humans are created to be creative as well. Nature, to Iqbal, embodied God’s “systematic mode of behavior,” or God’s creativity. For humans the arena of such creativity was in their knowledge—the knowledge of the universe, human self, and God, or the “mystic knowledge.” To Iqbal these seemingly different realms, Godly and human, were interrelated. He pointed toward this interweaving by peppering—seeding really—his text with the word “organic.” Nature, he stated, was “organic to the Ultimate Self [God],” and human knowledge, mystical or otherwise, was “organically determined” as well.43

Iqbal described God and nature as “organic” because, to him, they were alive. He articulated their realities as characterized by “change … without ceasing,” “a constant mobility, an unceasing flux of states, a perpetual flow in which there is no halt or resting place.” Similarly—but not identically—he perceived and expressed constant change as the very character of human life, both physical and inner: in the human mode of being, he declared, “there is nothing static.”⁴⁴ This, to him, was the essence of the unique connection between humans and God: human knowledge of the universe, he insisted, is not mechanical; it is alive, “organic,” and creative. It is precisely this creativity that gives us the unrivaled capacity to perceive deeper meanings behind constantly moving natural realities, including the “ultimate Reality,” or God.

Behind this assertion stood the entire network of Iqbal’s philosophy, which creatively interweaved Western philosophical discourses with expressions of Muslim mysticism and the Qurʾan. He derived his vocabulary of constant change and movement from Bergson, Whitehead, and Einstein. The latest breakthroughs in Western philosophy, physics, and mathematics confirmed to him what the Qurʾan had said all along. Doesn’t Qurʾan 10:6, in Iqbal’s translation, say that “in the alternations of night and of day in all that God created in the Heavens and in the earth are signs to those who fear Him”? And isn’t the notion of God’s ceaselessly creative movement the obvious connotation behind Qurʾan 55:29, which states, again in Iqbal’s translation, “every day doth some new work employ Him”?45

Indeed, Iqbal added, God’s creative movement is of a unique kind, impossible to grasp through the ordinary human perception of time: human beings, in the conventional sense, are finite, and their habitual sense of time provides limited perception of the constant and infinite flow of God’s creative activity. Yet, Iqbal proposed, within the human self there is an “appreciative side of the self,” which is truly creative and thus can move toward the grasp of the “organic” reality of God. Relying on Bergson’s phraseology, he explained that human beings progress toward realizing this side of themselves by examining their “conscious experience,” especially “in the moments of profound meditation,” when “we sink deeper into our deeper self and reach the inner centre of experience.” In such moments, he argued, “the states of consciousness melt into each other,” and while “there is [still] change and movement … this change and movement are indivisible.” Therefore, “the time of the appreciative self is a single ‘now.’”⁴⁶

This insight was central to Iqbal. He derived his phrasing from Western psychology and Muslim mysticism: his was at once the conceptual language of Bergson and the Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–1273). And it was within this network of meanings that Iqbal’s “organic” made sense: it was a word that transcended and transgressed boundaries. Its meanings were polysemous—distinct, yet resonant and interrelated—just as the creative nature of God was distinct from and yet resonant with the creative nature of humans. It was this resonance that enabled humans—not all, but those who remembered the divine—to consciously act in resonance with God’s commands and move toward grasping God as well. For Iqbal such “organic” movement was the purpose of the Qurʾan. In Reconstruction he urged his readers to overcome their self-imposed limitations, to pursue the life of constant creativity, and, in the process, shape their own nature and history. This was how he made sense of history as well. History, for him, embodied human beings’ “organic”—or divinely inspired—creativity; this creativity, in turn, made the movement of history progressive, its future always new, never repetitive.

Rahman was inspired by this vision and translated it into his own reading of the Qurʾan, but only to an extent. Echoing Iqbal, for example, he insisted that “God and nature are not two different factors.” Like Iqbal, he explained that there is a “more ultimate causation,” imperceptible to human beings’ conventional senses, which bestows “upon natural processes in their entirety a significance and intelligibility that natural processes viewed in themselves do not yield.” “This higher causation,” he further clarified, “is not a duplicate of, nor is it in addition to, natural causation. It works within it, or rather is identical with it—when viewed at a different level and invested with proper meaning.” Could it be that by “different level” Rahman meant something similar to Iqbal’s idea of “appreciative self,” which some human beings, very rarely, realize “in the moments of profound meditation”? Rahman moved close to saying just that—but he was careful not to go too far. Like Iqbal, he wrote that “inner perception” is essential in attaining deeper knowledge.47 Yet, unlike Iqbal, he stressed that even such unique human knowledge is essentially limited.

This careful dance around Iqbal’s mysticism reflected Rahman’s deep discomfort with Sufism: mystics, in his estimation, had a history of moving too close to pantheism, the belief that the creation is somehow identical with the Creator. And, to make sure that his readers “keep clear of pantheism and relativism, the most attractive and powerful of all spiritual drugs,” he was careful to avoid the term “organic” in one place where “organic” would be most natural—when he defined the nature of nature. Like Iqbal and the Qurʾan, he called on his readers to marvel at nature: it is “so well-knit and works with such regularity that it is a prime miracle of God.” But then he described it as “gigantic machine.”⁴⁸ Rahman’s word “machine” was characteristically non-Iqbalian and quite foreign to the Qurʾan: it was a patently modern way of describing creation.

Rahman’s innovative terminology reflected his proposition about a central principle of the Qurʾan, the notion of the “fundamental disparity between God and His creation,” according to which, “whereas God is infinite and absolute, every creature is finite.” Therefore, he observed, “All things have potentialities, but no amount of potentiality may allow what is finite to transcend its finitude and pass into infinity.⁴⁹

This was distinct from what Iqbal conveyed by the word “organic.” Iqbal’s inspirational dictum was that the destiny of “man” was “a unity of life.” In his poetic philosophy life was “organic.” Like nature, it was constantly evolving. And what human beings had to overcome, he argued, was precisely the perception of the creation as a machine. Such perception, to him, was produced by the “mechanizing effects” of modern everyday life, “of sleep and business.” For Iqbal nature was not a machine because God was not a machine either. He related it to human beings by stating that “nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self.” Both God and “man” to him were individualities/egos, as in ego and the Ultimate Ego. Both were organic, in polysemous ways. Both were living, which to him meant constantly moving, creating, and reshaping themselves. Indeed, what made human creative thought—even of the finite variety—possible for him was the “Infinite Thought of the Ultimate Ego.”⁵⁰ In Iqbal’s interpretation, therefore, the true promise of the Qurʾan to humanity was in its reminder about human beings’ essentially creative nature, which held the potential of freeing them from their machine-like mode of existence and propelling them in the direction of overcoming their finality, toward a mystical union with God.

For Rahman, however, this proposition was too impractical and potentially too inebriating. Practically speaking, he insisted that when the Qurʾan “is allowed to speak for itself,” without accompaniments from Bergson or even Rumi, it “expresses the most fundamental, unbridgeable difference between the nature of God and the nature of man.” It is, therefore, a “dangerous silliness” for humans to “equate and identify finite beings with the Infinite one.”51 (Iqbal, of course, did not equate humans with God: he wanted them to work constantly on their creative potential, which he identified as a movement toward—and not a static state of—the reunion with “the ultimate Reality.”)

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Charles Taylor, a Canadian Catholic philosopher, argued that what makes contemporary human beings modern—like the writer and readers of this book, or Rahman’s and Iqbal’s readers and listeners—is that we live in “secular time.”⁵² To articulate and relate the Qurʾan to modern audiences, contemporary interpreters, like Rahman, have to somehow address this reality—even if they do it “pretheoretically,” as Taylor would put it, even if they do not or cannot explain that this is what they do—because it is unavoidable.

To see how Rahman carried out such translation, it is worth paying attention to Iqbal. Iqbal’s Reconstruction, as well as his poetry, urged his readers to overcome their ordinary perception of time, to become attuned to the time of eternity. In a sense, his emphasis on religious, as opposed to profane, or everyday, understanding of time was characteristically Muslim and Qurʾanic, expressed by many premodern and modern Muslim authorities. As Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), a preeminent medieval religious thinker, pointed out, for example, the very sound of the Qurʾan, when it is recited, is filled with sadness: it expresses God’s sorrow over the typically sorry state of human beings, who tend not to notice God and eternity behind the everyday flow of their lives.⁵³ Yet, Iqbal also added that the profane time of the modern age is “mechanizing.” And it is this “mechanizing” quality that makes modern permutations of profane time, the time of our everyday experience, “secular.”

From Iqbal’s perspective, all that imposes such “secular time” upon human beings—and disciplines their sensibilities to be, in a sense, mechanical—is unnatural and therefore ungodly: the way modern humans live their lives, he argued, takes them constantly out of sync from the natural flow of life, the “organic” time of “the ultimate Reality.” Yet, as a scientifically attuned intellectual of the post-Darwinian age, he was certain that evolution was an undisputable fact. Therefore, for him, the movement of time, including human history, was irreversible and progressive. At the same time, as a religious person, he refused to think of time and evolution, either in nature or human history, as merely “secular.”

As the French sociologist Bruno Latour had put it, the basic feature of modern scientific perceptions of time and other phenomena is that they relegate God, and therefore eternity, to “the sidelines.”54 In Reconstruction Iqbal attempted to solve a peculiarly modern dilemma hinted at by Latour: the dichotomy between the “secular time” and the religious time of eternity.⁵⁵ But how could Iqbal express his solution, which relied on the word “organic,” for his listeners and readers, most immediately Indian Muslim university students in the late (and roaring) 1920s? Like most modern human beings, their “mechanizing” flow of life accustomed them to perceive eternity as “unchanging” and “secular time” as an expression of constant change?⁵⁶ Iqbal’s answer was to teach his audiences—like most influential writers and speakers, he had multiple audiences—to perceive eternity otherwise. Eternity, he declared, is “organically” related to the time of unceasing change, because it is constantly in flux as well.

How did Rahman, in the footsteps of Iqbal, address the dichotomy between secular and religious senses of time? In large part, his answer was Iqbalian. Rahman’s methodology of leaping across time, his “double movement,” relied on Iqbal’s interpretation of the Qurʾan as a revelation that pointed toward eternity and, because of this, spoke to and within constantly changing realities. At the same time, Rahman was cautious about Iqbal’s mysticism. He was concerned with practicalities of Muslim life and was wary of the intoxicating effects of poetic visions. This is why he deemphasized some of Iqbal’s most far-reaching formulations. Particularly productive here was Rahman’s sober take on Iqbal’s idea of “history,” which was at the core of his “double movement.” The significance of this move, however, went beyond Rahman’s methodology of interpretation: it allowed him to present the Qurʾan as the scripture of ethics, as opposed to a mystical or theological text.⁵⁷ This outlook informed the practical nature of Rahman’s methodology, which contributed, in turn, to a wide array of subsequent interpretations of the Qurʾan, including those by American Muslims.

Rahman agreed with Iqbal’s perception of the character of the Qurʾan’s presentation of history: it was, for both of them, didactic; it has been constantly reminding its listeners about stories from the past pedagogically—in order to change the very course of human history. Like Iqbal, he also understood the Qurʾan as a text of rational and logical guidance: it spoke across time and could be applied in dramatically different historical contexts precisely because it was logical.

This is what Iqbal attempted to demonstrate by highlighting the Qurʾan’s “constant appeal to reason and experience, and the emphasis it lays on Nature and History as sources of human knowledge.” What made this statement uniquely Iqbalian was its emphasis on the grand concepts of “Nature” and “History,” as opposed to the more mundane “nature” and “history.” He capitalized “History” for the same reason he capitalized “Nature”: because, like nature, history for him was an arena of God’s creativity and thus constantly evolving. As a mode of human knowledge, “history” for Iqbal was not a secular social science but an ongoing endeavor aimed at discovering “History,” by which he meant the divine creative movement behind the human history. Borrowing from Bergson, he characterized this divine “History” as evolving in “pure time,” which “is not a string of separate, reversible instants; it is an organic whole in which the past is not left behind, but is moving along with, and operating in the present.”58 That is why, perhaps, Iqbal never used the phrase “Muslim history.” Instead he kept speaking of “Muslim culture”—because “Muslim culture,” to him, was cumulative; it belonged in the present and the future as much as in the past.

Iqbal’s goal was to inspire Muslims to break beyond the limits of their realities and perceptions, to become makers—cocreators, together with God—of their history. He urged his audiences to remember their “Muslim culture” and recognize that it had been moving in the right direction all along, despite all sorts of political and other setbacks. The direction for this movement, Iqbal proposed, was set by the Qurʾan, which had opened “our eyes to the great event of change,” and by the Prophet, who had translated the revelation into the human reality of his time. Beyond the Prophet, Iqbal remembered Muslim thinkers such as the philosopher Ibn Miskawayh (d. 1030), who articulated a concept of evolution, the poet Fakhr al-Din ʿIraqi (d. 1289), who advanced a notion of multiplicity of time and space, and the historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), who envisioned a theory of patterned progression of history. These and other personalities confirmed to Iqbal that Muslim history, or rather “culture,” was really, underneath it all, about creativity and knowledge: it moved progressively toward ever deeper engagement with the universe of God and the Qurʾan. Or, as he put it, the past of “Muslim culture” demonstrated that “all the lines of Muslim thought converge on a dynamic conception of the universe.”⁵⁹

Iqbal’s reading of the past was inspiring because it was optimistic. The legacy of “Muslim culture” served for him as an illustration of what could become possible in his and his audiences’ present and future. Thus, he spoke the language of the state-of-the-art Western intellectual discourses of his time not because he wanted to catch up with the West—the center of the colonial world, whose political periphery his listeners and readers inhabited—but to position Muslims at the forefront of humanity’s historical evolution, which, to him, was about creativity and knowledge. He delivered his Reconstruction in anticipation of “the day [that] is not far off when Religion and Science may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies.”⁶⁰ And then he called on his audiences to remember that the Qurʾan had already harmonized the seemingly distinct realities, those of humans and the eternal, the “ultimate Reality.” This remembrance was counterfactual and forward looking. It ran counter to his listeners and readers’ ordinary sense of history, which relegated them to the sidelines of the modern world. It inspired them to “view the world otherwise” and, in the process, transform themselves and become makers of the next move in history’s never-ceasing progression. This was indeed a powerful and timely articulation: it emerged in the midst of the global anticolonial struggle and shaped the language of a Muslim counter-vision of history and progress.

Rahman, however, was a professional historian, not a visionary poet. His understanding of history was academic and practical: it unfolded entirely in the finite human time. In no way would he “equate” the history of humans with the “History” of “the Infinite one.” Unlike Iqbal, Rahman perceived much of the Muslim past in terms of stagnation, a view he shared with most professional historians of his generation.61 Contributing to his outlook was the fact that he worked in an era distinct from that of Iqbal’s Reconstruction—after the Islamic Republic of Pakistan had become a somewhat messy reality and after the pre–World War II enthusiasm about scientific knowledge, which Iqbal shared with many of his contemporaries, became soured by the atomic bomb and other forms of industrialized mass slaughter. What Rahman observed, therefore, was “the fact that man is still plagued by moral confusion … and that his moral sense has not kept pace with his advance in knowledge.”⁶²

In Major Themes Rahman’s central example of the sluggishness of the Muslim past revolved around the Qurʾanic word qadar, which literally means “fate” or “destiny.” Medieval Muslim thinkers, he argued, had misunderstood what it meant and imagined it as depicting a static type of predestination. Their interpretation—which, in his view, created a culture of “traditional placidity”—was shaped by their reading of the Qurʾan through the lenses of “strong fatalistic doctrines in the world-views of certain highly sophisticated peoples, particularly the Iranians.” Aside from it being, to put it mildly, quite sweeping, Rahman’s characterization connoted a methodological criticism. It suggested that his predecessors had not carried out the first move of his “double movement”: they did not examine what the term “qadar” had meant in the historical context where the Qurʾan had been revealed. It “actually means,” he explained, “‘to measure out.’” God creates, he stated, in an orderly way, and everything in creation “bears … the mark of ‘being measured.’, i.e., having a finite sum of potentialities.” Therefore, for Rahman, qadar indicated “potentialities” of movement and change that God instilled in humans. Here, Rahman’s interpretation was very much Iqbalian, except for his insistence that human “potentialities” were “finite.”⁶³

Rahman’s dynamic understanding of predestination had two repercussions. First, it allowed him to break through the limits of the customary depiction of Muslim history as stagnant. Second, it enabled him to stress the development of what he called “moral sense,” or ethics. From the perspective of ethics, human history, to him, was evolutionary, characterized by the constant movement of progress. This, he argued, was the authentically Qurʾanic concept of history, which he advanced by reading the scripture thematically:

In discussing evolution and discontinuity of civilizations, we have already said that although the Qurʾan often speaks of the discontinuity of civilizations, i.e., of making a fresh start with an altogether “new generation” of people [Qurʾan 6:6; 23:31, 42; 38:3], it is on the whole optimistic about the future because “the inheritance of the earth is given to good people.”64 A word also must be said about the legacy of civilizations for their successors. Here again there is a tension between two opposite directions. On the one hand, the history of civilizations is cumulative and evolutionary because while the “foam on the top of a torrent disappears, that which is beneficial to mankind [the alluvium] settles down upon earth” (13:17). This means that while the negative side of men’s conduct departs, the constructive side does leave a positive legacy for mankind. On the other hand, the evil legacies of earlier peoples do affect the quality of performance of later ones. In a sense, every civilization is a forerunner of or an example for later ones; hence the tremendous responsibility of the future generations. It is not clear whether this influence is due to the fact that later civilizations actually learn of the earlier ones—and try to vie with their foolish deeds—or whether their legacy becomes embedded in the unconscious of the later ones and becomes, as it were, part of their moral genes—in which case it is cumulative and the entire historic movement is like a spiral, not a cycle.⁶⁵

In this passage, Rahman was not certain about the exact reasons behind the evolution in history—perhaps because, for him, such reasons were fundamentally beyond human comprehension. What was clear, however, was his stress on “good people” and “moral genes.” This is why the proper understanding of qadar to him was key: it communicates “the doctrine of the power of God,” which “issues forth in the merciful creativity of God, in terms of ‘measuring’ things, producing them ‘according to a certain order or measure,’ not haphazardly or blindly.” This “measuring” is a reflection of God’s mercy, which, Rahman stated, is the most important Qurʾanic theological principle. Divine mercy, for him, was part of the “Qurʾanic concept of God as an organic unity.” The other elements of it were “orderly creativity, guidance, [and] justice.”⁶⁶ All of these elements—or, rather, streams and, hence, themes—come across, in Rahman’s interpretation, as “measured,” because their orderly appearance allows human beings to grasp and strive to embody the dynamic principles of God’s just commands.

Rahman explained that the key Qurʾanic concept that designated such a mode of living, constant discipline of mindfulness, was taqwa, or God-consciousness. In his interpretation, God’s mercy and human beings’ taqwa were two movements where the divine and human agencies worked in tandem. Through merciful communication—in scripture, nature and history—God discloses the potentialities of human beings. Therefore, by constantly attempting to be God-conscious, human beings can progress toward developing who they truly, ideally, should be. Taqwa, in Rahman’s interpretation, signifies a “unique balance of integrative moral action,” through which human beings could live in accordance with God’s “just and merciful guidance.” This type of living, he stressed, is both individual and collective. What drives human history, he explained, is the ongoing civilizational and societal movement toward more balanced, ethical, and “organically” God-conscious collective life. That is why, Rahman insisted, “a central aim of the Qurʾan is to establish a viable social order on earth that will be just and ethically based.”67

This vision was, once again, resonant with Iqbal’s Reconstruction. Rahman’s distinction, yet again, was in his choice of emphases. While discussing taqwa, he highlighted, for example, the “moment of balance where both sides [divine and human] are fully present, not absent, integrated, not negated.” But, quite tellingly, he did not call such moments “mystical.” In addition, unlike Iqbal, he stressed that the “unique position” of human beings in the creation was due not so much to their potential of knowing—truly knowing—God, but to their ability to discern God’s guidance and make moral decisions. Therefore, to him, the ongoing historical evolution of human societies unfolded not in some grand “History” but at the more down-to-earth plane of human “history,” where each “new generation” attempted to strike anew the balance of “moral integrative action,” while certainly building upon the legacy of previous generations. This, Rahman proposed, was “the knowledge of history” that the Qurʾan communicated “for man.”⁶⁸

Rahman’s reading of the Qurʾanic concept of “the knowledge of history” resonated with the discipline of history he was accustomed to—the academic, and hence largely secular, discipline of studying the past. This correspondence enabled him to fashion the academic study of history into an exegetical contraption. Yet, beyond this methodological intervention, which was very significant, Rahman’s articulation of the Qurʾanic mode of telling and teaching history had a more consequential practical edge: it resonated with societal, as opposed to spiritual and inspirational, “needs” and sensibilities “of contemporary man.” This is because, as Charles Taylor noted, modernity, the period of history inhabited by Rahman and his readers, is certainly secular—“not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all social action takes place in profane time.”⁶⁹

In light of what I have just outlined, there is indeed a significant difference between Rahman and Iqbal. Rahman’s own evaluation of Iqbal’s legacy provides insight into why he was so cautious about the poet’s influence, and yet could never escape it:

The result is that in so far as Iqbal’s teaching has been influential—and it has been so deeply and far-reachingly influential that spiritually it has been the chief force behind the creation of Pakistan—it has thrown its overwhelming weight on the revivalist side and has been largely construed in an anti-rational direction. The doctrine of activism and dynamism advocated by Iqbal has found such a tremendous response that the very considerable intellectual effort of which it was the result has been made to commit suicide in process. Iqbal’s philosophical legacy has, therefore, not been followed, partly because of what he has said but largely because he has been both misunderstood and misused by his politics-mongering followers. His Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam has remained a purely personal statement of Islamic Faith, and has not so far been able to function as a datum-line from which further developments could take place. In the event of such a real development taking place, the genuine insights of Iqbal into the nature of Islam will have to be carefully disentangled from the contemporary philosophical interpretations of science, especially the excessive assimilation of the natural to the spiritual.70

Based on this, Rahman’s Major Themes was likely an attempt to transform Iqbal’s insights into a practical “datum-line.” Central here was his rendering of Iqbal’s idea of constant movement into a measured methodology of Qurʾanic exegesis.

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Major Themes exemplifies the first movement in the constantly ongoing process of Islam’s translation into an American religion, at least as it unfolded in the post-1965 era. Rahman articulated in it a “normative” voice of the Qurʾan: his, after all, was a book that merely “allowed the Qurʾan to speak for itself.” Of course, to sound “normative,” it could not come across as obviously influenced by recognizably extra-Qurʾanic discourses. Is this why Rahman silenced Iqbal so thoroughly? Was it because Iqbal’s name was too closely associated with Pakistan? Was it because Rahman’s direct acknowledgment of his debt to Iqbal would have jeopardized the “normative” appearance of his “procedure … for synthesizing [the Qurʾan’s] themes,” which he used “only as necessary for joining together [the Qurʾan’s own] ideas”? Perhaps. Another, more consequential, explanation is that he did not conceal Iqbal at all but rather expressed himself in his own language, which echoed Iqbal’s formulations—because the poet’s vocabulary and logic, the grammar of his thought, resonated so “organically” with Rahman’s own common sense.

At the end of the day, I do not know why Rahman hushed Iqbal. What I do know is that Rahman was instrumental in American intellectual history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries because he was resonant in that particular context (and not only because numerous prominent local scholars and activists acknowledged his influence directly). It was this resonance, more even than Rahman’s methodology of exegesis, that allowed his American readers, like Mattson, to infuse his “normative” ideas with their American meanings.

A case in point is the scholarship of Azizah al-Hibri (b. 1943), a Lebanese American legal scholar, who specialized in U.S. constitutional law and Islamic jurisprudence and was one among many American Muslim academics and activists influenced by Rahman. What she borrowed from him was not just his “double movement” but the underlying trajectory that informed his exegetical choreography: the notion that the Qurʾan is a text that communicates to its believers divine, and therefore dynamic, ethical principles. Rahman called these principles “themes” precisely because they were dynamic or, as Iqbal first expressed it, “organic.” He argued that they had the precedence over and had to inform any time-bound human formulations of Islamic law. In other words, whereas for over a thousand years Muslim jurists had presented the Qurʾan as a book of law, Rahman went around their authority and stated that it was the book of Muslim ethics. For al-Hibri this insight was productive: by borrowing Rahman’s emphasis on scriptural ethics, she was able to argue that the American foundational legal texts, such as the Constitution, were essentially, thematically, compatible with the texts that informed Islamic jurisprudence because they spoke, however distinctly, to the same dynamic ethical principles.71

Al-Hibri’s line of argument is significant for my analysis not only, or primarily, because it echoed Rahman’s logic but because it resonated with how myriad other American Muslim speakers and activists of the post-1965 era articulated themselves. Most often without Rahman’s direct influence, they kept reiterating the notion articulated by al-Hibri—that their Muslim beliefs were harmonious with their American principles because of their ethics. For example, two of this book’s central characters, W. D. Mohammed and Hamza Yusuf, had no direct relationship with Rahman. Yet, when Mohammed searched in the Qurʾan for answers to his listeners’ questions, which were often uniquely African American, he found them in his scripture’s ethics. Of course, he did not use the word “ethics.” But he spoke of it nonetheless whenever he highlighted the morals of the Qurʾanic lessons he preached. Yusuf, unlike Mohammed, spoke the word “ethics” explicitly, especially after 9/11, when his American Muslim listeners longed to hear an affirmation of their belonging within the fabric of their country’s life. His reliance on ethics is particularly telling. Throughout his career, he presented himself as a “traditional” Muslim, who came to reverse “modernist” trends advocated by people like Rahman. And yet, when it came to his own cultural translations of the Qurʾan, he conjured “ethics”—a word that does not appear in the Qurʾan—as a central theme of the Qurʾanic message.

Such resonances, especially indirect ones, highlight the importance of Rahman in American Muslim discourses. They have broader significance as well. Rahman’s Major Themes made tangible a simple fact that most interpretations—formal and informal, written and oral—conceal habitually: that any text, including scripture, has to be constantly rearticulated so as to be sound outside of its original historical context. To be sound, to make sense of and in new settings (and therefore to have any promise of changing them), a scripture’s consequent verbalizations have to be resonant (which does not mean identical) with what is common sense, at each particular moment, to its current believers. In modern contexts the Qurʾan has to be constantly translated to speak to deeply ingrained, modern cultural logics, which did not exist or did not make quite the same sense during the time of its revelation.

Additionally, what Rahman’s “double movement” reveals is that such rearticulations entail distilling and synthesizing anew the Qurʾan’s original formulations. He called the yields of this process “themes.” Most other interpreters, in this book and beyond, do not speak of “themes” and instead choose to talk about the scripture’s “lessons,” “messages,” and sometimes “principles.” Or, they may choose not to assign any term to what they articulate and instead merely speak reminders from the Qurʾan that highlight a particular scriptural word, phrase, or story. Like Rahman’s “double movement,” however, every such act of highlighting translates the Qurʾan across time: it focuses on an uttering from the Qurʾan and then places it in light of—and in dialogue with—the present experiences of its believers, including their senses of justice and ethics, which are always contextually specific.