Review: Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

My review of Mohammed Iqbal's book about the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam is at Brownpundits..

.. Historical references are cherry picked and whatever theory he is proposing is supported by quranic verses that other Muslims may nor may not interpret the way Iqbal does. Sometimes the cherry-picking stretches credulity and even fans may become a bit suspicious; for example, defending the unequal shares of men and women in Quranic inheritance law he says “From the inequality of their legal shares it must not be supposed that the rule assumes the superiority of males over females. Such an assumption would be contrary to the spirit of Islam. The Qur’an says: And for women are rights over men similar to those for men over women’ (2:228). This is rather disingenuous, because the quoted verse in context is not about equality at all, but specifically about the superiority of men over women. Here is Yusuf Ali’s translation of the entire verse: Divorced women shall wait concerning themselves for three monthly periods. Nor is it lawful for them to hide what Allah Hath created in their wombs, if they have faith in Allah and the Last Day. And their husbands have the better right to take them back in that period, if they wish for reconciliation. And women shall have rights similar to the rights against them, according to what is equitable; but men have a degree (of advantage) over them. And Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.

Judge for yourself.

..Now that almost a century has passed (some of the lectures are revised versions of essays he was working on in the early 1920s) we can also ask, what influence has the book had? It seems to me that it continues to appeal to modern (semi-westernized) Muslims (especially in Pakistan) because it seems to offer the possibility of radical reform of Islamic law and creative (modern) reinterpretation of Islamic theology, the appeal is almost entirely symbolic; most of his fans don’t actually read the book, they just like the fact that it is there and that they have heard it is modern and all about creativity and freedom and how we had all this before the West ever thought of it. It is my impression that the detailed ideas had more appeal then, when this kind of reinterpretation and the “catch up with the West because we were actually there first” theme was commonplace in places like Aligarh, but since then the Islam that has risen to confront the West is good old classical Islam, Magian crust and all.