Ijtihad and Religious Authority in Modern Islam: The Discourses of the Sunni ‘Ulama

Ijtihad and Religious Authority in Modern Islam:

The Discourses of the Sunni ‘Ulama

Lecture by

Prof. Muhammad Qasim Zaman

(Princeton University)

Presentation: PD Dr. Roman Loimeier

ZMO, Kirchweg 33, 14129 Berlin

Donnerstag, 24. Mai 2007, 18 Uhr s.t.

Few terms have been invoked more often in modern intra-Muslim debates than ijtihad, which may broadly be characterized as the effort to arrive at new legal rulings in light of the Islamic foundational texts. Against the overlapping challenges of the Islamists, modernist and liberal Muslims, and modernizing Muslim governments, many among the traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars, the `ulama, of Sunni Islam have often expressed grave misgivings about ijtihad on grounds that those seeking it are not equal to the task, that it opens the door to capricious interpretations of God’s word, and that it would only exacerbate intellectual and religious anarchy in Muslim societies. Others, however, have endorsed it, though often in quite different ways and with varied implications. A question that has received rather little attention from observers of modern Islam, and which this talk will examine with illustrations from the Middle East and South Asia, is how the `ulama’s discourses on ijtihad relate to their conceptions of religious authority. If the rhetoric of ijtihad offers opportunities to liberal modernists and Islamists to stake out their claims in competition with those of the `ulama, what sort of opportunities does it offer to the `ulama for the articulation or reconfiguration of their own authority in a fragmented religious sphere? More broadly, what debates on religious and political authority do the `ulama’s discourses on ijtihad illuminate in the modern and contemporary Muslim world?

Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of The Ulama in Contemporary Islam and the editor, with Robert W. Hefner, of Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education.