RAHMAN, FAZLUR (1919–1988)

Fazlur Rahman was a notable scholar of Islamic philosophy and an important liberal Muslim thinker of the twentieth century. Born into a scholarly family in what is now Pakistan, he first studied Arabic at Punjab University in Lahore. He then won a scholarship that permitted him to attend Oxford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Islamic philosophy in 1949. His area of specialization was the work of Ibn Sina (Avicenna).

After spending some years teaching in the West, Rahman returned to Pakistan at the request of then–prime minister Ayyub Khan to direct the new Institute of Islamic Research. He provoked the ire of conservative Islamist movements during this volatile period, particularly with his progressive fatwas and two important interpretive studies, Islamic Metholodology in History (1965) and Islam (1966), in which he tackled some of the difficult issues of historical critical understandings of revelation. In the face of such opposition, Rahman left Pakistan for the United States. He settled into a distinguished career at the University of Chicago, where he served on the faculty from 1969 until his death. He contributed further important studies, including his Major Themes of theQur˒an (1980) and works on modernist thought and classical Islamic philosophy.

Overall, Fazlur Rahman's thought may be characterized as Islamic modernism in the tradition of Shah Wali Allah and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He preferred an approach that sought to recover the spirit behind Qur˒anic injunctions while contextualizing the tradition as it developed historically. He encouraged a renewal of Islamic educational institutions, as can be seen in his volume titled Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (1982), and was critical of irrational or morally inconsistent elements within the Islamic tradition. He was also a critic of contemporary Muslim "neo-fundamentalisms," which he considered to be defensive and ultimately destined to wither away.

See alsoAhmad Khan, (Sir) Sayyid ; Ibn Sina ; Modern Thought ; Wali Allah, Shah .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rahman, Fazlur. Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of IslamicFundamentalism. Edited by Ebrahim Moosa. Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Press, 2000.

Waugh, Earle H., and Denny, Frederick M. The Shaping of anAmerican Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1998.

Marcia Hermansen