A new term has risen over the last two decades which favors Muslims coming out of secular or modern countries, the ‘Muslim intellectual.’ As Esposito and Voll speak of the Muslim intellectual:
Their ideas provide the foundations for many of the programs of Islamic movements throughout the world. Even for those who disagree with them and dispute their claims, these activists thinkers have shaped the conceptual world and set the terms of most debates in the Muslim world. These people, their organizations, and their modes of thinking have been part of the heart of what has come to be called the Islamic resurgence of the end of the twentieth century. (2001: 3)
The authors explain the characteristics of Muslim intellectuals as upholding Western ideals. The contemporary Muslims the authors try to articulate are based upon the resurgence of Islam, especially in non-Islamic and Western countries. Simply put, the Muslim intellectual is someone who responds and appeals to the modern and Western world. There are three key Muslim intellectuals who have laid the foundation for Islamic thought in the States.
The first Muslim intellectual is Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Nasr’s obvious displeasure with modern man is that he has wandered into dangerous territory and in some sense lost the awareness and means for appropriation of the sacred. He speaks often against the evils of modernity which he recognizes as rationalism, evolutionism, humanism, secularism, materialism, and imperialism. Nasr understands his intended audience as both Westerners and Muslims who have come under the sway of the modern West. Nasr admits that his plea for the return of tradition is targeted primarily for:
…young Muslims who are the products of modern educational systems that he is concerned. More specifically, in some of his writings his interest is to help explain little known aspects of Shi’ite intellectual life…counter the perception, most evident in Western scholarship that Islam fell into decadence after the Mongol invasion. He calls it a dangerous illusion that modern Muslims are somehow separated from their tradition by an intellectual vacuum. (Jane Smith 1991: 80, 81)
According to Nasr Muslims have failed to critique what is wrong with the West. Muslims have mistakenly adapted their religion to the modern world. The cost of not living within a community that does not carry ongoing tradition is the failure to carry out the mission of Islam.
The second Muslim intellectual who has greatly influenced American Islam is Ismail Al-Faruqi. John Esposito explains Faruqi as a ‘Muslim scholar-activist.’ Faruqi addressed issues of identity, authenticity, acculturation, and Western political and cultural imperialism, which are still significant to the Muslim community today, even though he died in 1986 (John Esposito 1991: 65). Early in his career he emphasized the centrality of Arabism to Islamic history and civilization. Faruqi explained, “If Arabism is the spirit and best expression of Islamic values in a human community, then the pieces that do not seem to fit, such as non-Arab Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs, are to be understood as unconscious and uncultivated expressions of Arabism” (Ibid: 67). The importance of Arabism is not necessarily in culture or religion but in personality. Later he would emphasize the importance of Islamic culture and identity as he put his energy into Christian and Muslim relations. Al-faruqi’s presentations of Islam combined Islamic beliefs and values with Western philosophical/ religious issues and language. Esposito makes the point that some might point this to his Western education; however Esposito explains it is more probable to credit it to his desire to present Islam as the only viable response to modern issues that, in his estimation, Western culture had failed to address adequately (Ibid: 74). Faruqi believed the weakness of American Muslims was the fact that they abandoned “ijtihad, which is the source of creativity in Islam, the opposition of revelation and reason, the separation of thought and action, and cultural and religious dualism” (Ibid: 77). In this sense Fauqi is different than Nasr for he believed Islam combined faith and practice and that thought and intention must issue in action informed a life in which scholarship and activism were intertwined.
The third notable Muslim Intellectual to observe is Fazlur Rahman. Rahman was born in India, studied at Oxford, and eventually taught at the University of California and Chicago. At the University of Chicago he arguably became the leading Muslim modernist scholar of his generation. Over his career Rahman greatly influenced the Islamic and Western intellectual heritage “namely, the Qur’an and Sunna, on the one side, and philosophy on the other” (Frederick Penny 1991: 105). Frederick Mathewson Denny concludes Rahman’s legacy by saying:
Rahman considered the infinitely inventive human intellect to be, apart from the Revelation itself, the main “sign”…of God’s benevolent and just purposes in the created realm. The Quran certainly is the fundamental authority and its commands must be obeyed; but without the believers’ intellectual exertion (itjihad) to comprehend and apply it within the often confusing and contradictory circumstances of historical process, it will languish as a prisoner of dead tradition instead of being permitted to shed its full illumination and regenerating power in the Umma and the world. (Haddad 1991: 105)
The impact of Rahman on American Islam has greatly changed the perspective of many people of religion. Before people like Rahman the majority of Americans saw Islam as either a black or Arab religion filled with religious mysticism and fervor. However Rahman paved the way for people to no longer see a disconnect between Western intellectualism and Islam.
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