[gregmcal]

Excerpt from the introduction of the book:

Who speaks for Islam?

In traditional Muslim societies, a single social group spoke authoritatively for Islam: this was the class of the ulama. It had held the societal nexus throughout Islamic history, while safeguarding the tenets of the faith from a position of semi-independence from the political system. From the late nineteenth century, the comprehensive changes produced by the impact of European colonialism and modernisation gradually eroded its position. The control of the ulama over the educational process and legal systems was broken, and the basis of their economic power and independence was lost. The ulama would discover that its languages and methods were not those of the emerging order, while its traditional Islamic learning was perceived to be less relevant to the new concerns and preoccupations of Muslim societies. New social classes created by modernisation rose to prominence, while modern education produced a new educated elite, professionals and modern intellectuals. As the social position of the ulama shrank, a rising intelligentsia with a self-professed commitment to Islam occupied a significant part of the resulting vacuum. Various social actors entered the cultural arena with claims to speak for Islam: alongside intellectuals and professionals such as engineers and medical doctors, these included government officials and military personnel, for example. In the course of the twentieth century, the traditional impulse to solicit and defer to the opinion of the ulama has been considerably weakened, not least by their cooperation with the modern state, and their failure to respond effectively to the overwhelming discursive challenges of the modern era.

The intellectual authority of the ulama class in pre-modern Muslim societies derived from societal recognition of its members’ piety, and their specialist training in elite institutions of Islamic learning. In madrasas and ‘mosque-universities’ such as al-Azhar, formal Islamic knowledge and the authoritative interpretation of tradition were transmitted directly from generation to generation, in a system where customs of ijaza-granting signalled mastery of a more-or-less fixed canon of traditional texts and the principles of interpretation established therein. The monopoly of the ulama both on the transmission and the interpretation of formal Islamic knowledge was first broken by the introduction of print culture in Muslim societies. This produced a revolution in access, through the mass production of books:

"Books, which they [the ulama] possessed … could now be consulted by any Ahmad, Mahmud or Muhammad, who could make what they will of them. Increasingly from now on any Ahmad, Mahmud or Muhammad could claim to speak for Islam. No longer was a sheaf of impeccable ijazas the buttress of authority."

The ‘democratisation’ of direct access to the traditional texts of Islam made possible by print has been complemented by the ‘massification’ of modern education in Muslim countries since the mid twentieth century, creating unprecedented levels of popular literacy. The practical necessity to consult those with ‘ulamatic’ training has thus been greatly reduced. The traditional, hierarchical concepts of Islamic concepts of Islamic intellectual authority were dealt a further blow by the contribution of the salafi notion of returning to a direct understanding of the primary texts of Islam. Their argument effectively liberated Muslims from the need for specialist expertise, theoretically removing all barriers of learning between the texts and their readers. This greatly weakened the assumptions of ‘ulamtic’ training as the necessary credentials for speaking on behalf of Islam, throwing open the doors of interpretation of those without the skills and qualification that might ensure a degree of continuity in this. Increasingly today those without formal training in the Islamic disciplines claim direct interpretative rights over the Islamic texts as equals with the ulama, and in direct competition with them. Any possibility of uniformity or continuity of interpretation, or of a controlled diversity of readings, has been lost.

New claims to Islamic intellectual authority are tied to the norms and expectations created by modern education. Compared with the exclusive, erudite and at times inaccessible repertoire of the ulama, new spokespersons for Islam frame their discourses in forms accessible and relevant to modern-educated readerships, and adopt innovative techniques of interpretation. Marked by diffusion, diversification, and above all fragmentation, new modes of authority are linked to the rise of the professions, to political and social activism, and to the introduction of new information and media technologies in Muslim countries. As claims to Islamic intellectual authority multiply, new spokespersons for Islam are able to disseminate their interpretations to ever wider, anonymous audiences, while the control of information and opinion has become increasingly difficult, thanks to communicational changes reflecting the increasingly information-rich global context. Increasingly, it is a matter of circumstance, indeed accident, which a myriad ‘authoritative’ voices, texts and discourses are encountered and embraced, as Muslims access information across all boundaries. A ‘spectacularly wild growth of interpretations’ in recent decades reflects the absence of any guiding uniting concept of intellectual authority, and of the credentials that might underwrite it.

Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an by Suha Taji-Farouki Oxford University Press 2006 pp. 12-15