METHODOLOGY FOR STUDY OF THE QUR'AN
by Sheikh Imran Nazar Hosein
A rare moment in time is gone – a golden opportunity is perhaps lost!
There are those who might question my right to disclose in this essay such views of Maulānā which he chose not to speak about in his public lectures, nor to record in his writings. My response is that I not only have the right to do so, but that I am honored to do so. It seems to me that Maulānā may have believed that he lived his life before his time in history had come, and hence that he was a scholar before his age. I am honored to be among those chosen to fulfill the humble role of transmitting his thought to the world of Islamic scholarship so many years after his death. However my voice is insignificant, and I fear that unless there are other voices as well, I may have little success in transmitting such a powerful message to the world of Islamic scholarship.
I must also confess my view that Maulānā may have chosen to remain silent on these pivotally important issues of Islamic scholarship because of fear that disclosure might have resulted in such condemnation and such universal attacks on his scholarship by his peers, the scholars of Islam, as could have resulted in the total destruction of his profile and status as a highly-respected leading scholar of Islam of his age.
If this was the reason for his silence, then I must enter into the record my contrary view. I have no doubt whatsoever that if he had made his views public and had argued his viewpoint, that Allah Most High would have protected him, and he might just have succeeded in provoking a glorious revolution in Islamic scholarship. He did not do so, and chose instead to be either silent or to express his views in a manner that was not easily discernible. The result is that we still live with the present sorry and miserable plight of that world of Islamic scholarship. More than forty years ago Maulānā wrote about the miserable plight of Islamic scholarship in his age:
As matters stand in the Muslim world today, it is the decline of religious leadership from the Islamic standard in a serious measure that constitutes a major cause of its inability with regard to its emergence from the abyss into which it has been descending since some time.
(QFSMS, Vol. 1, p. 151, fn. 153)
As matters stand in respect of the Muslim religious leadership of the present day, neither those who are popularly known as Sufis, nor those who have become anti-Tasawwuf, and neither the political agitators among the ‘Ulamā, nor the professional preachers and writers among them, seem to possess any chances of achieving success in defeating the forces of evil that sway the world.
(QFSMS, Vol. 1, p. 361)
Forty years later, as this brief essay is being published for the first time, the state of the world of Islamic scholarship is even worse than it was in his time.
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