Summary

Fazlur Rahman was a preeminent 20th-century Muslim scholar who combined modernism with tradition. He saw his role as that of shaping the study of Islam in the modern Western academy with the empathy of a believer and a critical scholarly acumen. Grounded in philosophy, theology, history, and moral thought, he advocated for a reinterpretation of the early sources of Islamic learning—emphasizing, for example, the more organic Sunnah instead of the atomistic prophetic reports in the form of ḥadīth. Critical of some aspects of the transmitted discursive tradition, he nevertheless viewed tradition as indispensable to the renewal of Islamic thought. He placed the Qurʾān and his specific hermeneutic of the historicized thematics of the revelation at the center of his renewal and reform project. While he took history seriously, in the end a scripture-centered hermeneutic became his preferred discursive framework.