Towards a New Prophetology: Maulwi 'Abdullah Cakralawi's Ahl Al-Qur'an Movement

Summary

---

The idea that the Qur'än alone is the repository of Divine guidance and the primary sacred text of Islamic tradition, while others whether hadith or classical works of tafsir (exegesis) or fiqh (jurisprudence) - are only secondarily so, had begun to gain currency among a few religious scholars in South Asia and beyond in the late 19th century. According to Rashid Rida:

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Towards a New Prophetology: Maulwi 'Abdullah Cakralawi's Ahl Al-Qur'an Movement

The Ahl al-Qur'an (the People of the Qur'an) is a movement that originated from Lahore at the turn of the twentieth century under the tutelage of Maulwï 'Abdullah Cakralawi (d. 1916) with the purported aim of proselytizing the supremacy of the Qur'anic text as the only valid and authentic source of guidance required by the Muslims in matters of religious beliefs and practices. The idea that the Qur'än alone is the repository of Divine guidance and the primary sacred text of Islamic tradition, while others whether hadith or classical works of tafsir (exegesis) or fiqh (jurisprudence) - are only secondarily so, had begun to gain currency among a few religious scholars in South Asia and beyond in the late 19th century. In order to impress upon Muslims the primacy of the Qur'än as a universal, all-encompassing text with a rational approach, attempts were made by the likes of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Abduh to write 'rational commentaries' that were in tune with the impact of colonialism and findings of the ongoing scientific developments. This required a fresh look at the Qur'an without the support of all extraneous material in the form of hadïth or classical tafsir for the purpose of stripping the Qur'an of all its legendary tales and fables of supernatural events so as to reconcile dogma with modern intellectual attitudes. The dialectics of this new exegetical approach involved relocating the authority of the text through a process of interpretation whereby the details of history came to be of marginal significance. "Foreword" by Andrew Rippin in Abdullah Saeed, Interpreting the Quran: Towards a Contempary Approach (London: Routledge, 2006), Lx. About hadith, 'Abduh does not explicitly express reservations regarding its historicity but insists on verifying the soundness of each hadith before considering putting it into practice. However, his student Rashid Rida - who founded a religious periodical called al-Mandr in 1898 to serve as a mouthpiece for Abduh's ideas - highlighted the precedence of the Prophet's actions in the form of sunna over and above that of his words recorded in hadith collections. According to Rashid Rida:

The pillar of the faith is the Qur'an and the customs (sunari) of the Prophet which are transmitted through mutawatir traditions; these are the sunan 'amaltya (the applied customs), as for example the prayer ritual (salat) and the pilgrimage ceremonies (manasik), and some of the Prophet's sayings (abadith qawliya), which most of the worthy ancestors have accepted. The remaining traditions with one or only a few isnads (ahad), the transmission of which is doubtful or which do not specifically indicate anything, are subject to independent judgment (Ijtihad).1

Sayyid Ahmad Khan, on the other hand, calls for a rationalistic scrutiny of th...

See the full content of this document

---