The Challenges of Modernity: The Ulama and Authority of Religious Knowledge in Islam

Muhammad Qasim Zaman

[Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics, c 2002]
"In general terms, it is a combination of their intellectual formation, their vocation, and crucially, their orientation, a certain sense of continuity with Islamic tradition that defines Ulama as Ulama; and it is this sense of continuity that constitutes the most significant difference between them and their modernist and Islamist detractors."

The challenges of modernity have hit the ulema hard. Mass higher education and impact of print and other media have made deep inroads into the ulama's privileged access to authoritative religious knowledge, even as the "reflexivity" of modernity i.e the need to constantly adapt existing forms of knowledge, institutions and social relations to relentless flow of information poses severe challenges to the credibility of their discourses.

The modern bureaucratic state seeks to bring all areas of life under its regulation. And the transformative forces of global capitalism grow ever more relentless in undermining culturally rooted identities and social relations. How have the Ulema responded to these challenges, to the fragmentation of their authority, to the rapidly changing world around them?

The religiopolitical activism of the college – and university educated, the professionals and the urban bourgeoisie – the "Islamists" as they are often called – has now come to receive extensive attention: and thanks to the leadership of the Iranian revolution of 1979, so have the Shi'a Ulema. These "Islamists" are typically also products of modern, secular educational institutions…but are drawn to initiatives aimed at radically altering the contours of their societies and states through the public implementation of norms they take as truly Islamic.

The modernist project is guided by the assurance that once retrieved through a fresh but "authentic" reading of the foundational texts, and especially of the Quran, the teachings to Islam would appear manifestly in concord with the positions recommended by liberal rationalism.

Modernists and Islamists differ…what is shared is that one certainly does not need the ulama to interpret Islam to the ordinary believers. That authority belongs to everyone and to no one in particular.

In general terms, it is a combination of their intellectual formation, their vocation, and crucially, their orientation, a certain sense of continuity with Islamic tradition that defines Ulama as Ulama; and it is this sense of continuity that constitutes the most significant difference between them and their modernist and Islamist detractors.

Their larger claim on our attention lies in the ways in which they have mobilized this tradition to define issues of religious identity and authority in the public sphere and to articulate changing roles for themselves in contemporary Muslim politics.

Excerpts from: The ulama in contemporary Islam: custodians of change, Princeton University Press, 2002

Muhammad Qasim Zaman is the Robert H. Niehaus ’77 Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion at Princeton University, a position he has held since 2006. Prior to coming to Princeton, he taught at Brown University from 1997 to 2006. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He has been awarded a fellowship by the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, to examine various aspects of Islam in Pakistan in their interrelationship and their varied contexts. http://www.princeton.edu/~nes/faculty_zaman.html