Ah! Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman: A visionary of all seasons
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Ah! Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman: A visionary of all seasons

He was the person who identified the malaise of the Muslim Community and alsoanalyzed the causes of the revival of Muslims in all walks of life including education and intellectual fervour

Post by on Saturday, August 21, 2021

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It was a sad day on 18th August 2021 when a visionary reformist and an Islamic ideologue Prof Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman left this world and his death has created a great void in Islamic scholarship.He was the person who identified the malaise of the Muslim Community and also analysed the causes of the revival of Muslims in all walks of life including education and intellectual fervour.
 
He laments and says that our fossilized mentality can be seen from the fact that some of the traditionalists even justify dictatorship and call it a “just dictatorship” which is absurd assumption and is also against the Quranic injections.”He said that attention must also have paid to Islamic approaches and philosophy in every branch of learning the humanities and the social sciences.
 
In the final analysis, contemporary Islamic asalah will lead to reordering of priorities and a restructuring of methodology and thought so that the means for sound Islamic education will be provided. Moreover, a reconstruction of institutions, organisations, social systems, and political institutions will also take place, so that complementarity and sound progression will propel society towards a constructive reorganisation on the basis of Islamic values and purposes. We need to analyse our intellectual legacy or what it holds sacred
 
He thinks that the fears and, the lack of self, and the misgivings that we have planted in ourselves make it impossible for us to look honestly at the events, and the accompanying factors and shortcomings, of our past.
 
“If the methodology of thought does not undergo change, and if its approaches are not rectified, the Muslim mind will remain unable to take a critical or penetrating look at anything. Instead, it will continue to gravitate from one failed solution to the next. There can be little doubt that continuing along this path can only lead to further disintegration and collapse.”
 
In his analysis there was an imaginary struggle between reason and revelation,and it resulted in a “portentous rift between the juridical sciences of Fiqh and those of theology (ilm al Kalam)”.These  outward differences led  to a “serious intellectual rift that had deep seated effects on the relationship between concept and purposes of religion on the one hand,and between social life and institutions on the other .One result was that the sciences of theology became entangled in philosophical arguments and rational debates (more often than not over metaphysical issues related to the  “world of the unseen”)that had no relevance to the Islamic mind or to those issues which were of concern to it.”Such intellectual acrobatics gradually exhausted the Muslim mind and blurred true Islamic vision, thus negatively affecting the Muslim intellect when it came to matters of the  “seen and the unseen”(i.e. revelation,reason,faith ,determinism and free will, the divine names and attributes ,and a whole list of futile intellectual sophistries that contributed nothing to the Ummah ,its thought ,or its faith).
 
The result of this was that the sciences of Fiqh,and Islamic thought in general ,formulated no clear theological basis that could represent the purposes and principles enabling the Ummah to progress and develop both socially and organizationally. In this manner, the Islamic mind and thought became the prisoner of a specific and limited methodology that was incapable of growing and of keeping pace with changing realities, needs, and possibilities.
 
In the realm of Islamic International relations, scholars like MajidKhadduri (The Islamic theory of International relations and its Contemporary relevance) and 'Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman (Towards an Islamic theory of International relations: New directions for methodology and thought) have made immensely valuable and original contributions. Khadduri argues in his work, that the "ultimate objective of Islam was to establish peace within the territory brought under the pale of its public order and to expand the area of the validity of that order to include the entire World."
 
In a similar vein Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman contends that "Islamic theory and philosophy of relations among nations is the only adequate philosophy of peace in the contemporary world. It is the only philosophy, concept or approach that emphasizes the common origin, interest and destiny of man as the only firm base for understanding man's nature, interpersonal relations and group interactions. Man's interests and relations in Islam look like overlapping circles. Other World ideologies and philosophies focus on conflict management and consequently on war. The western philosophies of nationalism and class conflict emphasize the negative factor of conflicting perceptions, interests, and destinies. This attitude of conflict also leads to war and destruction"
 
One of the prime objectives of Islamization of knowledge is to address the problem of methodological deficiency besetting the Ummah. 'Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman finds this methodological deficiency in the realm of Islamic political studies and international relations. According to him, the deficiency in methodology has rendered Islamic political studies inadequate and this is despite the loftiness of principles such as the system of caliphate, Shura Justice, brotherhood, equality, freedom and responsibility behind them. There are two types of inadequacies in Islamic political studies according to him.
 
Thus Faruqi proposed the idea of Islamization of knowledge and founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) together with Sheikh Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Dr. Abdul Hamid Sulayman, former Rector of the International Islamic University, Malaysia (IIUM) and Anwar Ibrahim, in 1980.
 
(Author is Head, Department of Religious Studies, Central University of Kashmir. Former Director, Shah-i-Hamadan Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Kashmir Srinagar. He can be reached on hamidnaseem@gmail.com)
 

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