In life one is at times deterred by language and at others by the tyranny of terminology. Today is one such case.

I was truly frightened by the suggestion that I do the ritual and say a few words about the book before us. Dr. Irfan Ahmad’s persistence however left me with no choice. I claim no knowledge of philosophy or sociology of religions. I do know from the history of religions that they all began as critiques of the existing order, ended up as new orthodoxies and were subjected to heresies sooner or later.

This book, to my understanding, is a response and refutation of the suggestion of western scholarship that unlike the Bible in the post-17th century Christian world, Islam has not been subjected to what was called the Higher Criticism, of ‘the world behind the text’ or the context in which a particular form of words were articulated. The Muslim answer to this is that commentaries on the Qur’an belie this misperception.

History tells us that Muslim societies in most regions of the world had to pay the price of coming in the way of European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, with all its attendant cultural and psychological consequences. This also conditioned their views of Islam. Towards the end of the 19th century, Curzon called it ‘the impregnable rock wall of Islam.’

I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on the author’s thesis. Instead, I would like to share some impressions gathered in my reading of the early period of Islamic history:

• • In Muslim belief, the Qur’an is revealed text. The order of revelation, and of compilation, has been diligently researched. The compilation, as standard text, was undertaken a few years after the death of the Prophet.
• • The text, and the context of each verse, has been commented on in all ages. So ‘higher criticism’ is in place even if reverence for inherited tradition may have impacted its intensity.
• • Historians like Mohammad Ahmad Shaban have researched the earliest period of Islamic history and have opined that ‘the Arabs unintentionally acquired an empire’ since changes in the direction of trade reduced the importance of the city of Makkah as a centre of international trade and propelled the Arab tribes (including those who initially opposed Islam) as a new, unified-in-faith body, to explore lands beyond Arabia proper and take on the declining empires of Byzantium and Iran.

The question that should be explored relates to the psychological impact of conquests on Arab minds and on the temper and tempo of early Islam in parts of the world affected by it.. This is also important in today’s context when modernity – whatever its origin – does propel us to re-think it in Islamic terms and at the same time separate religion per se from ‘from the problems and responsibilities that are’, as Mohammad Arkoun puts it, ‘in the exclusive province of social actors, not God.’

In my view therefore, ‘religion as critique’ has to ensure that apart from pure critique and higher criticism, societal correctives are not hampered by tradition and patriarchy on grounds of alleged theological constrains.