Critical Muslims: Cosmopolitans or Heretics?

I have managed to track down lengthy videos of two of the protagonists featured in Cosmopolitans and Heretics: the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi and the late Algerian-French historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun. Unfortunately, there does not seem to exist a comparable audiovisual impression of the third intellectual featured in the book, Nurcholish Madjid. Instead, I have included a recording of the fifth Nurcholish Madjid Memorial Lecture, entitled 'Marx or Machiavelli: Towards quality Democracy in Indonesia and America' of 2011, delivered by the American political scientist and Indonesianist, R. William Liddle. The lecture was organized by the Center for the Study of Religion and Democracy (PUSAD) of the Paramadina Foundation in Jakarta, and hosted by Paramadina University.

Documentary on Hasan Hanafi

 

Former presidential adviser and head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Jacques Attali, talks to Mohammed Arkoun.

 Nurcholish Madjid Memorial Lecture by R. William Liddle

For further readings on these three Muslim thinkers, check out the recommendations below:

Liberal heresy in the contemporary Islamic cosmopolis

A review of Cosmopolitans and Heretics by Sajjad Rizvi, Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. Here are a few highlights:

The book under review is [...] an exercise in contemporary intellectual history. [...] Critically, it not only abandons an essentialist reading of religion as a timeless set of doctrines, practices and rituals, but also distances itself from postmodernist approaches to religion by holding onto the category of religion as a meaningful concept and signifier. 

[it] examines the role of three contemporary ‘liberal’ Muslim thinkers who stand outside the mainstream, who have a training in the traditional disciplines of the Islamic space of learning often called the madrasa (or at least have a familiarity with it), and who are not just influenced by but also express the traditions of intellectual fashion current in metropolitan academia and its study of religion. These three voices are Hasan Hanafi, the late Nurcholish Madjid and the late Mohammed Arkoun.

 Kersten’s argument is partly that unlike the earlier generation of colonial, modernists who were simply concerned with making Islam ‘relevant’ to the contemporary world through the adoption of modern ideologies, institutions and practices, this generation of thinkers expresses not only a distrust of the possibilities of modernist commensurability but also of the ‘fundamentalist’ quest for authentic being through an atavistic and ahistorical ‘return’ to the pristine, early generation of Muslims, al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ. 

...the book offers an excellent corrective to the Middle East focused bias of Islamic studies and is a strong advocate for a serious study of South East Asian studies. It is refreshing to see a ‘view from the edge’, especially given the demographic and institutional significance of Indonesia.

Read the full article on Rizvi's MullaSadra blog: Hikmat: Liberal heresy in the contemporary Islamic cosmopolis.

Refashioning the Study of Islam: Muslim contributions

Kristian Petersen, the new host of the Islamic Studies and Religion section of New Books Network (NBN) interviewed this blogger about the contributions of three Muslim intellectuals to finding new approaches to the study of Islam. The talk is based on the book Cosmopolitans and Heretics examinations of the writings of Indonesian Islamicist and public intellectual Nurcholish Madjid, the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi, and the French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun.

Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective.

Click here to listen to the whole interview. And the the image below to buy the book.