Innovative Thinking in Tradition

From Silvers

Back to Islam syllabus

This page will contain links and pages on innovative Muslim thinkers who struggle for change within the tradition and by engaging traditional authorities.

[edit]

Open Source is Open Tradition

  • Check out this essay Open Ijtihad by Ulises Ali Mejias on the relationship between open source software and interpretive religious traditions in Islam. I'd say he knows computers better than he knows Islamic jurisprudence, but the fact is that it is a stirring manifesto for an open, self-conscious, and ethical interpretative mode in Islam. I am particularly attracted to the comic book illustrations of his new heros, "The Ijtihackers." He practices what he preaches. Mejias just launched Open Islampedia a open-self-defining space for Muslims. He's got a dream that the community can work it out and that open source thinking is one of the ways we will do it. I'd agree.
  • My and Ilan Bashir's activism site, Progressive Islam dot Org, aspires to be an on-line commons for Muslims of diverse orientations. Our hope is that diverse Muslims will speak in the same domain space alongside Muslims they disagree with on serious matters and in so doing prove that the community can encompass difference without fear of losing our tradition.
[edit]

Islamic Anarchism

Communitarian Anarchism has a place within Islamic tradition and the imagination of Muslims, and as you'll see in Yakoub's site can be considered well within traditional boundaries.

  • Perhaps Hakim Bey is the most well known of contemporary Muslim Anarchist thinkers, but I would only put him in the category of Innovative Thinking in Tradition by his claim to a spot in the line of great Muslim heretics. Demanding to be out, somehow always digs you in deeper. Hakim Bey aka Peter Lamborn Wilson is a well-regarded poet, translator of Islamic poetry, essayist, activist, artist, and imaginative historian of global rebel cultures. He calls himself a spiritual anarchist, which of course sidesteps the social realities of making communitarian anarchism actually work. His most influencial book on the subject is TAZ, but my favorite remains Pirate Utopias for reclaiming the real and imagined history of piracy in Islam as a model for community.
The Muslim Anarchist Charter asserts that:
  • there is no god but God and Muhammad (aws) is God's prophet and messenger;
  • the purpose of life is to establish a peaceful and loving relationship with The One through understanding and acting upon knowledge of revelation, reason, and God's signs within Creation and also the human heart;
  • such a purpose requires a wholehearted commitment to learning, where such learning is carried out freely, consciously refusing to compromise with institutional power in any form, be it judicial, religious, social, corporate or political;
  • such a purpose also requires the active pursuit of justice with the aim of establishing communities and societies where free spiritual development is uninhibited by tyranny, poverty and ignorance.
The Muslim Anarchist Charter rejects:
  • fascist forces which seek to enforce a single, absolute truth, including patriarchy, empire, and capitalism.
Retrieved from "http://silvers.progressiveislam.org/Innovative_Thinking_in_Tradition"