Fazlur Rahman Quotes

Fazlur Rahman was a Pakistani-American Islamic philosopher and the most influential modernist interpreter of the Quran in twentieth-century Muslim thought. After studies at Oxford and a brief tenure as director of Pakistan's Central Institute of Islamic Research, where his progressive views provoked vehement opposition, he taught for the rest of his life at the University of Chicago. The quotes below are attributed to Fazlur Rahman, organized by topic.

Fazlur Rahman on God

Attributed to Fazlur Rahman:

“The Quran is one continuous moral message; it is not a code of disconnected rulings.”
Attributed to Fazlur Rahman:

“True Islam is moral, not legal, in its first concern.”
Attributed to Fazlur Rahman:

“A modern Islam is not a westernized Islam; it is an Islam that has rediscovered its own ethical center.”

Fazlur Rahman on Knowledge

Attributed to Fazlur Rahman:

“The double movement of interpretation goes from the present, to the historical context of revelation, and back.”
Attributed to Fazlur Rahman:

“Tradition is honored only when it is engaged, never when it is merely repeated.”
“Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), 37. as quoted in Ibn, Warraq (2017). The Islam in Islamic terrorism: The importance of beliefs, ideas, and ideology. ch 5”
The Qur’ān calls upon believers to undertake jihād, which is to surrender “your properties and youselves in the path of Allāh”; the purpose of which in turn is to “establish prayer, give zakāt, command good and forbid evil”—i.e., to establish the socio-moral order. So long as the Muslims were a small, persecuted minority in Mecca, jihād as a positive organized thrust of the Islamic movement was un