I was blown away by the level of sophistication and simplification Brown employed, following the success of the book Misquoting Jesus to explore the myriad obstacles of transcribing the works of Prophet Muhammad.
Revisiting Revelation with Reality, the books explored how scholars viewed the Quran and the Hadith in their epistemological contradiction when compared to the western or ad-hoc modern values, to justify the word of God. The author takes us an on a journey, focusing on the 18th Century Mughal reformist scholar Shah Wali Allah Khan, who for Brown epitomises the struggle of reconciling reasons with revelation.
Brown explores the myriad world of the Hadith and rich interpretive world of decoding Ahadiths, conforming Islamic Law with changing times a delicate and often misunderstood science. The journey particularly emphasises on the sheer amount of work being absorbed into collecting rulings from various differing schools of thoughts.
It's a refreshing move away from the modern thought of quoting a single Ayah/Ahadith and interpreting it without the paradigm of the whole religion, of how scholars worked to justify their epistemological crisis in difficult Ahadith of nature such as Divinity of God and Nature of God.
Particularly invigorating is how Brown incorporates history into religion, touring the world from the courts in Mughal India, to the deserts of Arabia from the Arab Spring in the modern world to an Ottoman Empire on its knees. It serves to remind us that Islam has never been a foxed religion, with one size fits all rules. The history of the religion is rich with numerous schools of thoughts and throughout Islamic history these schools of thoughts have lived in conjunction with each other and a war to determine Who decides what the word of God means. The sharia maligned today has a level of flexibility surprising to its detractors and even to some of its supporters who fail to see the rich history of interpretative translation and the liberties past scholars took ranging from arguments over linguistics to the authenticity of the works in question.
I’d highly recommend this masterpiece, even if I may not agree with some of the positions Brown took, to explore if nothing but as one of the greatest “world intellectual and cultural achievements”
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from Islam http://bit.ly/2ZM8VJu
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