Jamal Khwaja clearly is his father’s son. Maulana Mohammed Ali Jowhar, the leading light of the Khilafat Movement — which Gandhiji supported in the hope of building Hindu-Muslim amity and a united struggle for freedom — is supposed to have once said that “even the most degraded Muhammadan was better than Gandhi.”

Jamal Khwaja’s father, Abdul Majeed Khwaja — who too was closely associated with the Khilafat and the Civil Disobedience Movements in the early 20th century — obviously thought differently:“My father had the rare intellectual insight and the moral courage to say openly and repeatedly that, among all the people he had come across in life, he found Gandhiji to be the closest follower of Prophet Mohammed”. In his new book, Living the Quran in our Times, the son propounds a vision of Islam that would have made his father very proud.
Khwaja’s views are unlikely to cut much ice with the prevailing orthodoxy, whether in India or across the Muslim world. That’s not surprising, for Islam’s high priests of their day didn’t think much either of poet philosopher Mohamed Iqbal’s or Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s efforts to re-discover an Islam relevant to their times. For well over a century now there has been a slow but growing consensus among a section of educated, non-dogmatic Muslims that the centuries-old decision of the ulema to shut the door on ijtihad (the attempt to comprehend Divine intent through rational, critical thought) has been responsible for the ossification of Islam, for the entrapment of what Khwaja calls “perennial Islam” by a
“static Sharia”.
What does the Quran say? Like any other scripture or holy book, the Quran is open to multiple interpretations. So the answer to the question depends entirely on who is addressing it: Al Qaeda ideologues or a Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Khwaja’s propositions may outrage the tradition-bound and discomfort Islamophobes. But Muslims with an open mind should find the book liberating.
Like his many reform-oriented predecessors, Khwaja argues that Muslims must learn to distinguish between the “intrinsic (spiritual and moral) values” embedded in the Quran from the “instrumental rules” of conduct for the promotion of those values. He then proceeds to make a bold proposition: the task of interpreting the Quran “should never end”; what’s more, even its basic moral and spiritual values must constantly be revisited. (For example, the notions of justice and equity, crime and punishment, are not static but evolve through history.) In Khwaja’s own words, “The traditional ethos of mechanical and absolute conformity to ‘the Book and the Example (words and deeds of the Prophet)’ must develop into an ethos of ‘creative fidelity’ to the ‘Word of God’ and the character of His messenger.”
Khwaja’s creative fidelity to Islam takes him to a “joyful acceptance of the inevitability of plural interpretations of all religious faiths, including Islam”. Between the plurality of Islam that he celebrates, the “spiritual pluralism” cutting across religious divides that Khwaja embraces, his belief that “in the final analysis, the paths are many but the goal is the same”, his lack of any hostility even towards atheists on one hand and the millennium-old “Islam (my interpretation) is the
only true religion” line of the ulema on the other, lies a yawning gap.
Viewing current-day concerns through the lens of creative fidelity, Khwaja has refreshing perspectives to offer. On gender relations, he makes the candid and courageous admission that “the Quranic value system is weighted in favour of the male in several respects.” But extending his “intrinsic values” vs “instrumental rules” proposition, he argues that “the Muslim believer can justifiably hold that believers should not merely adhere to Quranic values and rules but also promote and develop them in the ever-changing human
condition.”
Khwaja takes the development route and leads us to a concept of gender relations far more egalitarian than the Quranic prescriptions. A devout believer, he has no problems with this for two reasons. One, of the total of approximately 6,200 Quran verses, barely around 80 are “hard injunctions” and another 120 are “soft injunctions”. In the remaining verses (97 per cent), there is repeated reiteration of “intrinsic values”, but “no instrumental rules”. Second, nowhere does the Quran enjoin Muslims from shunning the path of human
evolution.
Though he comes out strong on gender justice, when it comes to sexual orientation, Khwaja is unwilling to go as far as Ziauddin Sardar does, for example, in his recent book, Reading the Quran. In Khwaja’s Islam, there is little or no place for homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals. That apart, in his “candid reflections on some practical issues”, Khwaja emphatically asserts that many of the Sharia postulates have no Quranic basis. He debunks commonly held beliefs among Muslims such as: Muslims in non-Muslim societies must strive to establish an Islamic state; only Muslims will go to heaven; apostates and married adulterers must be stoned to death; all payment or charging of interest is prohibited; Islam is against family planning... Khwaja fully endorses as “valid” Arun Shourie’s sharp critique in his book, The World of Fatwas, and sees little merit in religious conversions.
Living the Quran in our Times will quite likely be ignored, if not slammed, by the ulema. But to the English-reading middle-class Muslim male and female who understand little and are easy prey to a received Islam that is at complete odds with today’s reality, and to all those interested in the subject of Islam and modernity, Khwaja has much to offer.