Pakistan: Religion today

Modernising religion

"I challenge liberal and conservative thought at the same time.The liberals in Pakistan are confused by me. The religionists are fuming and have called me everything short of an infidel."

"Just like the Industrial Revolution created a class of workers in the West," he said, "now we have a class of 'scholars' that is lashing out for its place in society." Many of these students, isolated in the madrassas, are becoming the foot soldiers for movements like Al Qaeda, which is now said to be reestablishing itself in Pakistan's border regions.

Javed Ghamidi, is a renowned islamic scholar, founding president of a well-known institute of Islamic Sciences Al-Mawrid situated in Lahore and a member of Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body responsible for giving legal advice on Islamic issues to Government and the Parliament.

Wanna know more? Lets see what wikipedia can tell us about Javed Ghamidi. Although I’ve been seeing his programs, interviews on sensitive issues like hijaab, interest and so on, for quite some time now, even then all i need to say about him is that he has yet to prove himself! because even n don’t know much about him to say more. This seems to explain it pretty well.

He tries to explain everything by intellect, logic or aql and he seems to have a problem with a majority of the hadith, however islam comes with narration or naql not just with intellect or aql.
One thing that is truly commendable about him is his ever emphasis on decency and decorum of good manners which separates him from the rest.

It is not exactly known whether 'enlightened moderation' helped Javed Ahmed Ghamidi or he came to rescue the idea. It may well be that none of this happened in the manner it is thought. But the truth is that the two gained prominence simultaneously. Today Ghamidi is one of the most influential public intellectual to have emerged in Pakistani society.

A disgruntled Jamaat-e-Islami man, he worked closely with Maulana Maudoodi for quite a few years before the two developed differences of opinion culminating in his expulsion from the party in 1977. Thereafter he went interpreting and reinterpreting religion his own way at the institutions he had set up, and at the weekly lectures where attendance grew thicker. All through the 1980s and 1990s. His was a 'non-traditionalist' or 'modernist' approach to religion, still a dangerous line to pick in those times.

Born to a rich, land-owning, religious family, Ghamidi grew up studying the Koran, Arabic, and Persian, and found a special interest in Western philosophy. He began his formal study of Islam only after completing his Masters in English Literature in 1977 from the prestigious Government College in Lahore. It was a chance meeting with Amin Ahsan Islahi, an Islamic theologian best known for his 6,000-page Urdu commentary on the Koran, which drew Ghamidi into the realm of religious scholarship.

Ghamidi followed Islahi into the Jamaat-e-Islami, the first major organization of Islamists in Pakistan, and got the chance to work closely with Sayyid Abul-Ala Maududi, who is considered, along with Sayyid Qutb, to be the main ideologue of the modern Islamism that is said to have inspired Al-Qaeda. But serious differences emerged between the Maududi and Islahi, two founding members of the Jamaat. The organization was becoming increasingly politicized, and Ghamidi and Islahi split.Ghamidi's Al-Mawrid Institute has already published 16 volumes of his work on Islam. In "The Penal Shari'ah of Islam.

Ghamidi, who drew inspiration from Amin Ahsan Islahi, stayed largely unnoticed till the present dispensation felt this need of one such person. Those who were reminded in his meteoric rise of another religious scholar, Maulana Tahirul Qadri, waited for the day Ghamidi would take oath as minister. That did not happen and so far he has only been content to sit on the Council of Islamic Ideology.

Ghamidi believes that secularism of the Western variety that separates the church from the state is untenable in a Muslim society. Having said that, his take on most established religious thoughts is revolutionary, to say the least. A staunch believer in the need for ijtehad, he is ready to assign that role to the elected representatives of the people sitting in the parliament and not to the clergy.