Fazlur Rahman and others (Afsaruddin...

Fazlur Rahman and others (Afsaruddin, 2005) go as far as to translate Mutakallimun (derivative of Ahl Al-Kalaam) and Kalaam as Muslim theologians and theology respectively, thereby delegitimizing all mainstream academic scholarship of Ahl Al-Sunnah over the last roughly 1400 years. 7- Muslims are encouraged to say “peace be upon him” at least once the first time they mention prophet Muhammad’s name in a gathering or paper, etc.

8- Modern Modernists include Egypt’s Syed Tantawi who considered building a gigantic wall on the Egyptian border to effectively imprison Palestinians in Gaza and cut off their aid supplies… a “religious obligation” (Suleiman, 2010).

9- The most common strategy of Westernizing Islam has been a conscious attempt, particularly over the last half century, to delegitimize the Sunnah of prophet Muhammad and his companions by various methods, like portraying it as a sort of cultural baggage left over from the pre-Islamic era. An example is seen in Hallaq’s The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law.

Hallaq ignores any reference to tens of early works on Hadeeth, Fiqh, and Rijaal to purportedly claim that a Qadi (lit: “judge” who rules by Qur’an and Sunnah) in early Islam did not have to know the Qur’an and Sunnah or that Qur’anic legislation ‘evolved’ since the prohibition/punishment on/for drinking alcohol was not applied to Tila’a (a Middle Eastern fruit drink)-which is not technically alcohol (khamr) according to Islamic jurisprudence (Nadwi, 2005).

10- Even Seyyed Hossein Nasr (a Sufi Modernist affiliate himself of IIIT, which is a mildly Modernist institution) notes, “the prejudices that have marred the study of Islam in the West since the time of Peter the Venerable, when the Qur’an was first rendered into Latin and even beforehand, must finally be overcome if in-depth 11- The a priori suppositions of the Modernistic lens are at least acknowledged in some of the work of academics such as Mohammad Akram Nadwi, Sherman Jackson, Talal Asad and Sabaa’ Mahmood.

Mahmood praises how Asad for example highlights “how the power of Western forms of knowledge lies not only in their ability to re-present social reality but also to intervene and remake non-Western traditions, practices, and institutions, [hoping to transform] what it means to live as a Muslim subject in the modern world” (Nyang, Ahmed, and Bukhari, 2009, p.11).