Islam's coming renaissance will rise in the West

There are too many of these scholars to enumerate and the number is increasing. All these cases underline the revolutionary thinking among Muslim intellectuals that is setting the pace for a new wave of Islamic rationalism radiating from the West.

Even writers from Muslim countries who are afraid to publish their works at home are doing so abroad. For example, The Book and the Quran [Koran]: A Contemporary Interpretation by Muhammad Shahrur, a civil engineer from Syria, is banned in his country. He argues that human understanding of the Koran is relative and changing and that it requires the continuous exercise of human reason.

His appeal to apply tools of modern epistemology and objective scientific reasoning to the study the Koran is anathema to hardline Islamists. Similarly, Hassan Hanafi, an Egyptian professor of philosophy, is well known for his rationalist views on Islam throughout the intellectual circles in the US, Japan, Germany and Morocco but is frowned upon by the al-Azhar establishment in Egypt. In short, scholars such as Shahrur and Hanafi have become intellectual prisoners in their own countries.

The situation is changing fast. The Internet and electronic communication technology have revolutionised the production and distribution of knowledge. Sources of information that were only remotely accessible to a selected few are readily available to many at the click of a mouse. Inquisitive Muslim minds do not have to wait for a cleric to arrive for consultation on theological issues. With the help of the Internet any verse or chapter of the Koran and any sayings of the Prophet can be accessed from multiple sources and the reader has the luxury of choosing from among a variety of interpretations, meanings and elaborations.

This revolution in information gathering has become a subversive tool and is eroding the power base of traditional clerics. The authority of the pulpit is collapsing by the hour.

The traditional argument that one should be a trained Islamic scholar or an imam to interpret the Koran does not carry weight any more. There is a rising tension between the traditional guardians of Muslim orthodoxy and a new crop of secular educated Muslims, many of whom are better equipped with advanced methodological tools to handle the primary religious texts. An Islamic spring is dawning from the West.

While Western governments and the media are too preoccupied with fighting militant Islam and its terrorist offshoot, the more positive developments that are taking place within the Muslim intellectual world are being ignored. The wave of critical thought emanating from a new breed of Muslim scholars in the West is one of those positive changes. It is a good omen for a long-awaited Islamic renaissance.

The hated West has become the surrogate mother of this wave of Islamic rationalism.