Islam's Reformers .pdf

which words of reverence can be used.At the beginning of The Revivalist Movement in Islam,Mawdûdî says:“Islamic faith propounds its own philosophy, which greatlydiffers from irreligious philosophies. Its knowledge about theUniverse and mankind is quite antonymous to the knowledge ofthe irreligious.”He means that there is philosophy in Islam and that Muslimscholars are philosophers. His deductions are similar to theEuropeans’ extraneous understanding of Islam. As explained indetail in our book Se’âdet-i Ebediyye, degrading Muslimscholars down to the degree of philosophers is symptomatic ofa misjudgement based on narrow personal valuations.Islamic knowledge is divided into two groups: religious andscientific. Scientific knowledge in Islam is obtained byobservation, close examination and experimentation, as is theknowledge of the irreligious in Europe and America about theUniverse and man. To say that these two groups of knowledgeare antonymous means to deny the existence of scientificknowledge in Islam which in turn means to make matters worse.A quotation from the exalted Islamic scholar Imâm al-Ghazâlîwould go with the situation: “An unschooled attempt to helpIslam would, let alone help, damage Islam.”Mawdûdî says on the thirty-third page of his book:“One of the two reasons why the institution of caliphateweakened was because Hadrat ’Uthmân was devoid of thecharismatic leadership possessed by his predecessors.”With these words, he tries to blemish ’Uthmân’s (radiy-Allâhu ’anh) governance. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptain writer, alsoattacks Hadrad ’Uthmân (radiy-Allâhu anh) with the samepresumptions in his book Al-’adâlat al-ijtimâ’iyyatu fi ’l-islâm.Speaking ill of Hadrat ’Uthmân Dhi ’n-nûrain (radiy-Allâhu ’anh),who was recommended by Hadrat ’Umar (radiy-Allâhu ’anh)and elected by the Prophet’s (’alaihi ’s-salâm) companionsunanimously and whose superiority had been declared in manyhadîths is a symptom of being too ignorant to understand that itis a grave sin to speak ill of him or a symptom of attempting todemolish Islam insidiously from behind the screen. Each of theSahâbat al-kirâm was a hero honoured by being praised in thehadîths, “The highest people are those who live in my- 157 -