Responding To Modern Challenges
Arshad Alam
THE ULAMA IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAM: CUSTODIANS OF CHANGE by Muhammad Qasim Zaman Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2006, 291 pp., 595
May 2006, volume 30, No 5

Postcolonial Muslim societies have been mostly understood through the prism of modernization theory. Very often, the focus of these studies has been the ‘modernizing imperative’ of the postcolonial state. Society as an arena of the non-state was studied only in relation to ways in which it corresponded to the modern demands of postcolonial states. Social groups and institutions which could not fit this theoretical conceptualization were seldom made subjects of scholarly attention. It is for this reason that the Ulama or traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars have so far received far less academic attention as compared to the Islamists, who share most of the assumptions of the modern postcolonial state which they oppose. By pulling the Ulama out of such obscurity, Zaman seeks to fill a very important gap in our understanding of Muslim religious authority. Zaman makes it clear at the outset that the ‘transformations, discourses and religio-political activism of the Ulama’ can only be ignored at the cost of misunderstanding crucial facets of Muslim politics. Far from being the passive recipients of the onslaught of modernization, Zaman’s work shows the many ways in which the Ulama have not only adapted and responded to modern challenges, but have also used modern institutions to further their own interests.

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