Islamic Intellectualism: 
Rahman, Gadamer, and the Hermeneutics 

of the Qur’ān

Norman K. Swazo

Abstract

The Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman disagreed with the 
German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer on elements of 
philosophical hermeneutics as they bear upon interpretation 
of texts ‒ in this case, the interpretation of the Qur’ān. 
Rahman proposed a “double-movement” theory of Qur’ānic 
interpretation through which he hoped for the revival and 
reform of Islamic intellectualism in its encounter with Western 
modernity, but also with difference from Islamic orthodoxy’s 
conceptualization of ijtihād. In this paper, I examine 
Rahman’s concerns as they relate to Gadamer’s general 
approach to understanding history and textual interpretation. 
Rahman argued that if Gadamer’s thesis concerning the fore-
structure1 of human understanding is correct, then Rahman’s 
theory has no meaning at all. I conclude that there is reason 
to see Rahman’s theory as consistent with Gadamer’s 
philosophical hermeneutics, albeit with some modification 
given Rahman’s focus on psychologism and objectivity as 
part of his approach to Qur’ānic interpretation. 

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices 
that makes us deaf to what speaks to 
us in tradition.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

___________________________________________________________________
Norman K. Swazo, Ph.D., M.H.S.A., Professor of Philosophy and Biomedical Ethics, 
College of Science and General Studies, Alfaisal University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The author acknowledges a scholarly debt of gratitude and expresses hereby his thanks 
to the editor and anonymous reviewers for constructive comments that contributed to an 
improved revision of the paper as published.



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:42

Introduction: Objectivism and Hermeneutics
At the conclusion of his introductory book on Islamic philosophy, phi-
losopher Oliver Leaman remarked on “the lack of radicalism” in Is-
lamic Qur’ān commentary, as compared to re-examinations that con-
tinue in Jewish and Christian scholarship.2 By “radical,” Leaman has in 
mind someone such as a Spinoza, who “rocked the intellectual world of 
Bible criticism in the seventeenth century when he suggested that the 
Hebrew of the Bible was so far from us today that we often have sig-
nificant difficulties understanding what the text means.”3 Leaman be-
lieves contemporary Islam experiences something of a “medieval 
gloom,” such that a proper understanding of the Islamic sources requires 
an enlightenment similar to that represented by the Spinoza critique. 

At least one significant Islamic thinker of the twentieth century hoped 
for as much, but in a way that would achieve revival and reform of both 
Islamic faith and understanding. In his Islam and Modernity: Transfor-
mation of an Intellectual Tradition, the Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman 
(1919‒1988) argued for what he construed to be “the correct method of 
interpreting the Qur’an,” for this is what is central to any meaningful con-
cept of Islamic intellectualism that is critical of its sources.4 Rahman is 
concerned with questions of method and hermeneutics, which he believes 
problematic in the way in which the Qur’ān was used during the medieval 
period of Islamic history. This is a problem carried forward into Islam’s 
encounter with Western modernity, in particular in what might be consid-
ered how Islamic orthodoxy responded defensively to “intellectual con-
structs”            ‒  for example, “Ibn Sinā’s philosophy or Ibn ‘Arabī’s mysti-
cism ‒ considered by some as alien to the sacred text itself. At issue here is 
the validity of such intellectual constructs in light of the primary authority 
of the Qur’ān itself. Rahman maintains that responses by scholars such as 
al-Ghāzalī or Ibn Taymiyah, for example, were critical of a “basic discrep-
ancy.” Consequently, “Islamic intellectualism has remained truncated.”5

Rahman describes the scene of intellectual contestation: 

 This piecemeal, ad hoc, and often quite extrinsic treatment 
of the Qur’an has not ceased in modern times; indeed, in some 
respects it has worsened. The pressures exerted by modern ideas 
and forces of social change, together with the colonial interregnum 
in Muslim lands, has brought about a situation in which the 
adoption of certain key modern Western ideas and institutions is 
resolutely defended by some Muslims and often justified through 
the Qur’an, the wholesale rejection of modernity is vehemently 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 3

advocated by others, and the production of “apologetic” literature 
that substitutes self-glorification for reform is virtually endless.6

Given that this contestation still pervades the heritage of Islamic in-
tellectualism, Rahman believes it imperative we account for or recon-
struct a critical hermeneutics of the Qur’ān. What is significant here is 
that this imperative for Rahman is decidedly ethical, or to use a word 
he appropriates from al-Shatibi, “religiomoral”7 ‒ precisely because 
a proper approach to the Qur’ān must be one that appreciates the inte-
gration of law, political philosophy, and ethics in the text of the Qur’ān, 
as Ebrahim Moosa remarked in his introduction to Rahman’s posthu-
mously published Revival and Reform in Islam. Urgent in the encounter 
of Islam and Western modernity, then, is the constitution of a moral re-
sponse from the primary source of Islam, the Qur’ān, without the guid-
ance of the commentators. This encounter presents a challenging impera-
tive for contemporary Islamic intellectuals insofar as they, too, are called 
upon to undertake an integrated yet critical hermeneutics of the Qur’ān. 

Rahman sought a method “exclusively concerned with the cognitive 
aspect of the revelation.” Such a statement requires us to be clear on both 
what Rahman understands by “revelation” and what counts as “the cogni-
tive aspect” of this revelation. Moosa provides some preliminary guidance 
in commenting that Rahman construed revelation as “a unique form of 
cognition in the form of idea-words that are part of a creative divine act.”8 
Rahman’s radical departure from the theological tradition, as expressed 
in its medieval conceptual framework, is undertaken with one question: if 
one accounts for orthodox Islamic dogma, according to which the revela-
tion that is the Qur’ān is wholly other yet intimately connected to the man 
Moḥammad (ṢAAS) as the religious personality sine qua non, then one must 
ask how one logically asserts truthfully that “the Qur’an is entirely the word 
of God and, in an ordinary sense, also entirely the word of Muhammad.”9 

It is this relation of the extra-ordinary to the ordinary, in the relation 
of the Qur’ān as revelation (and thus transcendental) and the prophet as 
human, that raises the question of the moral standing of the Qur’ān ‒ that 
is, the values that are expressed therein as “religiomoral” values.10 Val-
ues have “practical impact,” says Rahman, and this impact transcends the 
historicity of time and place in which they may be articulated. This is an 
important hermeneutic claim insofar as one is thereby called to assess the 
objectivity of any postulated religiomoral value. It is a hermeneutic claim 
among others by means of which Rahman intends to challenge the cri-
tique of objectivity that is represented by the philosophical hermeneutics 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:44

developed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose work 
moves beyond the historicist tradition and that of classical biblical herme-
neutics represented, for example, by the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

If we are to make sense of Rahman’s critique of Gadamer’s views, 
we must first of all understand that Gadamer’s concern with objectivity 
or objectivism reflects his familiarity with Immanuel Kant’s disclosure 
of the finitude of human knowledge, Edmund Husserl’s transcendental 
phenomenology and the latter’s elucidation of the phenomenon of con-
sciousness (Bewußtsein), and Heidegger’s subsequent fundamental ontol-
ogy. For Husserl, the “transcendental ego” is the ground on the basis of 
which all meaning is to be had, hence his concern with consciousness. 
Heidegger shifted the focus from the being of consciousness to the more 
fundamental question of Being (Sein) and the fundamental structures of 
human existence (Dasein). It is in the phenomenological assessment of 
consciousness that Gadamer’s own position links to the question being 
raised by Rahman about the relation of the extraordinary to the ordinary 
in Islamic dogma. In his Truth and Method, Gadamer referred to Husserl’s 
fifth “Logical Investigation,” in which Husserl identifies consciousness 
not as an object but as an “essential coordination” of “consciousness in 
experience” and “the inner perception of it.”11 Through this investigation, 
Husserl provided a means of overcoming objectivism ‒ “insofar as the 
meaning of words could no longer be confused with the actual psyche con-
tent of consciousness ‒ e.g., the associative images that a word evokes.”12

Gadamer accepts Husserl’s emphasis on consciousness in the sense of 
a co-ordination rather than as an object for a subject investigating one’s 
mere inner perception, including here the psychic content of images that 
one may associate with words and that are evoked by words as a way of 
clarifying their meaning. Meaning is a consequent of more than mere psy-
chic content; and thus, meaning would have to be more than the associative 
images that a word evokes, including here words that are characterized 
as religiomoral. Indeed, Gadamer accounts for what Husserl called the 
“protentional” and “retentional” aspects of experience ‒ that is, the claim 
that every experience has implicit horizons of meaning of what comes 
before and what comes after a given experience.13 This is what Gadamer 
means by “fusion of horizons” as a component of all human understand-
ing and clarification of meaning. The point for Gadamer here is to get be-
yond the subject-object dichotomy experienced in modern epistemology, 
and the ontology that results from it. “What Husserl means … is that we 
cannot conceive subjectivity as the opposite of objectivity, because this 
concept of subjectivity would itself be conceived in objective terms.”14 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 5

Thus, any discussion within a hermeneutics of Islamic dogma, such as the 
conceptual distinction between the extraordinary/transcendental revelation 
and the psychic reception of that revelation in an ordinary human mind, 
would have to give an account of this relation between subjectivity and 
objectivity ‒ without conceiving the pair as opposites, and without con-
ceiving either component of the dichotomy in objective terms. Such an 
ordinary human mind would likewise experience a fusion of horizons, and 
only through this fusion would this human mind achieve understanding 
and clarification of meaning. So, would it be for Muḥammad in the under-
standing and clarification of the meaning(s) of the revelation he transmits.

Gadamer, of course, eventually asserted his distance from Husserl’s 
transcendental phenomenology as he worked out his philosophical herme-
neutics under the influence of Martin Heidegger and the latter’s engagement 
of Western ontology and theology in their unity: “Husserl’s critique of the 
objectivism of all earlier philosophies was a methodological extension of 
modern tendencies, and he regarded it as such.”15 Going beyond objectivist 
tendencies in modern philosophy, Gadamer was instructed by Kant’s Cri-
tique of Pure Reason as well as the “fundamental ontology” of Heidegger, 
whose clarification of “understanding” (Verstehen) opens the way to a herme-
neutics beyond that of the modernist subjectivist/objectivist dichotomy.

In his “Introduction” to Rahman’s Revival and Reform in Islam, E. 
Moosa comments that, “Fazlur Rahman accepted the Kantian notion that 
knowledge is not a passive mirror of reality; its objects are determined by 
the way we comprehend them.”16 Then, following Emilio Betti (Die Her-
meneutik) in contrast to Gadamer, Rahman accepted the notion of “spiri-
tual values” that “represent an ideal objectivity that unerringly follows its 
own lawfulness.” In this respect, however, Rahman shifts his path away 
from Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason established the finitude of hu-
man knowledge, a finitude reinforced by Heidegger’s attempt at funda-
mental ontology and accepted by Gadamer in his philosophical hermeneu-
tics. On the one hand, Rahman accepts a constructivist view of historical 
understanding, consistent with the Kantian critique; but then he seemingly 
contradicts this view by believing a reproduction of authorial intent acces-
sible to contemporary Islamic understanding when otherwise a construc-
tivist view entails only what Gadamer’s hermeneutics allows ‒ namely, a 
productive understanding that involves a fusion of horizons within which 
prejudice unavoidably but positively contributes methodologically to all 
truth claims. In this case, religiomoral values cannot be merely discov-
ered; they have their status historically according to the epistemological 
limits of practical reason wherein apodictic certainty is denied. It is one 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:46

thing to assert a religiomoral value to be ideal; it is quite another to en-
gage it as something like a guiding, regulative principle of practical rea-
son having the status of an absolute. This assumes a power of conscious-
ness (Bewusstsein) that is not borne out by the Kantian critique of either 
pure reason or practical reason, and thus, a power of human conscious-
ness not borne out by the Heideggerian and Gadamerian critiques of epis-
temological reason seeking objectivity in the domain of normative life.

Commenting on the meaning of understanding consequent to what he 
encounters in Heidegger’s thought, Gadamer wrote: “a person who ‘under-
stands’ a text (or even a law) has not only projected himself understand-
ingly toward a meaning ‒ in the effort of understanding ‒ but the accom-
plished understanding constitutes a state of new intellectual freedom. It 
implies the general possibility of interpreting, of seeing connections, of 
drawing conclusions, which constitutes being well versed in textual inter-
pretation.”17 Let us consider the key statement here and its implication for 
understanding of the Islamic dogma: any reasonable human understanding 
of the Qur’ānic revelation as issued by an ordinary mind is an accomplished 
understanding. That is, this mind accomplishes what is already available 
to it ‒ the general possibility of interpreting, first and foremost, then of 
seeing connections of ideas, and of drawing conclusions, such that this 
ordinary mind can then be said to be well versed in textual interpretation.

Being in this way well versed in textual interpretation is a sign of a 
new intellectual freedom that necessarily goes beyond the text at hand ‒ if 
you will, that goes beyond the textus receptus, including here the Qur’ān 
conceived as received text. In short, even one such as Muḥammad would 
manifest this “new” intellectual freedom. But, for Gadamer, this new in-
tellectual freedom is not a freedom that somehow captures an objective 
experience ‒ “even if the intention of the knower is simply to read ‘what is 
there’ and to discover from his sources ‘how it really was’.”18 Gadamer is 
clear that Heidegger’s phenomenological clarification of the historical and 
temporal structures of human existence imply “no particular historical ide-
al of existence. Hence with regard to any theological statement about man 
and his existence in faith it claims an a priori, neutral validity.”19 Bearing 
in mind that there is no particular historical ideal of existence implied by 
the historical and temporal structures of human existence (assuming here 
the validity of the Heideggerian critique of objectivist ontology), any theo-
logical statement asserted in the historical context of Islam would likewise 
have to be examined critically for any claim of objectivity ‒ that is, of any 
claim of being able to discover from the Islamic source ”how it really was” 
at such an historical time for such and such a mind engaging a revealed 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 7

truth. Here, too, we have a new intellectual freedom that manifests a fusion 
of horizons in the interpretive act, thus also in the acts of exposition and 
disputation that contribute to theological understanding. A new intellectual 
freedom is thereby a sign of a productive, not re-productive, understanding.

Rahman is no doubt critical of such remarks. As he says, “In modern 
hermeneutical theory, the ‘objectivity school’ has insisted that one must 
first of all ascertain the meaning intended by the mind that authored the ob-
ject of study.”20 Thus, Rahman writes, “certainly, in the case of the Qur’an, 
the objective situation is a sine qua non for understanding, particularly 
since, in view of its absolute normativity for Muslims, it is literally God’s 
response through Muḥammad’s mind (this latter factor has been radically 
underplayed by the Islamic orthodoxy) to a historic situation (a factor like-
wise drastically restricted by the Islamic orthodoxy in a real understanding 
of the Qur’an).”21 In this passage, it is clear Rahman believes in both the 
possibility and the necessity of an objective understanding, without which 
the text of the Qur’ān could not have an absolute normativity ‒ that is, 
could not disclose religiomoral values that have an absolute normativity 
for Muslims. At the same time, Rahman recognizes the historicity of the 
person Muḥammad whose mind is likewise historically situated, and this 
historicity must be taken into account in making sense of an extraordinary 
event that this revelation is understood to be. Rahman is clear in his claim 
that contemporary efforts to make sense of the Qur’ān can have access to 
“the objective situation” that is this revelation to this prophet. This type of 
claim, Rahman concedes, is what Gadamer criticizes as “psychologism” 
‒ an interpretive move according to which one can speak of “the being of 
ideas in the author’s mind,” and “trace back ideas to the original mind in 
order to understand them as a true unity.” Thus, the question here is whether 
this interpretive move which Rahman accepts makes sense for interpretive 
success. That is, can one speak of “the being of ideas” in the mind of one 
such as Muḥammad, then trace these ideas derivatively to an original mind 
(what in the Latin medieval and scholastic tradition is designated “the in-
tellectus originarius”), such that one can then claim to understand the ideas 
truly as a manifest unity of the extraordinary and the ordinary in an histori-
cal situation. From the perspective of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneu-
tics, this move does not make sense, hence the critique of psychologism 
in its objectivist aspiration for understanding of the Qur’ānic revelation.

Rahman, however, argues that his effort to understand the objective 
situation of this revelation is not mere psychologism: “I have contended 
that the invisible context of ideas is not just mental but environmental as 
well….”22 He elaborates on his sense of ideas: “while their occurrence is 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:48

in a mind, their intentio or meaning is ‘referred’ outside the mind.”23 Thus, 
in the setting of the Islamic revelation, while the occurrence of ideas is 
in the mind of Muḥammad, the meaning of these ideas is necessarily re-
ferred outside his mind to the original intellect that is the source of these 
ideas. Rahman then notes Gadamer’s objection to this view: “Gadamer 
maintains his phenomenological doctrine according to which all experi-
ence of understanding presupposes a preconditioning of the experienc-
ing subject and therefore, without due acknowledgment of this fact being 
predetermined (which is the essence of Gadamer’s entire hermeneutical 
theory), any attempt to understand anything is doomed to unscientific vi-
tiation.”24 In short, the experience of understanding that is attributed to 
Muḥammad would likewise presuppose a preconditioning of his mind as 
“the experiencing subject.” Rahman is aware of Gadamer’s basic thesis 
that all acts of understanding are preconditioned by a fore-understanding 
‒ each such act of understanding has its prejudices, sometimes tacit, but 
which must be kept explicit ‒ all which prejudices are positive as “the 
effective history” within which understanding has meaning. “Thus there 
is no question of any ‘objective’ understanding of anything at all.”25 Nec-
essarily, this would include religiomoral understanding, and  thus would 
include that issues as textual interpretation of the Qur’ānic revelation with 
a view to religiously derived moral values. Rahman does not accept this 
Gadamerian methodological limitation on his effort to access what he be-
lieves to be accessible to the human understanding, namely, the objective 
situation of the Qur’ān. Thus, he writes further, and against Gadamer:

Even when we become aware of this predetermination ‒ that is, develop 
an ‘effective-historical consciousness’ as distinguished from ordinary 
‘historical consciousness’ ‒ the former is so limited that it cannot 
overcome this preconditioning. It is, of course, clear that this doctrine 
is radically opposed to what I have contended above by way of the 
hermeneutics of the Qur’an. If Gadamer’s thesis is correct, then the 
double-movement theory I have put forward has no meaning at all.26

Let me structure the relevant argument Rahman is posing. It is de-
ductive in form, with an opening conditional proposition: if Gadamer’s 
thesis is correct, then the double-movement theory Rahman puts forward 
has no meaning at all. At question here is whether one may reasonably 
affirm the antecedent, arguing thereby that Gadamer’s thesis is correct ‒ 
in which case, we would deduce that indeed Rahman’s double-movement 
theory has no meaning at all, and in which case any claim of access to 
the objective situation of the Qur’ānic revelation is itself meaningless 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 9

as an hermeneutic move. Alternatively, one may argue that the double-
movement theory has meaning such as Rahman intends, in which case 
one would deny the antecedent ‒ that is, Gadamer’s thesis is not correct.

However, I suggest these may not be our only logical options here. The 
truth of Rahman’s proposition depends on whether his understanding of Ga-
damer’s position is correct ‒ that is, it may be in error. Similarly, it may be 
that Gadamer is correct and that Rahman’s theory is compatible, or in some 
sense consistent with Gadamer’s position. This remains to be decided. Here 
I wish to engage these questions by reviewing what both writers have to say 
on the main point of disputation, beginning with Rahman’s double-move-
ment theory. Then I will turn to examine Gadamer’s concept of “effective 
history” more closely as it may bear upon Rahman’s quest. My point here 
is not to be exhaustive in my engagement of either Rahman’s works or the 
theological and philosophical scholarship that may relate to the topic I en-
gage here. The matter of difference in hermeneutic approach between Rah-
man and Gadamer is thematically interesting for scholars in both recent Eu-
ropean philosophy and Islamic studies, although the theme is not addressed 
specifically by students of Rahman, and certainly less likely to be engaged 
in the case of Gadamer scholars who work only within the Western tradition.

Rahman’s Double-movement Theory 

Rahman’s theory involves a process of interpretation in double movement: 
“from the present situation to Qur’anic times, then back to the present.” This 
statement in and of itself is not problematic; it is reasonable to try to under-
stand the past, even as one must make sense of the present in the light of what 
one learns from the past. This is a matter of our consciousness of history, our 
historical consciousness. But, for one such as Gadamer, the question is how 
one construes this idea of historical consciousness and, more important, 
how this differs from what is a historically-effective consciousness. I shall 
postpone for the moment the elucidation of this difference to be engaged in 
the next section, while I review the parameters of Rahman’s theory in brief.

For now, let us note that the problem of analysis begins with the open-
ing declaration ‒ that is, with what is posited, with what someone such as 
Rahman asserts the Qur’ān to be. Students of the Qur’ān clearly and un-
avoidably locate the disclosure and production of this text as an event oc-
curring in history. It is a text and more than text, given its environmental sig-
nificance, which Rahman finds essential to an objectively correct Qur’ānic 
understanding. For Rahman, “The Qur’an is the divine response, through 
the Prophet’s mind, to the moral-social situation of the Prophet’s Arabia, 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:410

particularly to the problems of commercial Meccan society of his day.”27 
There are several epistemological presuppositions operative in this remark: 

1. that one “objectively” knows the Qur’ān to be the divine 
word, notwithstanding its status as a text subject to human 
interpretation, including the interpretation that issues from the 
man, Muḥammad; 

2. that this divine word is delivered through the Prophet’s mind, such 
that one knows the ideas operative therein, and so thereby has 
access to the intentio of an “author” ‒ that is, the human author that 
Muḥammad is as “messenger”; 

3. that this text is indeed objectively known as Allāh’s (SWT)  
response to an historically identifiable and identified moral-social 
situation; 

4. that in particular one can have objective historical knowledge of the 
moral-social situation of Arabia and Meccan society for the period 
between 710 and 732 AC; such that 

5. one can somehow know all of this and, by implication, find this 
knowledge instructive for our contemporary understanding and 
interpretation of the Qur’ān; and, furthermore, such that insofar  

6. as the Qur’ān remains in principle a regulative guide in our 
appropriation of religiomoral values, this knowledge can reasonably 
inform our own individual and collective response to the moral-
social situation of our present. 

This set of epistemological presuppositions is surely daunt-
ing as a demand upon our hermeneutic method on the basis of 
which we might disclose the truth of the Qur’ān objectively.

That said, it is important to note Rahman’s intellectually formative de-
pendence on al-Shatibi with respect to what are articulated as “the higher 
objectives” of the Islamic dogma: al-Shatibi himself aligned with Al-
Ghāzālī’s approach to ijtihād (the latter undertaken in terms of the maqaṣid 
al shari’ah, thus necessarily purposive and contextual rather than literal-
ist). It is in the light of the work of these two authors that Rahman believes 
in the concept of a “perfect understanding” of the purposes of the law as 
given in the sacred sources. It is important to disclose this interpretive con-
text as explicit prejudice, although clearly this is not the place for a detailed 
assessment of either al-Shatibi’s or al-Ghazalī’s approaches to ijtihād. It is 
sufficient for the moment that tacit prejudices be made explicit, with the 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 11

understanding here that such prejudice is positive, hence positive as 
well for the interpretive bases of Rahman’s double-movement theory. 

As a matter of historical commentary, there is nothing fatally prob-
lematic with Rahman’s claim that, “The Qur’an … for the most part 
consists of moral, religious, and social pronouncements that respond 
to specific problems confronted in concrete historical situations.”28 Is-
lamic jurisprudence ‒ that is, all that issues as usul al fiqh, attests to 
the legitimacy of such a claim. What issues as a prophetic message is 
generally understood to do such, insofar as religious belief in Islam 
incorporates the idea of a prophet who mediates between God and a 
people, and whose mediation is delivered in his own exposition of this 
revelation, hence the authority of the Sunnah. Such is Muḥammad’s 
self-understanding, that of his companions, and that of those who have 
accepted his message within the monotheist frame of the revelation that 
is represented by the received text of the Qur’ān. We can accept this 
as a matter of an historical assessment of declared belief, even as does 
Rahman. Accepting this, Rahman then goes on to describe the interpre-
tive task further. In what he has to say here, we must bear in mind his 
disagreement with Gadamer’s critique of psychologism and what this 
entails for any claim to access to an objective situation. Rahman writes:

First, one must understand the import or meaning of a given statement 
by studying the historical situation or problem to which it was the 
answer. Of course, before coming to the study of specific texts in 
the light of specific situations, a general study of the macrosituation 
in terms of society, religion, customs, and institutions, indeed, of 
a life as a whole in Arabia on the eve of Islam and particularly in 
and around Mecca ‒ not excluding the Perso-Byzantine Wars ‒ will 
have to be made…. The second step is to generalize those specific 
answers and enunciate them as statements of general moral-social 
objectives that can be “distilled” from specific texts in light of the 
sociohistorical background and the often-stated rationes legis.29

Rahman insists the former is to be accomplished while accepting 
as an unarguable claim that the “teaching” of the Qur’ān “has no in-
ner contradiction’ but coheres as a whole.” All of the above mentioned 
“macrosituation” constitutes a set of “objective materials” to assist us 
in understanding the Qur’ān, despite the multiplication of “subjective 
interpretations.”30 Thus, it seems we have here a conjunction of objec-
tive materials accessible as objective, yet a set of materials that inevi-
tably and unavoidably engenders multiple subjective interpretations as 
to their significance. For Rahman, this is the “first movement” in his 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:412

double-movement theory ‒ that is, interpretation is a movement “from the 
specifics of the Qur’ān to the eliciting and systematizing of its general prin-
ciples, values, and long-range objectives.” It is noteworthy that Rahman 
speaks here of general, not universal, principles, in which case, both their 
derivation and their application have no apodicticity, but only inductive 
validity at best. But this announces a conundrum: if there is no apodicticity 
for either the derivation or the application of these general principles, then 
Rahman’s insistence on the absolute normativity of the Qur’ān loses it log-
ical force. What is general is not universal; and what is not universal lacks 
absolute normativity in the sense Rahman intends the Qur’ān to have in 
any declaration of religiomoral values, be these values those of the histori-
cal past or those that would have impact in the present as regulative ideals.

Rahman expects that the foregoing analytical approach is to yield 
an historical consciousness of the moral-social situation in which the 
Qur’ān is delivered. But, Rahman believes historical consciousness 
must be gained not merely to understand the past, but also to inform 
the present. Thus, he speaks of a “second movement” in interpretation:

[The] second is to be from this general view to the specific view that is to 
be formulated and realized now. That is, the general has to be embodied 
in the present concrete sociohistorical context. This once again requires 
the careful study of the present situation and the analysis of its various 
component elements so we can assess the current situation and change the 
present to whatever extent necessary, and so we can determine priorities 
afresh in order to implement the Qur’anic values afresh. To the extent 
that we achieve both moments of this double movement successfully, the 
Qur’an’s imperatives will become alive and effective once again.31

If and when this double-movement is completed, Rahman claims, then 
we recognize the accomplishment of several tasks: “the first task is primar-
ily the work of the historian, in the performance of the second the instrumen-
tality of the social scientist is obviously indispensable, but the actual ‘ef-
fective orientation’ and ‘ethical engineering’ are the work of the ethicist.”32

With this double-movement theory thus summarized, Rahman of-
fers yet another argument about one consequence of the second move-
ment: “if the results of understanding fail in application now, then ei-
ther there has been a failure to assess the present situation correctly or 
a failure in understanding the Qur’an.”33 This is thereby a triple failure 
of (1) sociohistorical analysis, (2) textual interpretation, and (3) ethical 
engineering ‒ all three of which are deemed necessary to a successful 
revival and reform in Islam’s encounter with Western modernity. Such 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 13

failures would represent failures to access the objective situation that 
one must encounter in sociohistorical analysis, textual interpretation, 
and ethical engineering in the sense of identifying and appropriating re-
ligiomoral values. Rahman justifies this claim in the following argument:

For it is not possible that something that could be and actually was 
realized in the specific texture of the past, cannot, allowing for the 
difference in the specifics of the present situation, be realized in the 
present context ‒ where ‘allowing for the difference in the specifics 
of the present situation’ includes both changing the rules of the past 
in conformity with the altered situation of the present (provided this 
changing does not violate the general principles and values derived from 
the past) and changing the present situation, where necessary, so it is 
brought into conformity with these general principles and values.34

One immediately notes here a hermeneutic limitation imposed by Rah-
man in any interpretive engagement of the Qur’ān: any change of rules 
must not violate the general principles and values derived from the past. 
This hermeneutic limitation already has its own epistemological prejudices 
about how and why such general principles count as regulative ideals for 
the past and for the present. The whole of this process is what is generally 
understood as ijtihad in Islamic studies and Islamic jurisprudence more spe-
cifically. Bearing in mind the influence of both al-Shatibi and al-Ghāzalī on 
his understanding, Rahman defines ijtihād thus: “the effort to understand the 
meaning of a relevant text or precedent in the past, containing a rule, and to 
alter that rule by extending or restricting or otherwise modifying it in such a 
manner that a new situation can be subsumed under it by a new solution.”35

Rahman’s definition thus stated is unproblematic. It is, for example, 
consistent with what a contemporary student of Islamic jurisprudence such 
as M. H. Kamali expounds about contemporary usul al-fiqh (understood 
here as “the methodology of the law”) and, more specifically, the contested 
question about whether and when a closing of the gates of ijtihād occurred 
within the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence: “The alleged closure of the 
door of ijtihād is one of the factors which is held accountable for the gap 
that has developed between the law and its sources on the one hand and 
the changing conditions of society on the other.”36 The ethical engineering 
task, for Rahman, is to pursue new solutions consistent with the current 
moral-social situation. Or, as Kamali puts it: “The quest for better solu-
tions and more refined alternatives lies at the very heart of ijtihād, which 
must, according to the classical formulations of usul al-fiqh, never be al-
lowed to discontinue.”37 With ijtihād, as Rahman understands, we have a 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:414

given text to engage, a given precedent from a prior analysis, a rule ap-
plied, an extension, restriction, or modification of that rule, a subsuming 
of the new situation under that revised rule ‒ and thereby the issuance 
of a new solution (judgment, fatwā) for a concrete moral-social situation.

In short, we have “rules of interpretation” being followed, including 
during any appeal to the authority of the foremost text, the Qur’ān: “Knowl-
edge of the rules of interpretation is essential to the proper understanding 
of a legal text,” says Kamali. “Unless the text of the Qur’an or the Sunnah 
is correctly understood, no rules can be deduced from it, especially in cases 
where the text in question is not self-evident.”38 What Kamali identifies 
here ‒ and what Rahman unavoidably identifies here ‒ is a methodologi-
calcommitment that is itself the central prejudice or conceptual framework 
according to which the double movement is to occur. Kamali, for example, 
clarifies some of this methodological prejudice when he writes, “Hence 
rules by which one is to distinguish a speculative text from the definitive, 
the manifest (zahir) from the explicit (nass), the general (‘aam) from the 
specific (khaas), the literal (haqiqi) from the metaphorical (majazi), etc., 
and how to understand the implications (dalalat) of a given text are among 
the subjects which warrant attention in the study of usul al-fiqh.”39 All of 
this, too, Rahman inevitably accepts as part and parcel of his own method-
ological prejudice (again, prejudice understood here positively). The task 
of the jurist (thus, also that of the “ethical engineer,” in Rahman’s sense)
is to avoid mis-understanding, to achieve correct understanding. However, 
all of this is impossible, however, without a prior methodological com-
mitment, that is, what is already given as rules of interpretation ‒ in this 
case, what is received historically as the usul al-fiqh, even when the fact 
of the closing of the doors of ijtihād is accepted in the sense that an Is-
lamic believer commits uncritically to the claim that there is no longer 
possible an “independent” mujtahid (that is, independent of the authority 
of the four mahdhabs, speaking here of Sunni Islam). Rahman believes 
we can achieve such correct understanding, specifically of the Qur’ān. His 
double-movement theory is offered as a method by which to advance con-
temporary ijtihād and, thus, achieve those truths that are relevant to the 
present as the outcome of ethical engineering of a religiomoral situation.

Gadamer and “Effective History”

As a first note of distinction in contrast to Rahman, following what he 
learned from the work of Heidegger, Gadamer stated quite clearly in Truth 
and Method: “The concept of understanding is no longer a methodologi-



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 15

cal concept.”40 Instead, “Understanding is the original characteristic of 
the being of human life itself.” Indeed, Heidegger “revealed the projec-
tive character of all understanding and conceived the act of understanding 
itself as the movement of transcendence, of moving beyond the existent.” 
Gadamer refers here to Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein (the human way 
to be), an analysis that puts in place a fundamental ontology distinct from 
the Husserlian phenomenological clarification of consciousness ‒ and from 
the modern rationalist-empiricist contestations about essence (essentia) 
and existence (existentia) in the case of the human way to be. Follow-
ing (but also modifying somewhat) what he finds in Heidegger’s analysis, 
Gadamer writes: “Our question … is how hermeneutics, once freed from 
the ontological obstructions of the scientific concept of objectivity, can do 
justice to the historicity of understanding.”41 As noted in my opening re-
marks, the historicity of understanding is involved in the act of understand-
ing a text or a law precisely because of the projective character of human 
understanding. It is this projective character of all human understanding 
that follows from the Heideggerian clarification of Dasein ‒ in contrast 
to the modernist ontologies and their associated epistemologies ‒  and 
which (presumably) Rahman fails to consider in his dispute with Gadamer.

Gadamer clarifies the idea of projection, thus:

For Heidegger too historical knowledge is not a projection in the sense 
of a plan, the extrapolation of aims of the will, an ordering of things 
according to the wishes, prejudices, or promptings of the powerful; 
rather, it remains something adapted to the object, a mesuratio ad rem. 
Yet this thing is not a factum brutum, not something merely at hand, 
something that can simply be established and measured, but it itself 
has the same mode of being as Dasein [human being-there].42

Gadamer, following Heidegger, distinguishes between the human way 
to be as historical being and that of a thing, the mode of being of which 
is “being present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit, that is, the way a tree is) ‒ a 
distinction cited here fully to highlight what is problematic in Rahman’s 
apparently contradictory appropriation of Kant without achieving the 
critical distance rendered by Heidegger’s critique of modernist ontology:

[That] we study history only insofar as we are ourselves ‘historical’ 
means that the historicity of human Dasein in its expectancy and its 
forgetting is the condition of our being able to re-present the past…. 
‘Belonging’ is a condition of the original meaning of historical 
interest…. [B]elonging to traditions belongs just as originally and 
essentially to the historical finitude of Dasein as does its projectedness 
towards future possibilities of itself…. [There] is no understanding or 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:416

interpretation in which the totality of this existential structure does not 
function, even if the intention of the knower is simply to read ‘what 
is there’ and to discover from his sources ‘how it really was’.43

The distinction being made here is important if we are to make sense of 
religious understanding, whether that religious understanding be Jewish, 
Christian, or Muslim. Understanding a text, a law, etc., must be apprehended 
in terms of a universal existential structure in which tradition and projec-
tion are both unavoidably present to a human act of interpretation ‒ this act 
not to be restricted narrowly to the supposed a priori authority of this or that 
method of interpretation. That is, even one such as Rahman would have to 
acknowledge an existential structure of human existence despite holding a 
hermeneutic prejudice of method such as the double-movement approach 
to Islamic understanding. Further, neither this structure nor such a posited 
method delivers to us an ideal of human existence, including whatever one 
may seek to clarify or promote as an ideal of religious existence having 
absolute normativity. This point underscores the importance of examining 
carefully what it is any contemporary Islamic intellectualism wishes to en-
gender through both revival and reform of the so-called Islamic tradition, 
a tradition that is itself unavoidably plurivocal in its representation of the 
past and its stipulations about the normativity of that past in the present.

Rahman is concerned that we understand first and foremost the 
significance of the Qur’ān. His double-movement theory presents the 
method. Were we in the presence of a live dialogue between Gadamer 
and Rahman, we would have one such as Rahman be given to understand

1. that “A person who is trying to understand a text is always 
projecting.” So would be Rahman in his effort to understand, 

2. “He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some 
initial meaning emerges in the text.” Thus, one claiming an 
understanding of the text of the Qur’ān taken as a whole projects 
meaning for it when some initial meaning emerges in one’s 
encounter with the text (a surah, an āyah) of the Qur’ān; and so it 
would be for Rahman. 

3. “Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading 
the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain 
meaning.” Thus, the initial meaning declared by one such as 
Rahman emerges only because he is reading the text of the 
Qur’ān with particular expectations he already holds in regard to 
a meaning he projects in advance. 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 17

4. “Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised 
in terms  of  what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is 
understanding what is there.”44

Thus would Gadamer instruct Rahman as to the disclo-
sure of the prejudice of his “fore-projection” inevitably pres-
ent in the methodology of the double-movement he intends in his 
engagement of the Qur’ān, thus to elucidate its “significance.”

This abbreviated description of this process as Gadamer ex-
plains it can be elaborated, of course. For example, Gadamer adds:

The process that Heidegger describes is that every revision of the 
fore-projection is capable of projecting before itself a new projection 
of meaning; rival projects can emerge side by side until it becomes 
clearer what the unity of meaning is; interpretation begins with fore-
conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant 
process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding 
and interpretation. A person who is trying to understand is exposed 
to distraction from fore-meanings that are not borne out by the things 
themselves. Working out appropriate projections, anticipatory in nature, 
to be confirmed “by the things” themselves, is the constant task of 
understanding. The only “objectivity” here is the confirmation of a fore-
meaning in its being worked out.45

Let us pause to reflect on this passage. From Heidegger and Gadamer, 
we learn of a process of interpretation that yields a constantly changing unity 
of meaning ‒ for example, what might be sought in speaking of the unity of 
the meaning present in the text that is the Qur’ān. We begin with our fore-
conceptions ‒ ideas, attitudes, concepts, definitions, interests, assumptions, 
presuppositions, methods, ideological appeals, opinions, truth claims of 
various sort, and so on ‒ all of which prejudice our effort at making sense 
of some object of concern, such as the text of the Qur’ān. Such prejudice is 
something positive, as Gadamer would have us see, not something negative 
and deficient. Some of these prejudices are explicit, some tacit, but there 
is no understanding without prejudice. So would it be with Rahman’s ef-
fort to understand the Qur’ān whether in part (some initial meaning) or the 
entire. The prejudices manifest or hide our expectations in the engagement 
of the text, the basis of any act initiating and finding meaning. It is this 
presence of disclosure (what is manifest) and concealment (what is tacit) 
that explains rival projects, hence the rival interpretive acts about partial or 
whole meaning of the Qur’ān in any given historical situation. The process 
of making sense of the text is iterative, and thus in its constancy, it is un-
dergoing revision, including revision of the fore-conceptions by which one 
continues to be guided in the quest for unitary understanding. This is in-



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:418

evitable even for what Rahman intends as his double-movement and what 
is accomplished thereby as the “significance” of the Qur’ān in the present.

What matters for Gadamer (following Heidegger), however, is that this 
quest for meaning be guided by the thing itself rather than by arbitrary 
fore-meanings. Here we would have to clarify what of the Qur’ān counts 
as “the thing itself” in contrast to an interpreter’s fore-meanings present 
as prejudice: “Thus it is quite right for the interpreter not to approach the 
text directly, relying solely on the fore-meaning already available to him, 
but rather explicitly to examine the legitimacy ‒ i.e., the origin and va-
lidity ‒ of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.”46 One taking up, for 
example, the double-movement theory such as Rahman presents it as a 
method of interpretation, would have to examine explicitly both the origin 
and the validity of the fore-meanings operative in the act of interpreta-
tion already structured by this method. Thereby, prejudices are made ex-
plicit rather than kept tacit. We seek understanding but are ever subject to 
the possibility of misunderstanding ‒ especially, as Gadamer points out, 
when our fore-meanings “go entirely unnoticed.” Hence the importance 
of the opinion (taken here in the sense of doxa rather than episteme) of 
the other who similarly seeks to achieve understanding: “If they give rise 
to misunderstandings, how can our misunderstandings of a text be per-
ceived at all if there is nothing to contradict them? How can a text be 
protected against misunderstanding from the start?”47 In a partial answer, 
Gadamer advises: “The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, 
so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own 
truth against one’s own fore-meanings.” Such is the truth that emanates 
from the thing itself, for example, in securing truth from the Qur’ān. One 
truth such as Rahman engaging the text of the Qur’ān would have to let 
this text assert its own truth against the multiplicity of fore-meanings he 
brings to that encounter, including the fore-meaning that is structured by 
his double-movement approach to the text. Unavoidably, consistent with 
the title of Gadamer’s work, we bring to the encounter of the religious 
text, in this case the Qur’ān, both truth and method ‒ with “the truth” itself 
governed by “the method,” but which method must itself be subject to the 
vigilance of one making his prejudices explicit so as to discern the ongo-
ing iteration of understanding achieved (accomplished as a “productive” 
and not “re-productive” understanding) in relation to “mis-understanding.”

If one seeks “enlightenment” such as philosopher Leaman desires in the 
case of surpassing a yet-medieval Islam, then the question is whether one 
seeks something analogous to the modern European Enlightenment’s po-
lemic with dogmatic biblical authority ‒ in this case, the dogma of Islamic 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 19

orthodoxy that likewise concerns Rahman. In the case of biblical criticism 
one has a critique that begins with accepting the possibility of error: “It is 
not altogether easy to realize that what is written down can be untrue.”48 As 
Gadamer said, “In general the Enlightenment tends to accept no authority 
and to decide everything before the judgment seat of reason. Thus the writ-
ten tradition of Scripture, like any other historical document, can claim no 
absolute validity.” The question here is whether one can say the same when 
it comes to evaluating the authority and validity of the Qur’ān, given Rah-
man’s insistence on the absolute normativity of the text in its issuance of re-
ligiomoral values. “Insofar as finitude … dominates not only our humanity 
but also our historical consciousness,” the question is whether this finitude 
is to be accepted even in making sense of the Qur’ān.49 One of the Enlight-
enment prejudices, says Gadamer, is its own “fundamental presupposi-
tion,” namely, “that methodologically disciplined use of reason can safe-
guard us from all error.”50 In terms of post-Enlightenment critique, Rahman 
would have to acknowledge that even in the case of Islamic understanding, 
we cannot have a methodologically assured safeguard against all error.

Between Rahman and Gadamer
Rahman is concerned to access the meaning of the Qur’ān as a unity. That 
unitary understanding, once achieved, has its consciousness of (1) a his-
torical tradition, (2) an analysis of contemporary social issues, which chal-
lenge the authority of that tradition, that is, what today counts as “Islamic 
orthodoxy,” and thus, (3) an emergent ethics that engineers an appropriate 
contemporary response to this encounter of tradition and modernity. Lea-
man, as I noted at the outset, bemoans the absence of a Spinoza in the 
case of a critique of Islamic tradition. But, as Gadamer advises, herme-
neutics “need not lead to the radical critique of religion that we found, 
for example, in Spinoza.”51 Thus, presumably there can be revival and re-
form of Islam without radical critique. Rahman acknowledges the pres-
ence of Islamic orthodoxy, the very word manifesting a claim of author-
ity in this tradition of faith, understanding, and practice. And, surely, 
such orthodoxy can have its legitimacy insofar as the fact of prejudice 
does not in and of itself count as false prejudice, and thus does not en-
tail a lack of authority in a transmitted tradition (that is, false authority).

Gadamer is clear that authority properly construed does not en-
tail blind obedience from among those who are adherents of a faith. In-
deed, within Islamic orthodoxy, there has always been a warning against 
blind obedience (taqlīd). To say there is such a thing as Islamic ortho-



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:420

doxy is to say there is a kind of knowledge accessible by some and made 
available to others ‒ “the knowledge, namely, that the other is superior 
to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment 
takes precedence ‒ i.e., it has priority over one’s own.”52 This acknowl-
edgement is not equivalent to the “subjection and abdication of reason.” 
Rather, as Gadamer observes, “The fact is that in tradition there is always 
an element of freedom and of history itself.”53 It is this combination of 
history and freedom that links the positive feature of prejudice and pro-
jection to the prospect of renovation of a tradition, given the presence 
of a “new” intellectual freedom that issues in every fusion of horizons.

Rahman disapproves of Gadamer’s critique of the objectivity school. 
But, Gadamer is careful about how we are to understand objectivism in 
the human sciences, including therefore how one may move hermeneu-
tically to interpret an authoritative text, such as the Qur’ān. He argues 
that we relate to the past as historical beings “always situated within 
traditions.” Precisely because we are always situated, therefore, we 
cannot and do not (except by error of reasoning) construe tradition “as 
something other, something alien.” In short, our engagement of tradi-
tion through “research in the human sciences” (as Gadamer puts it) can-
not defensively occur as though it were an “objectifying process.” So 
would it be for one situated in the tradition(s) of Islamic understanding. 
Thus, it is because of his affinity with, rather than because of a concep-
tual antithesis to, Islam that one such as Rahman can reasonably speak 
of both revival (an act of preservation of what is received) and of reform 
(an act of production beyond what is received) of Islamic intellectualism. 

Gadamer therefore rightly asks: 

Hence in regard to the dominant epistemological methologism we 
must ask: has the rise of historical consciousness really divorced our 
scholarship from this natural relation to the past? Does understanding 
in the human sciences understand itself correctly when it relegates the 
whole of its own historicality to the position of prejudices from which 
we must free ourselves?54 

One who understands this cannot reasonably be a proponent of epis-
temological methodologism ‒ that is, claiming objective historical knowl-
edge that is methodologically pure in the sense of being free of all prejudice 
(the latter almost always understood negatively, as a manifest deficiency 
of method). All traditions are living traditions, which is to say that they 
continue in their historical efficacy consistent with the positive status of 
unconcealed prejudice: “The effect (Wirkung) of a living tradition and 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 21

the effect of historical study must constitute a unity of effect, the analy-
sis of which would reveal only a texture of reciprocal effects.”55 Gadamer 
speaks of this in the context of natural science, which is in turn relevant to 
how one is to construe the human sciences, including historical studies.56

Let us consider what Gadamer means here in light of a critical set 
of remarks Rahman advances against the principle of effective history. 
Referencing historical developments or transitions in the tradition of 
Christian understanding and comparing to the Islamic tradition, Rahman 
writes: “It is obvious that there have been changes in human traditions, 
sometimes radical. In Christianity, the effective history of a fifth-century 
Augustine, a thirteenth century Aquinas, and a sixteenth century Luther 
could not have been quite the same.”57 Surely this observation would not 
be disputed by Gadamer, in which case it is not a relevant criticism. The 
point for Gadamer is that, from the perspective of philosophical herme-
neutics, each such historical personality ‒ Augustine, Aquinas, Luther ‒ is 
part of a living tradition; and, as such, each contributes to both conserva-
tion and reform of that tradition that is the Christian dogma or orthodoxy. 
If each individual ‒ Augustine, Aquinas, Luther ‒ contributes to an “ad-
vance” in Christian understanding of its sacred sources and the relation 
of that understanding to Christian faith, how that advance belongs to the 
moment in history in which it took place is interesting as a matter of his-
torical analysis. But beyond that secondary interest, what is one to say?

Rahman, however, continues his critique: “but what is even more 
important than that is that the conscious thought product of those men 
brought vast and vital changes into the subsequent effective history.”58 
Here again, Gadamer would not dispute the point. Each such individual 
has his own psychology, his own consciousness, including his own histori-
cal consciousness insofar as he is a member of a tradition and has his own 
engagement with that tradition. Each such individual has a productive, not 
reproductive, understanding of his tradition. Neither of these individuals 
is situated in relation to his tradition as one accepting blind obedience in 
the face of what he receives from what is given as the authority (thus or-
thodoxy) of that tradition. But, that “conscious thought” that each brings 
to his own intellectualism is not some objective experience dictating an 
irreformable pronouncement in the historical movement of that tradition, 
such that Luther permanently displaces Aquinas or Aquinas permanent-
ly displaces Augustine in the quest for truth in Christian understanding. 
Each thinker has his operative (positive) prejudices, his fore-structure of 
understanding, that allows him to engage his forebears and to work out 
his own contribution to this living tradition. There is no elimination of 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:422

prejudice and no objective (in the sense of absolute infallible) under-
standing in what either author delivers into history as his effective work 
‒ that is, work that produces historical effect whether in his own day or 
subsequently insofar as that work is appropriated by later generations.

Rahman’s comparison with Islamic thinkers is likewise unproblem-
atic: “So is the case with a tenth-century al-Ash‘arī, an eleventh-century 
al-Ghazālī, and a fourteenth century Ibn Taymiya: Islamic tradition was 
never the same again after the conscious activity of each and all of them.”59 
It is, of course, correct to say that Islamic tradition was never the same 
again consequent to the influence or historical effect of one or all of these 
thinkers. The problem here is that Rahman continues to emphasize the par-
ticularity of their cognitive activity ‒ their “conscious” thought ‒ as if it 
were somehow a wholly objective cognition: “Every critique or modifica-
tion of a tradition involves a consciousness of what is being criticized or 
rejected and hence, to that extent, self-awareness.” Surely, Gadamer would 
not deny the point. What is at issue here is how one is to construe this 
consciousness that is manifest as self-awareness. Despite the work of a 
thinker contributing to our historical understanding, in the sense that it en-
hances, modifies, or restricts what has been delivered over into our prior 
historical understanding, Gadamer argues: “we would do well not to re-
gard historical consciousness as something radically new ‒ as it seems at 
first ‒ but as a new element in what has always constituted the human 
relation to the past.”60 Likewise, it would be the same for the contribu-
tions of the Islamic thinkers that Rahman identifies. Gadamer clarifies this:

We accept the fact that the subject presents different aspects of itself 
at different times or from different standpoints. We accept the fact that 
these aspects do not simply cancel one another out as research proceeds, 
but are like mutually exclusive conditions that exist by themselves and 
combine only in us. Our historical consciousness is always filled with 
a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard. Only in the 
multifariousness of such voices does it exist: this constitutes the nature 
of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part. Modern 
historical research is not only research, but the handing down of 
tradition. We do not see it only in terms of progress and verified results; 
in it we have, as it were, a new experience of history whenever the past 
resounds in a new voice.61

Applied to Rahman’s concerns with Islamic tradition, I would have 
to say that the subject of Qur’ānic interpretation presents different as-
pects of itself at different times (for example, in the time of a tenth-cen-
tury al-Ash‘arī, an eleventh-century al-Ghazālī, and a fourteenth cen-



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 23

tury Ibn Taymiya) and, thus, from different standpoints such as each of 
these thinkers presents. These are, in the present, the variety of voices 
in which the echo of the past of Islamic tradition is heard. It is through 
these thinkers that this tradition is transmitted, handed down ‒ even as 
one may understand that that transmittal includes some enhancement, 
restriction, or modification of what one understood before. The past 
of the tradition resounds in these voices, despite each thinker’s self-
awareness in his engagement with his tradition, his living tradition.

Rahman objects by holding that

all conscious responses to the past involve two moments that must 
be distinguished. One is the objective ascertaining that past —which 
Gadamer does not allow), which is possible in principle provided 
the requisite evidence is available; the other is the response itself, 
which necessarily involves values and which is determined (not 
predetermined) by my present situation, of which effective history is 
a part but of which my conscious effort and self-aware activity also 
constitute an important part. For Gadamer these two moments are 
utterly inseparable and indistinguishable.62

I submit that the foregoing criticism involves a fallacy of accent, 
as well as a failure to distinguish what is understood in concept from 
what is apprehended in reality. Rahman continues to emphasize the 
concept of individual consciousness, and while doing so, he believes 
in an individual’s objective cognition (“possible in principle”) pro-
vided the evidence is available. For him, it is this objective cognition 
that can, or should, yield an objective understanding of the Qur’ān and 
so enable a revival and reform Islamic tradition for the sake of an Is-
lamic intellectualism effective in the present moral-social situation. In 
question here, however, is what counts as admissible (if available) evi-
dence, and here Rahman discloses his epistemological methodologism, 
which does not withstand the Gadamerian critique I have surveyed here.

In the case of historical research, all reasonably admissible evidence 
has its limited authority only in the context of the governing research para-
digm, the methodological frame of the investigation, the hypotheses posit-
ed in relation to inductive or abductive reasoning, the interrogative stance 
of the investigator, the expectations forecast in the light of the hypothesis 
and the guiding question, and so on. All of this is part and parcel of an ex-
plicit or tacit fore-structure of understanding that the historian or investiga-
tor brings to his or her interrogation of the past. What is thereby given has 
its historical finitude and its methodological limitation ‒ what is gained in 
understanding ‒ is never a comprehension of the subject matter wherein 
one attains an apodictic certainty. Gadamer does not deny that a thinker ‒ 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:424

even one self-aware and pursuing a reform agenda vis-à-vis tradition—in-
clines his or her conscious effort to historical research. He grants that such 
effort and self-aware activity are important parts of the ongoing act of un-
derstanding that is ever an interaction with a living tradition. What Gadam-
er does not allow is the claim of objective cognition such as Rahman insists 
would be accessible even to him. That very claim is itself an instance of the 
prejudice of epistemological methodologism that began in early European 
modernity (for example, Descartes) and continued into late modernity.

Rahman’s quest for objective Qur’ānic understanding is part of his 
own self-awareness, with its own operative prejudices (tacit or explicit) 
and fore-structure in that quest for understanding. He is himself moved to 
appropriate certain ideas from his reading of Kant. His source, and thus 
part of his methodological prejudice, is not merely the text of the Qur’ān 
but also that of late modern philosophy. He writes: “Just as in Kantian 
terms no ideal knowledge is possible without the regulative ideas of reason 
(like first cause), so in Qur’anic terms no real morality is possible without 
the regulative ideas of God and the Last Judgment.”63 In saying as much, 
Rahman discloses a component of his own fore-structure of understanding 
in his hermeneutic approach to the text of the Qur’ān. He construes the idea 
of God as a regulative idea, and he links the possibility of moral knowledge 
to this regulative idea. Yet, the Qur’ān does not in and of itself present the 
being of God in such a “philosophical” conceptual frame; this frame is 
already part and parcel of Kant’s engagement with epistemological com-
mitments of both modern British empiricism and continental rationalism. 
Rahman construes both “regulative ideas” ‒ the idea of God and the idea 
of a Last Judgment ‒ as ideas having moral function: “they exist for reli-
giomoral experience and cannot be mere intellectual postulates to be ‘be-
lieved in’.”64 Here Rahman makes a distinction in which a Kantian concept 
of “intellectual postulate” is appropriated and contrasted to what Rahman 
understands “religiomoral experience” to be. He continues: “the substan-
tive or ‘constitutive’ ‒ as Kantian phraseology would have it ‒ teaching of 
the Prophet and the Qur’an is undoubtedly for action in this world, since it 
provides guidance for man concerning his behavior on earth in relation to 
other men.”65 Again, one is moved to ask: what authorizes this appropria-
tion of Kantian concepts such that one can speak at all of “regulative ideas” 
in the Qur’ān, or speak of a “constitutive” teaching from the Prophet or the 
text of the Qur’ān as such? This is not so much argued and warranted by 
Rahman; it is only appropriated uncritically and then applied as he seeks 
his own agenda of reform in contemporary Qur’ānic interpretation. But, 
then, granted as much, we have here not a re-productive understanding of 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 25

Islamic doctrine; instead we have a productive understanding that involves 
the conceptual prejudices adopted from Kantian critique of pure reason and 
practical reason. This is a manifestation of Rahman’s own new intellectual 
freedom that characterizes his place in contemporary Islamic intellectualism 
‒ that is, the fusion of horizons that discloses his own intellectual accom-
plishment, while situated within the Islamic tradition(s) he seeks to reform. 

Rahman reveals another feature of his methodological commitment 
that conflicts with his strong assertion of the importance of historical con-
sciousness in the reading of the Qur’ān: “even though the Qur’an seldom 
refers to actual events and situations and almost never mentions names, 
it would be inaccurate to characterize it as an esoteric document, for it is 
eminently possible to accurately determine the rationales behind its state-
ments, comments, and injunctions.”66 Rahman believes this determination 
of historical analysis to be essential to making sense of the normative intent 
of the Qur’ān, whether the text be “literal” or “figurative” in a given mo-
ment of intellectual encounter: “To insist on a literal implementation of 
the rules of the Qur’ān, shutting one’s eyes to the social change that has 
occurred and that is so palpably occurring before our eyes, is tantamount to 
deliberately defeating its moral-social purposes and objectives.”67 For Rah-
man, one can have deductive truth in our reading of the Qur’ān, insofar as 
from the text there is to be deduced a set of “general principles” (usul kul-
liya) designed to govern human conduct: “If we look at the Qur’an, it does 
not in fact give many general principles: for the most part it gives solutions 
to and rulings upon specific and concrete historical issues; but … it pro-
vides, either explicitly or implicitly, the rationales behind these solutions 
and rulings, from which one can deduce general principles. In fact, this is 
the only sure way to obtain the real truth about the Qur’anic teaching.”68 
Rahman concludes: “In building any genuine and viable Islamic set of laws 
and institutions, there has to be a twofold movement: First one must move 
from the concrete case treatments of the Qur’an—taking the necessary and 
relevant social conditions of that time into account—to the general prin-
ciples upon which the entire teaching converges. Second, from this general 
level there must be a movement back to specific legislation, taking into 
account the necessary and relevant social conditions now obtaining.”69

Although Gadamer was not himself studied in Islamic jurisprudence or 
issues relating to law and morality in Qur’ānic interpretation, it is highly 
unlikely Gadamer would disagree with what Rahman says here as a matter 
of interpretive process. In fact, it is entirely likely Gadamer would acknowl-
edge precisely what Rahman has put forward here as consistent withthe 
basics of his philosophical hermeneutics, even if in modified form because 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:426

of the specific conceptual apparatus involved in Qur’ānic interpretation. 
The movements Rahman identifies are already acknowledged in classical 
and contemporary ijtihād, even as the closing of the gates of ijtihād is as-
serted such that there can be no independent or absolute mujtahid after 
that closing. But, as already noted, the very commitment to this historical 
claim of closure to the gates of ijtihād is itself part of a hermeneutic com-
mitment one either accepts or rejects, while situated within that tradition. 
Further, Rahman’s reference to a Maliki scholar such as al-Shatibi in the 
conception of general principles is itself a sign of an element in Rahman’s 
fore-structure of Qur’ānic understanding, even as Rahman’s appropriation 
of the Kantian concept of the regulative idea is part of that fore-understand-
ing. Rahman’s interest in religiomoral values is itself a consequence of 
his reading of al-Shatibi and, thus, an element of positive prejudice in his 
encounter with the text that is the Qur’ān. But, this is far from having the 
evidence of historical analysis that somehow or other achieves the objec-
tive understanding Rahman seeks through his double-movement theory.

In short, his method and his double-movement theory are hardly novel 
or radical from the perspective of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics 
‒ though they may be from that of contemporary ijtihād, such is performed 
by Islamic orthodoxy. What has been taken as radical, however, has been 
Rahman’s insistence that one can have access to the Qur’ān in the sense 
of access to the mind of God, insofar as the Qur’ān is (for him) God’s 
response to a sociomoral situation that is itself the occasion of the revela-
tion (asbab al-nuzul). Because the Qur’ān is disclosed through “the mind 
of Muḥammad,” Rahman argued, the process of ijtihād may yield to us 
an original authorial intention; and understanding this intention thereby 
yields religiomoral knowledge essential to moral action in the present. 
For him, “the really effective procedure” would be “to erect a system of 
universal ethical values on the basis of an analysis of the moral objec-
tives of the Qur’an.”70 This is to be achieved, he hoped, “through develop-
ing a systematic ethical system derived from the Qur’ānic values, which 
are either there explicitly or could be extracted from its rationes leges.” 
In advocating as much, Rahman sought to counter the dominant place 
of reasoning from analogy (qiyās) in contemporary ijtihād; this reason-
ing compares to casuistry in the Western tradition of moral analysis, the 
latter methodological perspective rejecting the universalist and absolutist 
claims of prominent moral theories. The result of unsystematic and ad hoc 
application of this legal principle, says Rahman, “is that today Muslims 
wishing to derive workable Islamic law from the Qur’an have to make 
a fresh start by working out a genuine ethical value-system from the 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 27

Qur’an.”71 While the latter quest for a Qur’ānic ethics is ever meritorious, 
the quest for access to objective authorial intention (whether of the mind 
of God or the mind of Muḥammad) is ever contested in any application 
of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics ‒ even as it was contested by 
Islamic orthodoxy in its understanding of revelation. Quite simply, there 
is never really a fresh start for one situated in a tradition of understanding.

Conclusion
Writing on “the message of Fazlur Rahman,” M. Yahya Birt commented 
that Rahman defended historicism, understood as “the practice of deduc-
ing from first principles truths about how people are obliged to organize 
themselves socially and politically.”72 Rahman’s focus was on the Qur’ān, 
in contrast to the Sunnah and whatever is available at any given time as 
the ijmā’ (consensus) of the scholars. One may, of course, defensibly 
assert the primacy of the Qur’ān in its normative authority, as Rahman 
does, and indeed as does Islamic orthodoxy. For the latter, however, the 
Sunnah is included as a principal source in the process of ijtihād, even 
as Hadith studies distinguish the genuine from the unauthentic hadith 
and so concede the primacy of the Qur’ān even when the Sunnah is in-
cluded in interpretive acts. As Birt remarks, “Most of the Hadith corpus 
is, in fact, the Sunna-ijtihad of the first generations which after a serious 
struggle received the sanction of ijma’, or the adherence of the majority 
of the Community.”73 The point is that throughout there has been and con-
tinues to be a process of ijtihād, present even in what is delivered as the 
ijmā’ of the first generations. This interpretive process remains an engage-
ment with a living tradition and is disclosed as such despite the presence 
of a methodological debate about how ijtihād is to occur. Clearly, Rah-
man’s focus on the Qur’ān as a living source of ethics entails its own in-
terpretive process. That is to say, it is one thing to speak of the presence 
of the Qur’ān as the revelation it is taken to be, and another to speak of 
the Qur’ān as an object of religiomoral knowledge encountered and en-
gaged by one whose ontological status as subject transforms the Qur’ān 
into something having objectivity. Rahman’s epistemological methodolo-
gism advances such a transformation of the Qur’ān. Thereby, he dimin-
ishes the presence of the Qur’ān as living tradition and source of ethics that 
cannot but speak historically. One who speaks historically accomplishes a 
fusion of horizons of understanding the past and the present, thus to dis-
close a living understanding into the present and transmit it into the future. 

I have noted that some contemporary writers such as Leaman bemoan the 
lack of a Spinoza in the Islamic intellectualism of the present. Spinoza’s ap-



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:428

proach to biblical interpretation resonates to a degree in Rahman’s approach to 
Qur’ānic interpretation. Gadamer himself commented on Spinoza’s approach: 

In Chapter 7 of the Tractatus theologico-politicus Spinoza elaborates 
his method of interpreting Scripture by analogy to the interpretation 
of nature: we have to derive the meaning (mens) of the authors from 
historical data…. [Everything] important can be understood if only we 
understand the mind of the author ‘historically’ ‒ i.e., overcome our 
prejudices and think of nothing but what the author could have had in 
mind.74

In part, this is what centrally motivates Rahman, hence his attention to 
the psychology of interpretation (the conclusions of which would invariably 
be only inductive in their logical strength). In this regard, his approach is 
similar to that of Schleiermacher (biblical hermeneutics). Gadamer wrote: 

Hermeneutics includes grammatical and psychological interpretation. 
But Schleiermacher’s particular contribution is psychological 
interpretation. It is ultimately a divinatory process, a placing of oneself 
within the whole framework of the author, an apprehension of the ‘inner 
origin’ of the composition of a work, a re-creation of the creative act. 
Thus understanding is a reproduction of an original production….75

Rahman, in his own way, seeks a reproduction of the original production 
that is the Qur’ān ‒ and this is his interpretive quest. His double-movement 
theory, however, is itself evidence of the fact that interpretation ‒ including 
Qur’ānic interpretation ‒ is always productive of understanding rather than 
merely reproductive of authorial intention; and its productivity is always fi-
nite given the finitude of the interpreter’s historical consciousness. It is this 
productive understanding that enables all engagement with moral values, 
whether for revival or reform of a tradition, and this includes the tradition 
of Islam. We can today still accept Rahman’s double-movement theory as 
consistent with ‒ rather than diametrically opposed to ‒ Gadamer’s philo-
sophical hermeneutics, so long as one is prepared to diminish the import 
of psychological interpretation and acknowledge the operative authority of 
positive prejudice even in Rahman’s approach to Qur’ānic interpretation. 
In this way, what Gadamer clarifies as the fusion of horizons of understand-
ing is achieved in any contemporary Qur’ānic interpretation. Despite its as-
sertion of epistemological methodologism, such is the function of the her-
meneutical circle, which is present in Rahman’s double-movement theory. 
Beyond this methodologism, Gadamer would have us acknowledge: “Un-
derstanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating 
in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present 



Swazo: Islamic Intellectualism 29

are constantly mediated.”76 Whether one speaks of the revival or reform of 
Islamic tradition, past and present are constantly mediated, even by Rahman 
as he participates in this tradition as a proponent of Islamic intellectualism.

Endnotes
1. Fore-structure (Vorstruktur) includes intentionality, inherited meaning, 

presuppositions expressed in concepts and practices that make up the 
individual human’s life world.

2. Oliver Leaman, Islamic Philosophy: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: 
Polity, 2009), 207.

3. Ibid.
4. Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual 

Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1.
5. Ibid., 4.
6. Ibid.
7. “Religiomoral” as used by al-Shatibi refers to those moral values that guide 

human conduct insofar as they derive from the Islamic source texts.
8. Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study in Islamic 

Fundamentalism (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2000), 14‒15.
9. Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1979), 31.
10. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 5.
11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1979), 

236.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 237.
14. Ibid., 241.
15. Ibid., 247.
16. Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam, 8.
17. Ibid., 251.
18. Ibid., 252.
19. Ibid., 252‒53.
20. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 8.
21. Ibid., 8.
22. Ibid., 9.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 5.
28. Ibid.
29. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 6.
30. Ibid., 7.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:430

33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 8.
36. M. H. Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Cambridge, UK: 

Islamic Texts Society, 2005).
37. Ibid. 
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 3.
40. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 250.
41. Ibid. 268.
42. Ibid., 251‒52.
43. Ibid., 252.
44. Ibid., 269.
45. Ibid., 271.
46. Ibid., 270.
47. Ibid., 271.
48. Ibid., 274.
49. Ibid., 277.
50. Ibid., 279.
51. Ibid.
52. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 281.
53. Ibid., 282.
54. Ibid., 283; italics added.
55. Ibid., 284
56. Ibid.
57. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 10.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 284.
61. Ibid., 285.
62. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 10.
63. Ibid., 14.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 19.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., 20.
69. Ibid., italics in text quoted.
70. Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam, p. 61.
71. Ibid.
72. M. Yahya Birt, “The Message of Fazlur Rahman,” www.freerepublic.com/

focus/fr/531762/posts. 
73. Ibid.
74. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 181.
75. Ibid, 186.
76. Ibid., 291, italics in text quoted. 

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