Abstract: Fazlur Rahman (1919 – 1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important scholars of Islam. After completing his doctorate at Oxford, he became an advisor to Ayub Khan’s military regime in Pakistan before being driven out in 1968 following a series of “controversies” and the unceremonious reception of his book, Islam (1966). This paper attempts to reconstruct one aspect of Rahman's political philosophy by exploring his ambiguous relationship with Muslim modernism as well as the character of his final decade in Pakistan. It focuses in on his preoccupation with the history and idea of “orthodoxy” which he sought to paradoxically reject and recover. While he was highly critical of the orthodoxy of his day, he also thought that Islam itself was a mediating force that should generate an orthodox “middle way” out of opposing extremes. He spent years developing what he called an “Islamic methodology” that could perform this task on behalf of Muslims. The paper situates his ideas in the political context of early post-colonial Pakistan and within broader conversations in mid-century orientalism and Islamic Studies.
Bio: Dr Taushif Kara is an intellectual historian of modern Islam at King’s College London. His research focuses on the history of decolonization, political thought, and the relationship between politics and philosophy. His research has appeared in Global Intellectual History, Public Culture, and Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. His first monograph, titled Vanishing Mediators: A History of Decolonization, is forthcoming with the University of California Press. He has taught or held research fellowships at the University of Chicago, the Centre of Islamic Studies in Cambridge, SOAS, Zentrum-Moderner Orient in Berlin, and most recently at Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for History. Dr Kara obtained his PhD from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.
