Westernizers’ Studies of the Qur’an: Arab Liberals as a Model

In this era, Muslims have faced intellectual challenges in a new form and in modern faces, and these challenges are divided into two parts: Internal challenges and external challenges. Internal challenges like the spread of ignorance, fanaticism, disbelieve (takfīr), terrorism, and others. As for the external challenges, they appeared in the form of the spread of ideas, philosophy, and concepts from Western civilization, including liberalism. This liberalism has spread to the minds of Muslims and dominated them, including Arab intellectuals. Some Arab intellectuals were influenced by this idea and then tried to introduce it into Islamic studies in general, from its history, culture, and language to the Holy Quran in particular, because it is the first source of this religion. They deal with the Qur'anic texts from a liberal perspective, interpret them loosely, and follow contemporary rules because they adhere to this concept, which is based on foundations that are contrary to the principles of Islam. Among the most prominent Arab thinkers who focused on the study of the Qur’an are Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd (1943-2010), an Egyptian liberal thinker and writer who made an effort to build a new treatment of the Qur'anic text, Mohammad Arkoun (1928-2010), an Algerian thinker and writer who proposed a new treatment of heritage and text, and Mohammad Shahrour (1938-2019), a Syrian writer, and engineer who graduated from engineering faculty and then made an effort to build a contemporary reading of the Qur'anic text afterward. In general, they claimed to be advocates of renewal and reform in dealing with the Qur'anic texts, and they claimed that the concepts existing at this time must be renewed with modern ideas and new interpretations because the interpretations at the time of the Companions may be inappropriate at this era. Therefore, they tried to liberalize the limitations of the rules established by the community of scholars in the Qur'anic studies and its principles through their contemporary approaches. The importance of this research was to know the approaches of Arab liberals in dealing with the Holy Quran, as well as to warn Muslims not to fall into the pit of their corrupt ideas but to preserve their beliefs and protect their faith in the book that was revealed to the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, which is the Holy Quran. The objectives of this research are to highlight the contemporary intellectual challenges embodied in the emergence of Arab liberals in the Islamic world and to reveal the approaches of Arab liberals to the study of the Qur'an. The researcher used the descriptive method, which is a way of describing the topic to be studied through a correct scientific methodology and depicting the results reached on expressive numerical forms that can be interpreted, then the researcher collected facts related to the opinions of Arab liberals in their writings with studies about them, The second is the inductive method, which is the process of observing phenomena and collecting data about them to arrive at general principles and universal relationships, then the researcher collected this data from the ideas of these liberals and took a holistic conclusion from their approach. After conducting the research, the researcher found the following key findings: The Arab liberals built on the following approaches, namely: Skepticism, Humanisation, Historicism, Negation of Synonymy, and Linguistics in their study of Qur’an.