Fazlur Rahman and the Recalcitrant Everyday

Fazlur Rahman (1919 – 1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important scholars of Islam. An advisor to Ayub Khan’s military regime, he was eventually driven out of his native Pakistan in 1968 following a series of “controversies” and the unceremonious reception of his book, Islam. This essay suggests that Rahman’s ambiguous relationship with Muslim modernism, as well as the character of his time in Pakistan, might be clarified by reconstructing his attitude towards what the editors of this section call “the everyday.” Though it was a category he never used himself, I suggest that Rahman’s identification of Islam with “the social order,” his preoccupation with the persistent question of “the masses” and their “day-to-day actual”, as well as his development of the idea of a “living Sunnah” can be understood as ciphers for “the everyday” in his thought. These entangled concepts are read with reference to Rahman’s own complex political philosophy as it developed in the middle of the twentieth century as well as the historical context of early Pakistan and the itineraries of Muslim modernism itself. I want to suggest that Rahman’s fixation on such concepts and his arrival at “the everyday” emerged from his study of two diremptions or struggles in the history of Islam: the conflict between philosophy and theology, and the relationship of law to ethics. It was in the specific context of Pakistan that he thought these twin splits could be resolved or repaired. The idea of “the everyday” ultimately functioned in Fazlur Rahman’s thought as an exit; a way of repairing a fissure and escaping violence.