Reza Aslan Quote
Yet al-Afghani rarely spoke of Islam in religious terms. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Islamic political thought was his insistence that Islam, detached from its purely religious associations, could be used as a sociopolitical ideology to unite the whole of the Muslim world in solidarity against imperialism. Islam was for al-Afghani far more than law and theology; it was civilization. Indeed, it was a superior civilization because, as he argued, the intellectual foundations upon which the West was built had in fact been borrowed from Islam. Ideals such as social egalitarianism, popular sovereignty, and the pursuit and preservation of knowledge had their origins not in Christian Europe, but in the Ummah. It was Muhammad’s revolutionary community that had introduced the concept of popular sanction over the ruling government while dissolving all ethnic boundaries between individuals and giving women and children unprecedented rights and privileges.
Yet al-Afghani rarely spoke of Islam in religious terms. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Islamic political thought was his insistence that Islam, detached from its purely religious associations, could be used as a sociopolitical ideology to unite the whole of the Muslim world in solidarity against imperialism. Islam was for al-Afghani far more than law and theology; it was civilization. Indeed, it was a superior civilization because, as he argued, the intellectual foundations upon which the West was built had in fact been borrowed from Islam. Ideals such as social egalitarianism, popular sovereignty, and the pursuit and preservation of knowledge had their origins not in Christian Europe, but in the Ummah. It was Muhammad’s revolutionary community that had introduced the concept of popular sanction over the ruling government while dissolving all ethnic boundaries between individuals and giving women and children unprecedented rights and privileges.
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About Reza Aslan
Aslan has worked for television, including a documentary series exploring world religions on CNN called Believer, and served as an executive producer on the HBO drama series The Leftovers. Aslan is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the International Qur'anic Studies Association. He is a professor of creative writing at University of California, Riverside, and a board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).