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89

Husein Dozo’s Modern Interpretation of the Qur’an and his Liberal Approach to the Question of as-Salaf as-Salih1

Enes KARI *

Abstract

Hussein ef. Djozo (1912 – 1982) is the most famous Bosnian commentator of the Qur’an in the second half of the 20th century. A er graduation from Bosnian madrasa and Sharia law school, he went to al-Azhar and nished there the faculty of Sharia law. A er returning to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a er his releasement from the Communist prison, he engaged into the activities of the Islamic community during the sixth decade of the 20th century. He was the main author of the Islamic community then, and wrote texts from the eld of Qur’anic studies. This paper shall point out the ways Hussein ozo used the ideas of the al-Manar commentary for the Bosnian context during the socialist Yugoslavia.

I.

Muslim thinking, in particular during the past two centuries, has been power-fully seized by the rst generations of Muslims that is the question of the sala salih. It could be said, in fact, that the sala salih still remains the problem of the renewal, revivalist and reformist-modernist strands of Islam today, and debates about this is-sue are reduced to the issue of the real and e ective treatment of the rst Muslim generations. There is not a single important global ideological Islamic problem of the Muslim world today that is not linked with the manner of the real and e ective treat-ment of the heirs of the rst generation of Muslims.

Hussein e endi ozo belongs to the pleiade of Muslim thinkers who have dedi-cated a substantial element of their thinking to the problem and issue of the rst

1 Hussein ozo was born in 1912, in Eastern Bosnia-Herzegowina (Bare, Goražde). He gradu-ated from Al-Azhar University in academic year 1939-1940. During 1962-1982 ozo was the most outstanding Muslim theologian in Sarajevo and former Socialist Yugoslavia. He was a professor of the interpretation of the Qur’an at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo.

* Hussein ozo was born in 1912, in Eastern Bosnia-Herzegowina (Bare, Goražde). He gradu-ated from Al-Azhar University in academic year 1939-1940. During 1962-1982 ozo was the most outstanding Muslim theologian in Sarajevo and former Socialist Yugoslavia. He was a professor of the interpretation of the Qur’an at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo.

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Muslim generations. The questions that form the heart of Abduh’s tafsir school are issues such as:

– how to treat the praxis of the rst Muslim generations

– were the rst Muslims mujtahids

– If they were mujtahids, is their praxis authoritative for the Islam of later times in all individual ma ers, or should one search for and nd inspiration in the spirit of their acts and methodology?

In many of his fundamental treatises dedicated to the rst generations of Muslims, Hussein ozo shows great interest in them, considering their praxis as tihad of the

rst degree. In his book Islam u vremenu (Islam in the time), ozo states that Qur’anic thought “de facto had only one elaboration and one application”2, that is during the time of the earliest generations of Muslims. ozo further says that that rst, once – for its times – dynamic elaboration, “remained captive to those outmoded, ossi ed forms... for more than a thousand years”.3 At least three important points can be un-derstood from these words of ozo’s:

1) that for ozo the syntagma sala salih meant the generations of Muslims from the rst four centuries;

2) that the generations belonging to the sala salih were the only ones in Islamic history to have an authentic and dynamic tihad;

3) that later times, lasting a thousand years, were “captive to that dynamic elabo-ration of theirs of the Qur’an”.

However, before demonstrating whence Hussein ozo drew this daring opinion of the sala salih, one must consider what sala salih means.

The Islamic syntagma as-salaf as-salih means the “righteous forefathers”, “model predecessors”, “early worthy and valuable generations”. It is interesting to follow the word salaf in Ibn Manzur’s dictionary Lisan al ’Arab.4

The primary and principal idea of the trilateral root salafa and its subsequent verbal and nominal variations consists in the meanings “that which came before and that which was good”, “the good that once occurred and that still showers blessings upon us”.

The syntagma sulafu l-khamri wa sulafatuha means, according to Ibn Manzur, “that which is rst extracted from the grape”. Ibn Manzur adds here that the word sulaf

2 Hussein ozo, Islam u vremenu, p. 163 ibid, p. 164 Ibn Manzur, Lisan al ’Arab, published by Dar al Ma’arif, n.d., Vol. III, p. 2069

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and sulafah in fact mean the must that rst ows from the grape without pressure or ltering.5 Ibn Manzur enumerates the following syntagmata to elucidate the trilateral

salafa: “as salafatu is the rst of all to ow” (as-sulafatu awwalu kulli shay’in usira), “as salafa is the purest and best part of the wine, that is the best wine, or the best part of the grape juice, the must”.6 That best part is obtained without ltering and treading or pressing.7 A er enumerating these and similar linguistic entities, Ibn Manzur con-cludes with the following sentence:

As sulaf and as sulafa is the best part of something (as-sulaf wa as-sulafah min kulli shay’in khalisuhu).8

At the basis of the intention of these classical Arabic linguistic structures one may unmistakably see that the word salaf and the syntagma sala salih are appropriate to the rst generations of Muslims. Following the meanings given above leads to the conclusion that bene t in faith without reciprocation and recompense is obtained from the sala salih. The generations of the sala salih, Ibn Manzur’s explanations sug-gest, are the foremost in Islamic history, its nest part.

Ibn Manzur says that the prayer for the dead in Arabic is, “(Allah), make him our venerable forebear, our model (wa ‘j’alhu salafan lana)”.9

Addressing di erent variants of the syntagma as-salaf as-salih, Ibn Manzur says, “It is said that the phrase salaf al-insan signi es a man’s forebears and relatives who died before him. . .”10

This, says Ibn Manzur, is why the rst generation of tabi’in is called sala salih (wa li hada summiya as-sadru l-awwalu mina t-tabi’ina as-salaf as-salih).11

Ibn Manzur’s de nition of the syntagma sala salih is not the only one. Many authors do not limit the title sala salih only to the rst generation of tabi’in, as the linguist Ibn Manzur does, but consider that sala salih encompasses as a whole the ashab, tabi’in and tabeitabi’in. Certainly, sensu latu the rst four Muslim centuries enjoy the status of sala salih.

There is no need to draw special a ention to the fact that the syntagma sala salih is used in this sense by az-Zamakhshari (d. 1144), Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), as-Suyuti (d. 1505) and others.

5 ibid, p. 20696 ibid, p. 20697 ibid, p. 20698 ibid, p. 20699 ibid, p. 2069 10 ibid, p. 206911 ibid, p. 2069

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II

In Islamic thought today, sala salih is the subject of the most diverse theoretical and practical treatment. The oeuvre of Hussein ef. ozo, who o en refers to this syn-tagma and to the early generations of Muslims, also indicates this in its own way. The treatment of the early generations of Muslims known as sala salih di ers in contem-porary use depending on who is making use of it, with what purposes and, of course, with what consequences, not only theoretical but also practical. Such is the case with the thinking of Hussein ozo.

In principle, it is possible to distinguish two forms of current interpretation of the heritage of the generation of sala salih, their theory and praxis, and to recognize these in ozo’s thinking.

The rst interpretation is of a revivalist nature, where the sala salih are represent-ed as a universal model that must simply be revived and applied, as it is usually said, in every era and everywhere, for Muslims to become happy. Everyone who reads the Muslim apologetic press in Bosnian or even in Arabic knows this phrase about “the Islam that had an answer for everything”, “the Islam that is valid for every time and place” (al-islamu as-salihu li kulli zamanin wa makanin). The word Islam here generally refers to the Islam that was developed/ practiced in the Medina community and the early generations of Islam.

Subsequent generations of Muslims will gain happiness in both worlds if this Medina model is applied, just as it is, “in every time and place”.

This line of thought is represented primarily in the works of Muhammad ibn Abdulwahhab (d. 1792), and, though in a di erent way, in the writings of the Muslim Brothers (al-ikhwan al-muslimun), while Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) also developed it in a particular revivalist theory. In this concept, the history of Islam is divided into the model period and the period of evil innovations (bida’).

Muhammad ibn Abdulwahhab was convinced that it would be possible to recre-ate the authentic Medina community and pure Islam by returning to and restoring the then praxis of the sala salih. It is well known that the followers of Muhammad ibn Abdulwahhab followed his fatwas, essentially inspired by the thinking and philoso-phy of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), on the destruction of all that was bid’a. It was thought, naively no doubt, that the destruction of turbas, tekiyas and zawiyas would reveal the Medina community in all its purity. Of course, this did not come about, however much nostalgia may have been expressed in all this. In that regard, the Wahhabi movement forgot the most important moment facing any restoration, even if purely architectural: that is, that with a distance of twelve centuries it is not possible faith-

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fully to reconstruct the Medina community, however good the intentions, pure the objectives and authentic the isnad, the matn and the transmission in general. It cannot be done simply because there is no one among the living who created the Medina community. That is, what are reconstructed are our Medina community, and not their Medina community.

Muslims encounter this problem everywhere these days, and the ’Abduh school made, without doubt, a major contribution to our being able to go into the future with face turned towards the future and not towards the past, and to being able to enter the fu-ture equipped with the Qur’an, hadith and sunna, together with the dynamic spirit of tihad from all, not just a few, generations of Muslims.

In one of his fatwas, Hussein ef. ozo is critical of the Wahhabi movement, saying:

It is not that simple to assess the results of the Wahhabi movement. The starting point was undoubtedly proper as the intentions likewise. The current situation has essentially demonstrated the need to undertake speci c measures to halt the com-plete collapse and corruption of Islamic thought.

It seems, however, that the exponents of Wahhabism, notwithstanding their con-scientious starting point, their good and honest intentions, were not up to such a com-plex task. They evidently lacked any deep knowledge of life and the laws of its de-velopment. What was perhaps the most tragic for the movement was that it was born and was active in a rather backward and isolated environment (the Najd). The strug-gle for purity of Islamic thought, the fundamental preoccupation of that movement, led to gross extremes. Wahhabi orthodox sheikhs from the Najd, whose knowledge was very limited and composed only of formal knowledge of the hadith, frequently opposed anything that was new. They looked back to the rst centuries of Islam. They were opposed to anything that had arisen during these centuries. They fought against anything new, regardless of whether it was bene cial and necessary or not. Thus they destroyed countless very important cultural monuments. They destroyed all graves, so that today you do not know even the graves of the great ashab and other personalities from the rst Islamic era. They energetically opposed the introduction of anything modern: the telephone, the radio, television, the introduction of secular subjects in school, etc. The resistance to anything new still exists, unfortunately… The Rector of the Islamic university of Medina, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, persists in as-serting that it is a great sin to “believe” that the world spins on its axis and that man can reach the moon.”12

12 Hussein ozo, Fetve (Fatwas), Novi Pazar, 1996, p. 492

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ozo’s criticism of Wahhabi teachings, which gradually transformed themselves into an Islamic ism and are now generally called Wahhabism, is based, as will be seen, on ’Abduh’s and Rida’s de nitions and views of the sala salih from the earliest Islamic period.

Both Wahhabism and the al Manar school recognize the sala salih, but in di erent ways. Wahhabism, as Hussein ozo demonstrates, wants to go backwards into the future. The al Manar school, which ozo belongs to with all his being, wants to take from the sala salih their methodology, the spirit of their decisions, the principles and rules of issuing decisions, but not the speci c decisions of those days.13

Of course, Hussein ozo does not want to leave the impression of a man who unreservedly criticizes Wahhabi Puritanism, but leaves open the possibility that Wahhabi fear of the new was caused by fear of the occupationist ambitions of colo-nial forces.

For this reason he says a li le later,

“Resistance in the Islamic world to external innovations must be considered very carefully. No hasty judgments should be made about this. We frequently err when we describe this resistance unilaterally, and without re ection and deep study, as conservatism or even reactionary. There was some justi cation too in such resistance. Many felt that these innovations, imposed upon them by others, concealed a desire to alienate and corrode their own being.”14

It can be seen here and there in al Manar that ’Abduh and Rida have double stan-dards in their understanding of the Wahhabi movement. In one passage in al Manar they say, although it was later to be proven wrong, that the Wahhabis were the ex-ponents of Islamic reform, that if it were carried out Islam would regain its former glory (Wa qad kanu qa’imina bi islahin islamiyyin law tamma la ‘ada li l-islami majduhu al-awwalu).15

Although ozo (and ’Abduh) retreated to a di erent and more positive view of Wahhabism, ozo remained to the end of his life critical, as only a zealous ’Abduh modernist can be, of the movement. (Rashid Rida (d. 1935), a er ’Abduh’s death, was to join the Sala s and become highly suspicious of modernist reforms based on ’Abduh’s concepts).

13 Dr. Salih ibn Fawzan ibn Abdullah al Fawzan, “Nazarat wa ta’kibat ’ala ma kitab As Sala yya”, published in the magazine “Majallat al Buhusi l Islamiyya”.

14 Hussein ozo, Fetve, p. 49215 al Manar, V, p. 159

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Neither ’Abduh nor his student Hussein ozo were pure Su s, nor even inclined to Su sm, but in their reformist and renewalist thought there are echoes of the Su saying particularly emphasized by Muhyuddin Ibn ’Arabi (d. 1240) when he criti-cized the lifeless isnad cited by the ulema and shari’a lawyers in their writings. All these isnad are composed of the names of dead people, and Ibn ’Arabi’s reaction is “to o er” to Islam and to God the opportunity to speak without isnad. Many works quote the expression:

Ahadtum ‘ilmakum mayyitan ‘an mayyitin wa ahadna ‘ilmana mina l-hayyi lladi la ya-mutu.

(“You have taken your knowledge lifeless from dead people, and we from the Living God who does not die.”)

One may mention in passing that, as already stated, the teachings of the Muslim Brothers goes hand in hand, in many details, with the Wahhabi restoration of the her-itage of sala salih, especially as regards the Qutb version of their ideology. Because Qutb ercely opposed the ulema and sheikhs of al Azhar, who in their time were nonetheless under the strong reformist in uence of Muhammad ’Abduh, it is worth noting that Qutb’s concept of the restoration of sala salih, too, in some ways was similar to that of the Wahhabi. He considers that there is no true Islam without the Islam lived by the Medina community, which in Zilal he calls “the excellent genera-tion of Muslims” (tabaqah mumtazah mina l-muslimin).16 Of course, both in al Manar and in ozo’s writings one may read that all agree that they were true Muslims, but are their practical solutions valid today as the true and only solutions. In fact, are some of their solutions possible at all today?

III

The other use of sala salih is that of the reformists and modernists (islah wa tajdid), and in their view sala salih is an unquenchable source of inspiration for every genera-tion. The chief representative of Muslim reformism is, certainly, Muhammad ’Abduh (d. 1905) and the al Manar school, and in our Balkan region Hussein ozo. ozo has great con dence in such interpretation of sala salih and of the model era of Islamic history.

In ozo’s, which also means in ’Abduh’s, treatment, the sala salih is not the fossil-ized community of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries AH, but the generations of Muslims permeated with tihad and dynamism. This interpretation of sala salih is to be seen in many of the pages of the tafsir al Manar. Both in al Manar and for ozo, the ashab are

16 Sayyid Qutb, Fi Zilali l Qur’an, Beirut, Daru Shuruk, 1984, I, p. 30

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mujtahids ( ozo even classi es almost the entire hadith of Muhammad p.b.u.h. as the tihad of the Messenger of God). Both ’Abduh and ozo praise the shining example of the tihad of the ashab, for example the second caliph Hazrat Umar, who abolished the privileges of the category of muallafah al qulub, and then abrogated the punish-ment for the – amputation of the hand – in times of crisis and instability, and so on. Indeed, ozo persistently repeats these and other examples as examples of tihad and dynamic interpretation, and what is more, as the performance of “true Islam” (al-islamu al-haqiqiyyu).

Like ’Abduh and Rida, ozo considers that tihad is not the privilege of Muham-mad p.b.u.h., the ashab and of the sala salih in general. Ijtihad is a duty for every era. For this reason ozo is suspicious of interpretations of the sala salih as some kind of mystical, privileged generation. For him they are no more nor less than brilliant mujtahids.

Here, then, ozo di ers markedly from the Wahhabi and Ikhwan al Muslimin lines of thought.

It is known that Wahhabi and Ikhwan al Muslimin interpretations of the earliest periods of Islam underline an extremely pessimistic hadith, which states,

“The best generation is mine, then those that come a er it, and then those that follow later”.17

This hadith has been, and remains, the subject of highly diverse interpretations, but the Wahhabi and Ikhwan al Muslimin interpretations may be summarized with the words that the other periods of Islam and later generations of Islam are not at the level of mature Islam such as that of the rst generations of Islam.

Of course, it is not necessary to lay special emphasis on the fact that ’Abduh and ozo are exceptionally critical towards such a pessimistic interpretation of this hadith. This can be seen from the status of the so-called occasions of revelation of the Qur’an ( asbabu n-nuzul) in al Manar, and also from the interpretation of ayat 19 of sura al An’am:

“This Qur’an has been revealed to me that I may warn you thereby, and whom-soever it may reach”. Interpreting this ayat in volume seven of al Manar, Rashid Rida defends the dignity and maturity of the later generations of Muslims too, quoting the hadith “Whomsoever the Qur’an comes to, it is as though he had seen the Messenger” ( man balagahu l-qur’anu fa ka’annama ra’a n-nabiyya).18

17 Hadith quoted according to a passage de ning sala salih in a dictionary of shari’ah legal terminology, Mu’jamu lughat al fuqaha, by Kal’aji and Kanibi, Beirut, 1985, p. 248

18 al Manar, VII, p. 341

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This ayat, in this passage of al Manar, provides Rashid Rida with a great oppor-tunity to see the rst generations or sala salih as the source of tihad. He pities the later generations of Muslims who do not practice tihad with the same intensity as did those model forebears, and says that, where knowledge of the Qur’an is concerned, they turned to blind imitation of the theologians and shari’a jurists (nara l-muslimina qad taraku da’wata l-qur’ani wa tabligahu ba’da as-sala s-salihi, wa taraku al-‘ilma bihi... ila taqlidi l-mutakallimina wa l-fuqaha’i).19

These words mean no less than that the later generations of Muslims may also at-tain maturity by practising tihad in their relation with the Qur’an and hadith. What is important is that the Qur’an is there, is authentic, and has come down to later genera-tions. The ashab are people, and as mortal beings could not come down alive to later generations. As long as there is any Muslim practising tihad, he will have the status of a person “who is as though he has seen the Prophet”; this is the message of Rashid Rida. Hussein ozo says of this:

“As long as the Qur’an was the subject of application in practice, as long as people lived according to its precepts, its thought was alive and was a motive force for the Muslims. We would not want here to sing a panegyric to what that thought brought about, as is usually done. We maintain that it is far more important to see the condi-tion of that thought today”.20

Insistence on tihad today does not mean diminishing the value of the sunna as “one of the fundamental sources of Islamic jurisprudence”,21 says Hussein ozo, con-tinuing,

“No one disputes the importance of the praxis of the Messenger of God and his companions. This is not in question at all . . . But what does that praxis consist of? Does it lie in accepting every individual aspect of that praxis as the nal solution, once and for all, or in acceptance of the praxis as a means of application of Qur’anic thought to the problems of life? This is the essence of the question.”22

On the basis of these words of Hussein ozo, it can be distinctly seen that sala salih is the source of a method of practising tihad, and not the source of nal solutions.

ozo has adopted this line of thought one hundred percent from al Manar, and for him the sala salih was not a madhhab per se, but, as Dr Al Buti would say, “a blessed temporal stage” (marhalah zamaniyyah mubarakah la madhabun islamiyyun).23

19 ibid, p. 34120 ozo, Islam u vremenu, p. 16.21 ibid, p. 1522 ibid, p. 1523 Dr Sa’id Ramadan Al-Buti, As Sala yyun, Damascus, 1988

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When ozo speaks of “captive Islamic thought”, “its stereotyping”, “the decline of Muslims and general backwardness”, “life according to outmoded stereotypes”, and so on, he is always following in the footsteps of an important sentence from al Manar:

Li anna hifza l-mawjudi aysaru min adi l-mafqudi... (“Preserving what already exists is easier than nding what has been lost”).24

One recalls ozo’s texts in which he says that “the old and outmoded stubbornly a empts to hold on, and does not allow the new and progressive to enter the stage”. For this reason Muslims are afraid of boldness in the many faceted eld of tihad, they fear that they risk losing their Islamic identity.

In fact, according to ozo’s concept of Islam, the entire history of Islam is divided into the time of tihad and the time of taqlid, or one might say the cycle of tihad and the cycle of taqlid. These are two powerful forces that seek to impose themselves on the other and are in constant con ict.

Further, when he speaks of the parasitic nature of present-day Muslims at the expense of the already outmoded solutions of the sala salih, one may see in ozo’s words a direct echo of these words from al Manar: “The Muslims received enlighten-ment from the Book of God, but they have replaced that enlightenment with the dark-ness of repugnant taqlid”. 25

There are many passages in al Manar praising the sala salih and their tihad; the sala salih always reached a decision on the strength of argument, their members spoke according to the evidence, seeking arguments and prohibiting the adoption of opinions without strong proof. And then came the generations of khala talih, the generations of corrupt and idle people, who ordained taqlid and prohibited the free introduction of evidence.26

Finally, one cannot but observe that both tafsir al Manar and ozo’s oeuvre (ex-cept for his fatwas) are for the most part expressed in the discourse of generalities and principles.

These principles and generalities largely characterize contemporary modernist Islamic thought, so that the e ectiveness of the commonplaces of reformist Islamic modernism must be seen in practice. It is interesting that the Muslim, and in particu-lar the Arab, political scene of modern times has been chie y and overwhelmingly characterized by socialism of various types, and li le inspired by ’Abduh’s, and still less by Qutb’s, thinking.

This, however, is the theme for another treatise.

24 al Manar, IV, p. 29825 ibid, IV, p. 298 passim26 al Manar, VI, p. 906