Fazlurrahman, modernism and historicism

With the decline of the İslâmîc world in the second half of the 18th century, Muslim scholars and intellectuals presented some ideas in social, political and religious fields in order to prevent this bad course. The aim of these efforts of intellectuals was to identify and solve the problems of the Muslim society and to return İslâmîc institutions to their former glory. Some of the movements to resurrect the İslâmîc community turned from being personal to organized movements. As one of the products of these efforts, İslâmîc Modernism emerged with the thesis of finding solutions to the problems faced by Muslims based on the main sources of religion. One of the contemporary İslâmîc movements, the father of the idea of modernism is the Pakistani thinker Fazlurrahman. Fazlurrahman is an innovative academic who has received both traditional and modern education, closely follows the issues of the Muslims and tries to find solutions. He attracted attention with his work called Islam and became the focus of negative criticism. Fazlurrahman's path to İslâmîc modernism; He described it in three steps as first revivalism, new revivalism and classical modernism. After these steps, textual modernism and historicist modernism, which Fazlurrahman introduced as the main İslâmîc modernism and which are divided into two branches in terms of their approach to the Qur'an, come. Textualist modernists argued that the textual meanings of Qur'anic verses are universal and can be adapted to current events. Historical modernists, on the other hand, said that in order to understand the provisions in the Qur'an, it is necessary to know and understand the conditions of that historical period. The idea of İslâmîc modernism, which he based on Fazlurrahman and his ideas, has been subjected to many criticisms. The essence of the criticism is the thesis that İslâmîc modernism is not based on a solid intellectual foundation. It is one of the most directed criticisms of İslâmîc modernism, where İslâmîc modernism originates from the West and takes its ideas from circles that want to wear down Islam. This study consists of four parts: In the first part, we tried to explain Fazlurrahman's life and ideas, in the second part, the concept of modernism in the West and İslâmîc modernism, in the third part textualist and historicist modernism, which are the two branches of İslâmîc modernism, and in the fourth part, Fazlurrahman's criticisms of modernism and historicism. Keywords: Modernism, Fazlurrahman, Islam, Historicism, Qur'an, Tradition.