NCJ Number
123230
Journal
Terrorism Volume: 11 Issue: 5 Dated: (1988) Pages: 357-359
Date Published
1988
Length
3 pages
Annotation
Throughout Islam's history, Islamic scholars and rulers have wrestled with the accommodation of Islamic divine revelation to shifting historic conditions through the application of reason.
Abstract
From its inception, Islam has been in continuous contacts with its neighbors, and successive rulers adopted foreign ideas and institutions from India, Greece, Rome, and Western Christendom. In the modern age, Islam has also adopted Western ideas and institutions. Today, all reformers agree that Islam is threatened by foreign pressures and that Islamic authorities and law should be re-established. Reformers are divided into modernists and revivalists. The revivalists insist that authority and law should comply with the textual sources. The modernists have accepted Western secular standards and paid little or no attention to Islamic standards. The revivalists are not opposed to change, but they do insist that foreign ideas and practices be assimilated within the parameters of basic Islamic concepts. Whenever the modernists move too quickly to adopt reforms without such assimilation, the revivalists resist, some with violence.