Formulation of the Claim
The text holds that trustworthy religious reform does not rest on improvisation or repetition, but requires a deep, introspective contemplative theology.
Explanation
Reform begins from within the religious question itself, when the believer and the thinker reflect on meaning, purpose, and limits. What is required is not merely an external adjustment, but an intellectual and spiritual effort that reconsiders assumptions in a calm and profound way.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This idea provides reform with its epistemic and ethical foundation, after the book has revealed the limitations of superficial or slogan-driven reforms. It clarifies that the change required is not complete without a contemplative dimension that revisits concepts from within; it therefore forms a bridge between critique and transformation, and between rational understanding and the spiritual dimension.
Brief Evidence
The obsolete, as the definitions and theories imposed by the positivist historicist school since the nineteenth century have led us to believe. In contrast to it, the fundamental intellectual effort embodied today by the process of rendering Islam—or any other religion—intelligible consists in evaluating matters within a new epistemological perspective. By this I mean evaluating the characteristics of the two major cognitive systems of humanity: the historical system and the mythical system, or the rational system and the imaginary system. We must know the characteristics of each of them and the extent of their complexity; indeed, I go so far as to say that both systems remain intertwined and active within our modern thought itself, even after three centuries of the triumph of rationalism and historicism. By this we mean the extreme rationalism
Related Links
Critique and Ijtihad in Islamic Thought, Where Is Contemporary Islamic Thought?