CHAPTER 8
The Ulama and Contestations on Religious
Authority
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Introduction
Issues of religious authority are central to debates and contestations on varied
facets of Islam in the modern world. How are the Islamic foundational texts –
the Quran, the reported teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith) and,
in the case of the Shia, the teachings of the imams – to be interpreted? What
qualifi cations are most suitable to interpreting these texts, as well as others
widely recognised as sources and repositories of legal and ethical norms?
What is the scope of legitimate interpretation when it comes to discerning the
will of God from the texts He has made available to the people? How do the
juridical methods, the exegetical discourses, and the theological doctrines of
generations of earlier scholars impinge on, assist or impede renewed efforts
to discern God’s will and to put it into practice? What does it mean to put
God’s will into practice, and under whose guidance might this be attempted?
What role does the state have in authorising religious discourses, shaping
religious institutions and demarcating the sphere in which religious practices
take place?
These questions of religious authority are not necessarily peculiar to the
Islamic tradition, though it is with reference to Islam that I will consider some of
them in this chapter. Nor, indeed, are they unique to modern and contemporary
Islam. Such issues had arisen, and been extensively, if inconclusively, debated
long before the massive political, economic and intellectual transformations that
Muslim societies have undergone since the nineteenth century. The authority
of the Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, was scarcely uncontested before the
emergence of the college and university educated ‘new religious intellectuals’
(cf. Crews 2006: 27, 92–142).^1 Conversely, the ulama’s claims to authority have
not ceased either to be put forth or, in particular contexts, to be infl uential, even
in the face of serious challenges from a host of rivals. The contexts in which
they have articulated and defended their authority are radically different from
anything seen in earlier times, however, and so, therefore, are some of the ways
in which claims to authority are put forth as well as the ambiguities that attend
upon them. Before we explore the signifi cance of these changed contexts, it is
worth briefl y considering some facets of the long history of debate and contesta-
tion on questions of religious authority.