Rational Religiosity: Its Concept, Characteristics, and Obstacles

Summary

This engaging, beneficial lecture is of great significance. The esteemed reader will discover important approaches, novel renewal attempts, and serious insights relating to the topic of rightly-guided religious observance, and the forms of deviation from it. Dr Issam al-Bashir treated the subject matter with comprehensive study, dexterously navigating its broad extents, studying, accepting and rejecting others’ notions, critiquing and exercising creative juristic reasoning, as he expansively elucidated its facets, specification, and characteristics. He described rightly-guided religious observance as a balanced, moderate observance, linked to God, free of extremism or negligence, comprehensive of human life, mirroring the Divine Revelation’s moderation, in harmony and in tune with innate nature (fiṭrah); a religious observance that constructs life, grounded on the ethos of achievement, effectiveness, and practice cognisant of actuality, considerate of a phased and gradual trajectory, and of God’s Natural Laws in universe and society; one distinguished by positivity, in that it is constructive not destructive, living the present, looking forward to the future, benefiting from any good from the past and welcoming the beneficial new, eased by scholarly opinions (fatwa) and delivering good news through the call to Islam (da‘wah), open to other civilisations without assimilation; a religious observance that raises the Muslim nation’s actuality from the realm of fair existence to the realm of active testimony through creed in harmony with innate nature, ritual worship that drives civilising effort, intellect guided by revelation, knowledge connected to faith, ethics that elevate the human being, body sustained by spirit, family that protects the individual, and legislation that secures the public interest.
The lecturer then turned to explaining the ten deviances manifesting in religious observance, in understanding linked to practice, and ritual worship linked to delivery of Islam’s message; these being: bogus observance; deficient observance; ‘pick and choose’ observance; absented observance; reversed observance; superficial observance or that of appearance and image; contentious religious observance (thriving on disagreement); suicidal observance (beginning with labelling of apostasy, and ending in committing atrocity); enthralled religious observance; reclusive religious observance; and defeatist religious observance.
Dr Issam concluded his lecture by emphasising that departing the bounds of true rightly-guided religious observance is a distortion of Islam’s image, as the Noble Qur’ān will not regain its central place in our souls, and may not have the profound, comprehensive, balanced and effective impact, unless we are able to extract this holistic map of natural universal laws that the Qur’ān draws for human life, and then engaging with it in a comprehensive, profound, balanced way, regulating our entire life in light of its requirements.