Reformist Muslims in Contemporary America
Authors: Tanriverdi Serhan 
Published: March 2020

In the last two centuries, Muslims have made efforts to reform Islamic tradition and thought. Reform attempts have often focused on the advancement of the Islamic tradition and reconfiguration of Muslim thought and practices in light of changing sociopolitical circumstances and human knowledge. Reforming Islam has been a particularly central focus since Muslims’ direct encounters with modernity in the early 20th century. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (b. 1838–d. 1897), Muhammad Abduh (b. 1849–d. 1905), Muhammad Rashid Rida (b. 1865–d. 1935), and Fazlur Rahman (b. 1919–d. 1988) are the prominent figures of the reformist trend in recent history. Since the 1990s, an increasing number of Muslims have migrated to the United States, and rising Muslim populations have led to the emergence of reformist Muslim intellectuals there. Many of these reformists are professors or public intellectuals working at American institutions, and they come from different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. Reformist American Muslim intellectuals should not be considered as an entirely and internally homogenous group; instead, it should be seen as an umbrella term covering various critical reconstructivist approaches to the Islamic tradition and modernity in the context of the United States and globalization in the last three decades. These thinkers call themselves “reformists,” “progressives,” or “critical Muslims” in their works. Referring to them as “reformist American Muslim intellectuals” was preferred for this article because they live and work in the United States and want change, but they are not advocating for revolution or radical social upheaval. Instead, reformist Muslims mainly focus on building democratic, pluralist, and ethical theories or practices from a Muslim perspective while prioritizing the development of indigenous Islamic arguments for their agendas and ideas. Thus, their intellectual projects often simultaneously challenge (a) apologetic, exclusivist, premodern socio-legalistic thoughts, and epistemologies promoted by Muslim fundamentalists, Islamists, and traditionalists; and (b) Western-centric, secularized, reductionist views found in some popular Western discourses. Ultimately, reformists attempt to deconstruct the hegemonic assumptions of (neo)orientalist perspectives and dogmatic discourses about Muslims in order to reconstruct democratic, pluralists, and just interpretations of the Islamic tradition for the sake of contemporary Muslims. The themes of reformists’ writings reveal a correspondence to the sociopolitical issues of contemporary Muslims in the West and the global scene. For example, reformist Muslims’ writings have focused on themes such as the critique of traditional Islam in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 and the resurgence of radical groups, extremist ideas, and authoritarianism in Muslim communities. Thus, reformist Muslims often focus on debates about Islam’s compatibility with modernity and democracy, the role of religion in public life, human rights, religious freedom, pluralism, and gender justice. As a result, reformist Muslims in the United States can be seen as a continuation of Islamic modernism that started in the 19th century in the Islamic world but has been significantly shaped by the conditions of the modern American society and circumstances of Muslims. In other words, it is reasonable to say that reformist Muslim discourses do not emerge or exist in a vacuum. Thus, their writings can be seen as the production of a dialectical engagement between Islamic tradition and modernity at large.