Islamic modernism: a legitimate part of a historical tradition of islamic thought

The topic of this paper is Islamic modernism, an important school of thought within modern Islam, a source of inspiration for various current progressive movements and individual intellectuals across the Muslim world. A brief introductory definition of Islamic modernism with the description of its place in the context of traditional Islamic thought is followed by an example of three noteworthy representatives of this tendency to illustrate the typical feature of Islamic-Modernist argumentation: the return to the essential sources of Islam, namely Qur’¯an as theWord of God (All¯ah) to enable the reinterpretation of certain deeply rooted norms of traditional approach to this religion and its legal system. My point of departure is a thesis that Islamic modernism is a fully authentic ideological direction within the framework of the broad historical tradition of Islam and that those Western scholars, who used to claim that any and all modernist tendencies in Islam were formed exclusively by Western liberalism, were wrong. This paper is a part of broad research of Islamic modernism focusing especially on its Egyptian branch