A critical decolonial reading of liberation, in the Islamic Liberation Theology, works of Asghar Ali Engineer, Shabbir Akhtar, Farid Esack and Hamid Dabashi

Abstract: This thesis will specifically examine four scholars who self-identified with the term “Islamic Liberation Theology” starting from Asghar Ali Engineer in 1979. The idea was further developed in the works of Shabbir Akhtar (1991), Farid Esack (1997) and Hamid Dabashi (2008) who all analyzed the conception of liberation theology in Islam and explicitly claimed that their texts engaged in developing an Islamic Liberation Theology. What makes Islamic Liberation Theology unique in varying currents of Islamic thought and activism is its emphasis on a politics of poor. The critical conversations in the thesis were engaged with at an intersection between social theory, decolonial studies, Islamic thought and Liberation Theology. There are two major phases in the history of Liberation Theology; one is the critique of developmental politics from a Marxist perspective and the other is the decolonial turn in Liberation Theology after the Cold War. This decolonial Islamic Liberation Theology occurred explicitly in tandem and in alliance with a decolonial turn in Liberation Theology in a wider sense. Later I will argue that there are five broad organizing principles or minimum foundation in the Islamic Liberation Theology. 1) A critical liberatory reading of Islamic texts, thoughts and history. 2) The emphasis on praxis as in Esack and Engineer’s work or the lack thereof in Akhtar and Dabashi’s work. 3) A preferential option for the oppressed, marginalized, dominated, colonized and the minority. 4) A theology of pluralism and the willingness to keep the conversation with the "Other". 5) The broader agreement on the colonial matrix of power in understanding the violence of the world. Concomitant with this is a rejection of vacuous castigation of subjective and visible dimension of violence in favour of more radical critique and understanding of systemic and institutional violence. The historiography of decolonial Islam renews the modern/postcolonial historiography of Islamic Liberation Theology and replaces the place of Islam in the global configuration of power of coloniality. The social analysis is derived not from decolonial Liberation Theology alone but also from decolonial Islamic thought. The place of Islam is the major difference between a more general decolonial Liberation Theology and a iv specifically decolonial Islamic Liberation Theology. Decolonial Islam also differs from decolonial Islamic Liberation Theology in one important aspect. The preferential option for the poor is an absent dimension in decolonial Islam. The experience, action and thought of the poor in the Global South is the first site of the emergence of a decolonial Islamic Liberation Theology. It is a struggle and process oriented theology of liberation that fundamentally emerges from the experience of the poor in the Global South.Ph.D. (Religion Studies