ABSTRACT
One of the most sensitive issues raised by a contextualist approach, for many Muslims, is the question of how this approach might lead to changes in the legal or theological positions arrived at by pre-modern Muslim scholars. Such positions for many Muslims still are equivalent to “fundamentals” or “fundamental principles” (asl, pl. usūl) of Islam, and must remain unchanged. Often, arguments in favour of a contextualist approach are countered with assertions that a contextualist approach goes against such fundamentals and therefore is an unwarranted approach to the Qur’an. However, from a contextualist perspective, the approach is a principled approach that does not go against the fundamentals of the religion, and in fact, there are enough safeguards in the approach to avoid it being categorised as relativism.
