ABSTRACT

The chapter argues that there is a mild ontological revolution and an epistemological awakening that European Islam is launching through the Muslim Prometheus imagery – following in the path of earlier attempts in Islamic scholarship. This argument is presented as follows: European Islam (1) “rationalizes ethics,” makes the individual and the community of believers as the guardians of the Qur’anic moral cosmology, and in so doing it is (2) “revisionist-reformist,” and (3) “traditional-modern.” European Islam’s claims to defend human agency, the faculty of reason, and endorsement of the values of modernity in the light of religious ethics, without denial of the divine, are the aspects that make it revisionist or traditional, and thus continuous with previous debates in Islamic scholarship.