ABSTRACT
LIKE ETHNICITY, religion, too, is often reified and essentialized as if it were the one thing beyond change. Such reifications often serve the interests of religious elites who wish to stem unwelcome social changes, or they may comfort believers who regard their religion as the only thing that has remained the same amidst all the turmoils of urban living, migration, and the multicultural challenge. Nonetheless, while all religions claim to have an immutable core, even the meaning of that core changes as it is reasserted in new circumstances. To repeat the same statement in new circumstances is to make a new statement.1 This is why Aziz
Al-Azmeh’s contention, quoted here, is the only safe starting point. At first sight, this contention must sound shocking, and it may even sound blasphemous to some. Yet we would have no hesitation in applying this statement to the whole range of convictions that people use to guide their moral commitments: There are, quite clearly, as many socialisms, feminisms, commitments to environmentalism, and ideas about human rights as there are contexts that sustain them. Why, then, does it sound so strange to apply the same awareness of different contexts to Islam? Al-Azmeh has two answers to this.
