History Of The Golden Time In Islamic History

The golden time in Islamic history, according to a majority of Muslims, was the time of the prophet Muhammad and the first few generations that followed him. However, moving further away from that golden time, the Muslim world began to fall behind the West, that is Europeans, who began to gain more and more strength and power as time progressed. This lead to some of the intellectuals in Muslim community to question why this was happening. How can the Muslim world return again to time when they were prosperous? It became clear that something had to change, a reform was urgent. The attempt at reformation came in two waves. Both, the first and the second generation reformers, wanted to go back to the root of Islam.

The golden time in Islamic

The first generation reformers argued for adopting European ideas and finding ways through these ideas to demonstrate a return to the true roots of Islam (). They didn’t propose creating innovations, just wanted to find ways to incorporate the European ideas that would reflect what was already there in Islam. The second generation reformers were opposed to copying the Europeans at all or copying the interpretations by previous generations of main Islamic sources such as Qur’an. As Rahmen writes about one of the second generation reformers, “ [Abduh] called for a Qur’an-centered life to replace tradition, a Qur’anic theology to replace scholastic deliberations.” (Rahmen, 49) Their approach to returning to the roots of Islam was to reexamine, reinterpret Qur’an using rationality to find answers to modern issues. They believed that this text has answers to contemporary problems, and it only needs to be looked at from a different perspective to answer them. The previous generations, of course, didn’t have to deal with contemporary problems and for that reason couldn’t have interpreted Qur’an to solve such problems. The second key difference is that the first generation reformers were focused primarily on the Ottoman citizen, while the second generation reformers were focused on all Muslims out there no matter where they lived. In other words, the first generation reformers were