Gents and Ladies.
It is my belief, that Islam is a faith of reason and intellect rather than a faith of ritual and conformity. Our rituals will/can and should change according to time. There has been a movement in Islam to reject hadiths altogether since there are many contradictory hadiths and their authenticity is suspect.
The movement started in Sunni Islam and its adherents are called Quranists. One of the controversial aspects that Quranists purported was that rituals were man made therefore should be subjected to change. The article below is from Dawn.com about one of earliest proponents of the theory.
As a young man, Ghulam Ahmed Parvez would frequently wonder: why is the unvarying practice of Islamic rituals by Muslims not creating more upright men?
He would repeatedly ask why all this ritualism isn’t creating the kind of a society that Islam’s holy book talks about.
He would often be advised by his worried elders to keep his inquires to himself. But Parvez continued to study the Quran and other Islamic literature under various religious scholars to look for answers to all that was perturbing him. He then went on to bag a Master’s degree from the Punjab University in 1934.
Ghulam Ahmed Parvez was now on his way to becoming one of the most well-informed and prolific Islamic scholars in South Asia. When he migrated to Pakistan in 1947, he rapidly rose to become a prominent figure on the rationalist sides of the Islamic discourse in the country.
Consequently, he also became a controversial thinker who would often clash with the traditionalists and the so-called obscurantists until the early 1980s when he finally slipped into a state of disillusionment and self-doubt, passing away as a broken old scholar in 1985.
What would our society have been like if Ghulam Ahmed Parvez’s unique message had not been rejected half a century ago?
In the 1930s, after mastering the works of some of Islam’s leading scholars and texts, Parvez moved towards studying the faith’s esoteric strains, such as Sufism.
He also managed to strike a friendship with famous poet and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal, and took him as a mentor.
His relationship with Iqbal helped the young Parvez come into contact with Muhammad Ali Jinnah — the future founder of Pakistan.
Impressed by the young man’s intellectual energy and prowess, Jinnah asked Parvez to edit an Urdu weekly, Tulu-i-Islam — a magazine Jinnah’s All India Muslim League had begun to use to fend off the attacks Jinnah and his comrades would face from orthodox clerics and anti-Jinnah Islamic parties who accused him of being a ‘fake Muslim’.
In one of his editorials, Parvez claimed that Islam (unlike other monolithic faiths) was not supposed to be an organised religion. He maintained that Islam’s holy book is a philosophy that goes beyond rituals and that anything practised or believed by Muslims that was outside the holy book was a fabrication.
According to Parvez, a majority of Muslim traditions were concocted by forces who wanted to portray the faith as being amoral and violent.
Parvez had become a prominent ‘Quranist’ — someone who rejects any Islamic text that was not part of the Quran.
Understandably the orthodox clergy and scholarship labelled him as a ‘heretic’, but Jinnah insisted that Parvez was to be the one to edit Tulu-i-Islam.
One of the first cover features to appear in the magazine (under Parvez) was titled, ‘Mullahs have hijacked Islam.’ In it Parvez lambasted conservative Islamic parties and the clergy as being ‘agents of rich men’ and the enemies of the well-being and enlightenment of common Muslims.
After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Parvez became part of the Muslim League government but retired in 1956 to concentrate on his scholarly work.
In 1961 Parvez created an uproar of sorts in the ranks of the orthodox Islamic scholars when he attempted to popularise the saying of the Muslim prayers (namaz) in Urdu, a language he said most Pakistanis understood (unlike Arabic).
In the 1930s, modern Turkey’s founder, Kamal Atta Turk, had already attempted to introduce prayers and the call for prayer (aazan/baang) in Turkish. Parvez wanted to repeat the experiment in Pakistan with Urdu.
Though Parvez’s idea was initially supported by the Ayub Khan regime (1958-69), the government soon backed out when Parvez was vehemently attacked by conservative religious parties and scholars.
Undeterred by the criticism that was being continuously hurled towards him by religious parties and conservative Islamic scholars, Parvez kept emphasising and propagating his views through a number of books and lectures.(More on the article)