Early in his classic work, The Call of the Minaret, Kenneth Craig surveys Islam at the current time; I am reading in the third edition published in 2000. In the first section, as he recounts different aspects of the Islamic (and Muslim) encounter with modernity, his thoughts - in many ways - apply to more than just Islam. They speak to the larger encounter of religion with the technological age. (All emphasis added to the quotes below.)
"For these [who see the Shari'ah and tradition as unchanging] there is no option between chronic permissiveness and the strictest literalism. Nor is this simply a male verdit or an authoritarian tyranny. Secreted in the home and behind the veil, Muslim womanhood finds no immolation or feminist restlessness, but devoted fulfillment of authentic Islam in a role positively undertaken. Sociologists may explain the phenomenon as they will. Religion has as great a capacity to resist modernity as to survive it. Only the opinionated would identify which is the truer Islam." (pg 17)
"There are those who cannot find the ancient reality in the new thoughts, others who cannot identify the ancient reality without them. In the strange but indispensable interaction of the faith and the faithful, the structure of belief and the participant believer, Islam and the Muslim, change is absorbed and continuity attained. That it is so is the genius of the partnership." (pg 26)
"Certainly a monotheism so tremendous as that of Muhammed and Islam is through and through a divine-human encounter. As such we must strive to know it. Whenever we study or confess doctrines of God we proceed upon parallel affirmations about humanity. So inseparable are the two realms that every theology is inevitably also a view of the human." (pg 38)
This book came highly recommended to me through the classes on Islam and Christianity that I have taken in the last couple years, and indeed this has the same sort of caring insight that Cragg is known for, being himself Christian but an accepted scholar of Islam. (previous post)
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