Javed Ahmad Ghamidi


Jāvēd Ahmed Ghāmidī is a Pakistani Muslim theologian, Quran scholar, Islamic modernist, exegete and educationist. He is also the founding President of Al-Mawrid Institute of Islamic Sciences and its sister organisation Danish Sara. He became a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology on 28 January 2006, where he remained for a couple of years. He also taught Islamic studies at the Civil Services Academy for more than a decade from 1979 to 1991. He was also a student of Islamic scholar and exegete, Amin Ahsan Islahi. He is running an intellectual movement similar to Wasatiyyah, on the popular electronic media of Pakistan. Currently he is Principal Research Fellow and Chief Patron of Ghamidi Center of Islamic Learning in Dallas, Texas, United States. Javed Ahmad Ghamidi was named in The Muslim 500 in the 2019 and 2020 editions.

Early life

Javed Ahmed Ghamidi was born on 18 April 1951 to a Kakazai family in a village called Jivan Shah in District Sahiwal, Punjab, Pakistan. His family village settlement was Dawud in Sialkot. His father, Muhammad Tufayl Junaydi, was a landowner, involved in medicine and a committed follower of tasawwuf until his death in 1986.
Ghamidi and his two elder sisters grew up in a Sufi household. His early education included a modern path, as well as a traditional path. His father wanted him to have both traditional and modern education, splitting his time between school and learning Arabic and Persian.
His first exposure to traditional Islamic studies was in the Sufi tradition. After matriculating, he came to Lahore in 1967 where he is settled ever since. Initially, he was more interested in Literature and Philosophy. He later graduated from Government College, Lahore, with a BA Honours in English Literature & Philosophy in 1972.
During his excursions to the library he stumbled on the works of Hamiduddin Farahi, a scholar of Quran. In this work he found a mention of Amin Ahsan Islahi, the torchbearer of Farahi's thought. Knowing that Amin Ahsan Islahi was resident in Lahore during those days, he set out to meet him the very day he had first read his mention. The meeting changed Ghamidi from a man of philosophy and literature to a man of religion. In 1973, he came under the tutelage of Amin Ahsan Islahi, who was destined to who have a deep impact on him. He was also associated with scholar and revivalist Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi for several years. He started working with them on various Islamic disciplines particularly exegesis and Islamic law.
In his book, Maqamat, Ghamidi starts with an essay "My Name" to describe the story behind his surname, which sounds somewhat alien in the context of the Indian Subcontinent. He describes a desire during his childhood years to establish a name linkage to his late grandfather Noor Elahi, after learning of his status as the one people of the area turned to, to resolve disputes. This reputation also led to his reputation as a peacemaker. Subsequently, one of the visiting Sufi friends of his father narrated a story of the patriarch of the Arab tribe Banu Ghamid who earned the reputation of being a great peacemaker. He writes, that the temporal closeness of these two events clicked in his mind and he decided to add the name Ghamidi to his given name, Javed Ahmed. Taxila.

Views

Ghamidi's conclusions and understanding of Islam, including the Sharia, has been presented concisely in his book Mizan with the intention of presenting the religion in its pure shape, cleansed from tasawwuf, qalam, fiqh, all philosophies and any other contaminants.
Ghamidi's non-traditionalist approach to the religion has parted him from the conservative understanding on a large number of issues. However, Ghamidi argues that his dissenting conclusions are at times based on traditional foundations set by classical scholars. In his arguments, there is no reference to the Western sources, human rights or current philosophies of crime and punishment. Nonetheless, employing the traditional Islamic framework, he reaches conclusions which are similar to those of Islamic modernists and progressives on the subject.

Jihad

Ghamidi believes that there are certain directives of the Qur'an pertaining to war which were specific only to Prophet Muhammad and certain specified peoples of his times. Thus, Muhammad and his designated followers waged a war against divinely specified peoples of their time as a form of divine punishment and asked the polytheists of Arabia for submission to Islam as a condition for exoneration and the others for jizya and submission to the political authority of the Muslims for exemption from death punishment and for military protection as the dhimmis of the Muslims. Therefore, after Muhammad and his companions, there is no concept in Islam obliging Muslims to wage war for propagation or implementation of Islam.
The only valid basis for jihad through arms is to end oppression when all other measures have failed. According to him Jihad can only be waged by an organised Islamic state, that too only where a leader has been nominated by the previous leader or by the consensus of the ulema if the state is newly established. No person, party or group can take arms into their hands under any circumstances. Another corollary, in his opinion, is that death punishment for apostasy was also specifically for the recipients of the same Divine punishment during Muhammad's times—for they had persistently denied the truth of Muhammad's mission even after it had been made conclusively evident to them by God through Muhammad.
According to Ghamidi, the formation of an Islamic state is not a religious obligation upon the Muslims per se. However, if and when Muslims do happen to form a state of their own, Islam does impose certain religious obligations on its rulers as establishment of the institutions of salat, zakah, and 'amr bi'l-ma'ruf wa nahi 'ani'l-munkar ; this, in Ghamidi's opinion, should be done in modern times through courts, police, etc. in accordance with the law of the land which, as the government itself, must be based on the opinion of the majority.

Gender interaction

Ghamidi argues that the Qur'an states norms for male-female interaction in Surah An-Nur, while in Surah Al-Ahzab, there are special directives for Muhammad's wives and directives given to Muslim women to distinguish themselves when they were being harassed in Medina. He further claims that the Qur'an has created a distinction between men and women only to maintain family relationships.

Penal laws

According to Ghamidi:
While discussing the Afghan Taliban, Ghamidi wrote:

Morals and ethics

Ghamidi writes on moral and ethical issues in Islam. He states:
After faith, the second important requirement of religion is purification of morals. This means that a person should cleanse his attitude both towards his Creator and towards his fellow human beings. This is what is termed as a righteous deed. All the sharī‘ah is its corollary. With the change and evolution in societies and civilizations, the sharī‘ah has indeed changed; however faith and righteous deeds, which are the foundations of religion, have not undergone any change. The Qur'an is absolutely clear that any person who brings forth these two things before the Almighty on the Day of Judgement will be blessed with Paradise which shall be his eternal abode.

Interaction with other Islamic scholars

Like Wahiduddin Khan, Maulana Naeem Siddiqui and Israr Ahmed, Ghamidi also worked closely with Maulana Syed Abul Ala Maududi and Amin Ahsan Islahi. His work with Maududi continued for about nine years before he voiced his first differences of opinion, which led to his subsequent expulsion from Mawdudi's political party, Jamaat-e-Islami in 1977. Later, he developed his own view of religion based on hermeneutics and ijtihad under the influence of his mentor, Amin Ahsan Islahi, a well-known exegete of the Indian sub-continent who is author of Tadabbur-i-Qur'an, a Tafsir. Ghamidi's critique of Mawdudi's thought is an extension of Wahid al-Din Khan's criticism of Mawdudi. Khan was amongst the first scholars from within the ranks of Jamaat-e-Islami to present a full-fledged critique of Mawdudi's understanding of religion. Khan's contention is that Mawdudi has completely inverted the Qur'anic worldview. Ghamidi, for his part, agreed with Khan that the basic obligation in Islam is not the establishment of an Islamic world order but servitude to God, and that it is to help and guide humans in their effort to fulfill that obligation for which religion is revealed. Therefore, Islam never imposed the obligation on its individual adherents or on the Islamic state to be constantly in a state of war against the non-Islamic world. In fact, according to Ghamidi, even the formation of an Islamic state is not a basic religious obligation for Muslims. Despite such extraordinary differences and considering Maududi's interpretation of "political Islam" as incorrect, Ghamidi in one of his 2015 interviews said that he still respects his former teacher like a father.
Ghamidi's thought and discourse community has received some academic attention in the recent past by Pakistani scholar Dr. Husnul Amin whose critical analysis of Ghamidi's thought movement has received academic attention. Amin traces the history of secessionist tendencies within the mainstream Islamism, and its ruptures, and then critically examines Ghamidi's emergence and proliferation in society as an unprecedented phenomenon. Ghamidi's views and discourse on Islam and democracy have also been examined in another cited research paper.

Awards and recognition

In 2009, Ghamidi was awarded Sitara-i-Imtiaz, the third highest civilian honor of Pakistan.

Resignation from Council of Islamic Ideology

Ghamidi resigned in September 2006 from the Council of Islamic Ideology , a constitutional body responsible for providing legal advice on Islamic issues to the Pakistani government. His resignation was 'accepted' by the President of Pakistan. Ghamidi's resignation was prompted by the Pakistani government's formation of a separate committee of ulema to review a Bill involving women's rights; the committee was formed after extensive political pressure was applied by the MMA. Ghamidi argued that this was a breach of the CII's jurisdiction, since the very purpose of the council is to ensure that Pakistan's laws do not conflict with the teachings of Islam. He also said that the amendments in the bill proposed by the Ulema committee were against the injunctions of Islam. This event occurred when the MMA threatened to resign from the provincial and national assemblies if the government amended the Hudood Ordinance, which came into being under Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization. The Hudood Ordinances have been criticised for, among other things, a reportedly difficult procedure to prove allegations of rape.

Public appearances

Ghamidi has appeared regularly on dedicated television programs. His television audience consists of educated, urban-based middle-class men and women between the ages of 20–35, as well as lay Islamic intellectuals and professionals. Ghamidi's religiously oriented audience tends to be dissatisfied with the positions of traditional ulema and Western-educated secular-liberal elite, and find his interventions and ideas more sensible, moderate, and relevant.
Ghamidi has earned criticism from Islamic scholars in Pakistan for his interpretation of certain Islamic values. Some books highly critical of Ghamidi are, Fitna-e-Ghamdiyat by Hafiz Salahuddin Yusuf and Fitna-e-Ghamdiyat ka Ilmi Muhasbah by Maulana Muhammad Rafiq.
In one interview, when asked his opinion about being branded as a liberal, Ghamidi replied that he does not care about such things and his objectives are not affected by such terms.

Exile from Pakistan

Ghamidi left Pakistan in 2010 as a result of opposition to his work. In a 2015 interview with Voice of America, Ghamidi explained his reason for departure was to safeguard the lives of people near him including his neighbours who had begun to fear for their safety. Some of his close associates had already been killed like Muhammad Farooq Khan and Dr. Habib-ur-Rehman. Another close associate who was related to the work of Ghamidi's Risala, Syed Manzoor-ul-Hasan was shot but survived. Ghamidi maintained that his work of education was not affected by his departure because of modern communication. Ghamidi, also regularly appears on Ilm-o-Hikmat, a Pakistani Dunya News show. He has stated his desire to return in the future when circumstances change.
Ghamidi moved to Dallas, Texas, USA as of July 2019, to support establishment of Ghamidi Center of Islamic Learning, an initiative of Al-Mawrid US and an educational institute named after himself.

Publications

Ghamidi’s books include:
Translation by Saleem Shehzad:

Primary sources