While mass religious movements offer moral clarity, society needs thinkers who can engage deeply with science, philosophy, and power, without losing their roots. It needs intellectuals who ask ‘why’ not just ‘how’.
Prof Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi
Every society is composed of different layers of understanding, consciousness, and engagement with reality. Among these, two broad categories are often discussed: common people and intellectuals. While education plays an important role in shaping individuals, it is a serious misconception to assume that every educated person is necessarily an intellectual. Education may provide information, skills, or professional competence, but intellectualism demands something deeper: critical consciousness, philosophical awareness, historical insight, and engagement with the scientific and social narratives that shape the modern world.
The distinction between common people and intellectuals is not a moral one. It does not imply superiority or inferiority in terms of faith, sincerity, or ethical worth. Rather, it is an epistemological distinction, concerned with how people understand the world, how they interpret reality, and how they respond to changing social, scientific, and philosophical conditions.
Common People And Lived Religion
Common people constitute the backbone of any civilisation. They preserve traditions, values, and social continuity. Their understanding of religion is often experiential rather than theoretical, rooted in rituals, inherited beliefs, communal practices, and moral discipline. In religious societies, common people usually express faith through devotion, obedience, and imitation (taqlid), rather than through critical inquiry or philosophical reflection.
This is neither a flaw nor a deficiency. Religion, after all, is meant for all human beings, not only for philosophers or scholars. The Qur’an itself addresses humanity at multiple levels of understanding. However, problems arise when the worldview of common people is absolutised and imposed as the only legitimate understanding of religion, even in contexts that require intellectual engagement with modern realities.
Movements such as Tablighi Jamaat largely operate within the framework of common religious consciousness. They emphasise personal piety, ritual correctness, moral reform, and revival of basic religious practices. Their strength lies in simplicity, discipline, and grassroots mobilisation. For ordinary believers, this approach provides spiritual stability and moral clarity.
Yet, the very features that make such movements effective at the popular level also limit their intellectual scope. Their understanding of Islam tends to be inward-looking, apolitical, ahistorical, and disengaged from philosophical, scientific, and sociological questions of the modern age. This does not make them irrelevant, but it does explain why many intellectuals find it difficult to fully subscribe to their worldview.
Education Is Not Intellectualism
Modern societies often confuse education with intellectualism. Degrees, certifications, and professional success are mistaken for intellectual depth. An educated person may be highly skilled in a technical field yet remain unaware of the philosophical assumptions underlying modern science, economics, politics, or culture. Such a person may function efficiently within a system without ever questioning its moral, metaphysical, or epistemological foundations.
An intellectual, by contrast, is someone who reflects on the ideas that govern society. Intellectuals interrogate dominant narratives, whether religious or secular. They ask uncomfortable questions, trace historical developments, and examine the relationship between power, knowledge, and culture. They are concerned not merely with how things work, but why things are the way they are.
In the modern world, this distinction is especially crucial because modernity itself is a product of philosophical and scientific narratives. Enlightenment rationalism, empiricism, secularism, capitalism, nationalism, and technological determinism did not emerge accidentally. They are outcomes of centuries of philosophical debates and scientific revolutions. Anyone who wishes to meaningfully engage with the modern world must understand these intellectual currents.
The Intellectual’s Task In The Modern World
To be an intellectual today requires familiarity with multiple domains: philosophy, science, history, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies. It also requires awareness of how these domains interact to shape institutions, ideologies, and everyday life. An intellectual cannot afford intellectual isolation, nor can they retreat into a single tradition without dialogue.
At the same time, genuine intellectuals rooted in religious civilisations must also deeply understand their own ethos, theology, law, history, and institutions. Knowledge of Western philosophy or modern science alone does not make one an intellectual in an Islamic sense. Without grounding in one’s own tradition, such knowledge often results in alienation, imitation, or intellectual dependency.
The challenge, therefore, is synthesis rather than rejection. Intellectuals must critically engage modern philosophies and sciences while remaining anchored in their own moral and spiritual frameworks. This task cannot be accomplished by movements or approaches that deliberately avoid intellectual engagement, however sincere they may be.
Why Intellectuals Struggle With Reductionist Religious Movements
Most intellectuals find it difficult to fully align themselves with movements that reduce religion to a limited set of rituals, moral exhortations, or literal interpretations divorced from context. Islam, as a civilizational tradition, has produced theologians, philosophers, jurists, scientists, mystics, historians, and reformers. Any understanding of Islam that ignores this intellectual heritage appears incomplete to the thinking mind.
Movements like Tablighi Jamaat serve an important function at the level of mass religiosity, but they do not address questions of political ethics, economic justice, epistemology, science–religion relations, or global power structures. Intellectuals, whose very vocation is to wrestle with such questions, cannot confine themselves to a framework that discourages debate, critique, or theoretical engagement.
This does not mean intellectuals should dismiss or undermine such movements. Rather, it means recognising the plurality of roles within the Muslim community. Common people need moral guidance and spiritual discipline; intellectuals need conceptual clarity and critical freedom. One cannot replace the other.
Toward A Balanced Vision
A healthy society requires both common people and intellectuals, just as it requires both faith and reason. The danger lies in allowing one category to dominate all others. When intellectuals lose touch with the masses, they become elitist and ineffective. When popular religiosity dismisses intellectual inquiry, society becomes stagnant and incapable of responding to new challenges.
The modern world, shaped as it is by philosophical and scientific narratives, urgently needs intellectuals who are fluent in these narratives yet rooted in their own religious and cultural traditions. Such intellectuals can mediate between tradition and modernity, between faith and reason, between continuity and change.
In conclusion, not every educated person is an intellectual, and not every sincere believer is equipped to interpret the complexities of the modern world. Intellectualism is a responsibility, not a privilege. It demands breadth of knowledge, depth of understanding, moral courage, and intellectual humility. Only through such intellectuals can societies preserve their identity while meaningfully engaging with the realities of the contemporary world.
—Dr Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi (also known as Dr Hamidullah Marazi) is a distinguished contemporary Islamic scholar whose work significantly contributes to the dialogue between Islamic philosophy and modern Western thought. He is the author of several books. Through a rigorous comparative methodology and an emphasis on epistemological integrity grounded in Tawhid (the oneness of God), Marazi critiques secular paradigms and advocates for an integrative intellectual tradition. His scholarship not only critiques Western thought but also calls for mutual enrichment between traditions, emphasising Islamic metaphysics, ethics, and educational reform as central to contemporary challenges.
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