Dr. Rashid Shaz

H.E. Dr Rashid Shaz is an ISESCO Ambassador for Dialogue of Culture among Civilizationsand a professor of English at the Aligarh Muslim University, India. Widely known as pioneer of the ‘New Dialogue’, Rashid Shaz has produced some ground breaking works on Islam from an interfaith point of view. His bookUrdu: کونوا ربایین ‎serves as an interfaith introduction to Islam in which he emphasises that the rabbania is the sum total of Islam, an ideological identity that embraces all the submitters to one God, especially the sublime souls among the people of the book. It was in this backdrop that in 2008 he released in Monaco an important founding document “Calling for a New Dialogue between Islam and Christianity”. Dr. Shaz has also revived and taken up further the long frozen debate on shibh-ahle-kitab. In his magnum opus ادراک اسباب تراجع الامۃ(۲ مجلد) he takes up the issue from the point where Al-Baironi and Shahrastani had left. In 2004, he motivated many enlightened intellectuals in Abrahamic traditions to debate the common issues on futureislam.com.

He has been in the public arena for almost two decades. In 1992 while Oslo Peace Accord was in the air, he went on a peace mission to London and Washington DC to convey to the policy makers in these capitals about the Muslim sentiments on Jerusalem. In 1994 Dr. Shaz launched from New Delhi a weekly newspaper Milli Times International that ceased publishing in the year 2001. The year 2004 witnessed the birth of yet another journal FutureIslam.com, this time an electronic one and in four major languages; English, Urdu, Arabic and Indonesian. In 2005, under the aegis of futureislam.com he organized a major event in London on “Muslim Ummah: What Shall We do Now?”. Some of his books have been ground breaking and pioneered a new thinking as the Islamabad based journal of Ijtihad has projected him among a few living voices of modern ilm al-kalam and some scholars at the Imam university have projected him as pioneer of a neo-rationalist school in Islam. He rejects both the nomenclatures, though. FutureIslam.com, the journal that he edits and which is being revived after the suspension of three years, is regarded today as one of the most respectable forums of civilizational dialogues and Reform Islam as acknowledged by Amirpur & Amman in their German book Der Islam am Wendepunkt: Liberale und konservative Reformer einer Weltreligion, 2006, Verlag Herder, Germany. Recently, Robert Reilly, an American thinker, has written a whole new book The Closing of the Muslim Mind to support his contention. He writes: “in ‘Reinventing the Muslim Mind’, a contemporary Indian leader of reformist thought, Rashid Shaz states: "those eager to make a new beginning must accept beforehand that the traditional mind will lead them to nowhere…This book, then, is an effort to understand the journey that Sunni Islam took to nowhere.’’

Professor Rashid Shaz condemned silence of Aligarh on lynching incidents, Shaz has faced fatwa against him issued by Darul Uloom Deoband