"Fortunately, historians are now beginning to recognise the historic role of Islam as a liberating force for peoples oppressed by the burdens of unjust social systems"
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"Fortunately" does a lot of quiet political work here. Aly Khan isn’t merely praising Islam; he’s correcting a narrative, implying that the dominant record has been lazy, biased, or strategically incomplete. By framing the shift as something historians are "now beginning to recognise", he casts his claim as overdue scholarship rather than sectarian advocacy. It’s a deft move for a public servant: change the terms of debate from belief to legitimacy, from theology to history.
The key phrase is "liberating force", paired with a carefully chosen villain: not people, but "unjust social systems". That abstraction matters. It sidesteps naming empires, castes, colonial administrations, or local elites, while still indicting them. It also positions Islam as a practical engine of emancipation - a framework that can dissolve inherited hierarchies and redistribute dignity. The word "burdens" suggests that oppression is not just violent but normalized, built into daily life.
Contextually, this reads like mid-20th-century rhetoric shaped by decolonization and the Cold War competition over moral authority. If Western modernity claimed freedom as its brand, this sentence argues that Islam has its own liberation genealogy, one that predates and complicates Western self-mythology. The subtext is strategic: a call for intellectual respectability and political relevance, insisting that Islam belongs not on the defensive, but in the archive of movements that changed who gets to count as fully human.
The key phrase is "liberating force", paired with a carefully chosen villain: not people, but "unjust social systems". That abstraction matters. It sidesteps naming empires, castes, colonial administrations, or local elites, while still indicting them. It also positions Islam as a practical engine of emancipation - a framework that can dissolve inherited hierarchies and redistribute dignity. The word "burdens" suggests that oppression is not just violent but normalized, built into daily life.
Contextually, this reads like mid-20th-century rhetoric shaped by decolonization and the Cold War competition over moral authority. If Western modernity claimed freedom as its brand, this sentence argues that Islam has its own liberation genealogy, one that predates and complicates Western self-mythology. The subtext is strategic: a call for intellectual respectability and political relevance, insisting that Islam belongs not on the defensive, but in the archive of movements that changed who gets to count as fully human.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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