OBITUARIES - July 30, 1988

Fazlur Rahman; Expert on Muslim Faith

Fazlur Rahman, 68, one of the nation’s leading experts on the Muslim faith. Rahman, a professor at the University of Chicago, had been the Harold K. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the school’s Near Eastern languages and civilizations department since 1969. Rahman was world-renowned for his modern interpretation of Muslim law. He proposed that the Koran gave broad moral prescriptions that should be adapted as social conditions change rather than used as the basis for a rigid and unchanging system. Those views were called radical by Islamic fundamentalists who believe in a strict interpretation of the Koran. He left his homeland in what is now West Pakistan in the late 1940s and found great success in spreading his philosophy at several universities. The U.S. State Department sought him as an adviser in dealing with Arab nations, and writers called upon him for information and interpretation. He was the author of “Islam,” “Philosophy of Mulla Sadra” and “Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition.” He also wrote “Avicenna’s Psychology,” which described the influence the 11th-Century Arab thinker had on theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Western thinkers. In Chicago on Tuesday of complications related to heart surgery.