Islam and Rationality
Islam and respect for the intellect – 3
The philosopher Ibn Rushd tried to rescue philosophy and wrote his famous work The Incoherence of the Incoherence refuting the views of al-Ghazālī. But unfortunately reason...
Islam and respect for the intellect – 2
English dictionaries define the mind as ‘human consciousness manifested in thought, perception, emotions, will, and memory’. That is, it is the force that enables us...
Islam and respect for the intellect – 1
All religions and beliefs, by their nature, are not subject to the rule of reason because they are a matter of faith, and faith is...
Within the mind
In cases where modern ideas clash and intersect, the mind frees itself from all constraints and all limitations, from mental padding, and restricting control is...
Their women and our women – 2
A Muslim woman's task in life is to take care of, and obey, her husband and not leave her home without his permission. Therefore, there...
Islam in History
Orientalism as an epistemological necessity for enlightenment – 3
The distinctive feature of the Orientalist writers was they were observing Muslim communities at a time and age when it was not possible for Muslim...
Orientalism as an epistemological necessity for enlightenment – 2
It was the questions posed by modernity that brought about the current waves of Orientalism and the Enlightenment. When the mind becomes preoccupied with questioning,...
Orientalism as an epistemological necessity for enlightenment – 1
In the book Al-Nabī al-Khātim by Shaykh Abū al-Ḥasan al-Nadawī – one of the poles of the Muslim Brotherhood and a leader of political Islam – he praised...
The Hidden Origins of early Islam – 2
The foregoing lengthy introduction is a summarisation of some of Lüling's theses and reflects his interest in the historical anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and his hostility...
The Hidden Origins of early Islam – 1
Hidden origins? This is the title of a book by Karl-Heinz Ohlig of the University of Saarland, Germany, who heads a group of expert researchers...
Salafist Discourse
Takfir as an eradicating culture
The issue of takfir (declaring a person an ‘infidel’) is occupying a steadily expanding place in the media and discourse, and in ways that go...
Intellectual pollution or polluted thinking? – 1
Say: Are those who know equal with those who know not? Everything rests on a pillar, and the pillar of the believer is his...
Intellectual pollution or polluted thinking? – 2
This free digression may seem misplaced and off topic, but in reality it is not. What is it, then, this intellectual pollution? It is not the...
A fake Salafism – 3
Salafist thought is a ‘Bedouin viewpoint’ in the history of Islam, something which is incapable of founding a state or establishing a culture or a...
A fake Salafism – 2
Islam has known, throughout its long history, multiple interpretations from which various schools of jurisprudence and fundamentalism arose. Each school had its intellectual and actual roots...
Ethical Issues
Shaykh al-Azhar and the ‘rules’ on beating women
The debate on violence against women in Egypt returned after a female parliamentarian proposed a law to criminalize spousal violence, a phenomenon which – staggeringly...
Islam and the concepts of mercy and revenge
We must first define Islam according to the dictionary: Islam is a proper noun, denoting those who adhere to the religion of Islam. The word ‘islam’ means showing...
In what way are Muslims ‘defeated when they abolished slavery’? – 2
From a scientific point of view, and particularly physiologically, there is no difference between an Arab woman and a Byzantine woman captured by Muslim armies...
In what way are Muslims ‘defeated when they abolished slavery’? – 1
On the website Sudan Online an Islamist wrote an essay entitled ‘How Muslims lost by abolishing slavery.' Its author bemoaned the divine good deeds that Muslims were...
The rights of the child in Islam – 1
We must admit at the outset that when Islam emerged the rights of the individual were not as they are now. The individual was a...
Islamism
The Islamist fantasy of an economy
In our previous essay The Islamist fantasy of a state we touched on the claims of advocates of political Islam about their Islamic project, and discovered that it...
The Islamist fantasy of a state – 2
It is surprising to find those who call for political Islam and the Islamic state claiming that such as state will be one of freedom...
The Islamist fantasy of a state – 1
From the beginning of the middle of the last century, Islamists and advocates of political Islam have come out with dreams of returning to the...
Why don’t we live a ‘Norwegian Islam’?
I don’t know who it was that spread the joke that the developed countries of Northern Europe, which rank first in quality of life, governance...
The emergence of political Islam – 4
Is there an influence from 'Wahhābī Salafism' on political Islam? If the reform project advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood may be considered the dominant intellectual...
Religious Reform
No to the prevailing interpretations of the faith
Conditions in the Arab world are bad, actually very bad. It is plagued by a religious and tribal culture that has for centuries wiped clean...
Jurists: “We must perfect religion” – Qur’an: “We have done that” – 2
3 – The Bayt al-Māl system. Any social system needs a financial economy compatible with the needs, capacities and members of this society. When the...
“It is forbidden to show mercy to a non-Muslim”
How can this be said by anyone who calls himself a Muslim? A divine Sunna recognises neither substitution nor change according to the Qur'anic verse:...
The crisis of Islamic thought: Hadith science as an example – 2
It has already been said that the consolidation of hadith as itself constituting the religion and the relegation of the Qur’ān practically to the status...
The crisis of Islamic thought: Hadith science as an example – 1
One of the things I have observed in the so-called ‘science of hadith’ is that every religious group and Islamic trend now sports its own...
The Doctrinal Dimension
Islamic myths – Yajuj and Majuj – 2
In the Torah, just the name Māgōg ( מָגוֹג ) is mentioned in the Book of Genesis, which is the first book of the Torah...
Islamic myths – Yajuj and Majuj – 1
The Qur’ān mentions Yājūj and Mājūj (Gog and Magog) as corruptors and that Dhūl-Qarnayn asked the people who had complained of their corruption to appoint...
On the jihad of captive women
Let us first acquaint ourselves with the definitions of sabī and jihād. According to the dictionary sabī, jurisprudentially speaking, is the amassing of combatant infidel enemy women and children...
The mysteries of Sahih books and the myths of jurists
The Sunna relies on the books of the Ṣaḥīḥ hadith, which they consider the most sound and reliable books after the Qur’ān, especially the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī and the Ṣaḥīḥ of...
Myths of Islamists – The ‘Sahih’ Hadith Collections
One of the means used to lead the herd that follows them is the use of parallel texts attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad and turned...
The Scriptural Dimension
Prayers on the Christians as ‘infidels’ – 1
Costi Bendaly the author of الله والشر والمصير (‘God, Evil and Destiny’) says in the margin of chapter VI, p. 231 of this work: “A few years...
The beginnings of the printed Qur’ān – 2
The Cairo text is often at odds with manuscript evidence. This may have been expected, since the Cairo project was not so much about text restoration so...
The beginnings of the printed Qur’ān – 1
The widespread belief that the Qur’ān has a single, unambiguous reading is partly due to the confidence of the translators, who rarely expressed any doubts...
An Aramaic and Syriac reading of the Qur’ān – 2
The author of the book The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran affirms that he put aside all the previous theories put forward by Orientalists or Arab scholars...
An Aramaic and Syriac reading of the Qur’ān – 1
In 2000 a book by the German orientalist Christoph Luxenberg was published in which he presented a new reading of the mysterious passages contained in...