Progressive, Enlightened Voices from the Arab World
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...
There is a law in physiology that says that any organ in the human body, if not fully used, decays. When men imprisoned women at...
The ‘scholars’ of Al-Azhar have occupied themselves so much with the jurisprudence of al-walā’ wal-barā’, menstruation and postpartum that Khomeini called them ‘scholars of menstruation and the...
The child is born with his mind a blank page devoid of letters and ideas. His parents and his community then write the first lines...
The Mu‘tazila was an Islamic theological sect that emerged in the late Umayyad period in the city of Basra and flourished during the ‘Abbāsid era. The...
Another example as amazing as transparently exhibiting the same cunning and opportunism, was that of Imām ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib before the Committee of Six...
When you read the history of the Rightly-Guided Caliphate looking for the relationship of religion to the world, you come across what are one hundred...
If there was literature in verse-form (poetry) would there not also be prose literature? And if it did exist, why has not record of this reached us?...
Many scholars consider the early history of Islam to be a ‘black hole.’ We know that the writing and recording of history relies mainly on...
The qibla to which the Prophet of Islam turned towards is Petra, not Makka in the Hijaz. The proof of this is that all of the mosques...
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...
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...
When I hear the term ‘they have been slandered’ I feel my neck, for it means that they have been added to the groups that...
In the arena of the sacred, the orchestra of fundamentalist political Islam plays even now an ancient melody in auditoria designed to combat tedium, as...
So much of what we do now on a daily basis was in the past forbidden by Sharī‘a and much of what we see as...
The god of the Qur’ān set legislation and punishments for Muhammadan Islam to apply to the people, and Muhammad and his Companions actually did apply...
The pious Muslim jurist Yūsuf Qaraḍāwī named all non-Muslims with every moral defect that he enumerates one by one, in order to show the differences...
Some highly stubborn psychopathic neurotic symptoms have afflicted the moral values of Muslims with death, and these are a set of assumptions whose truth is...
The Muslim jurists have distorted the saying of the Most High:“Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion.” There is no doubt in my...
The takfir of Christians and Jews is a traditional issue that is part of a ‘parallel religion’ of declaring others ‘infidels’ and has nothing to do with...
Islamism differs from contemporary Salafism, which is in all respects a fundamentalist current. Salafism originated in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the 1920s. It...
Antoine Milot conducted a study on the origin, differences, and predictions of political Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, which I would like...
Islam is a religion. But is not just a religion, but one of the greatest religions known to humanity in history, if not qualitatively in...
The definition of separating religion from politics means separating religion from the state, meaning that the dilemma between the two groups – the fundamentalist and...
‘Islamic secularism’ is a term both shocking and fearful for many clerics as well as some of the more romantic-minded liberals. It is a new...
If Islam is a set of spiritual and moral values that call for justice, equality, peace, righteousness, charity, mercy, compassion and symbiosis, something which we have known since...
Islamic feminists believe that religion, any religion, is not as is commonly believed a source of oppression for women, and their evidence for this is...
The early nineties of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a global feminist and Islamic movement at one and the same time. This trend...
It is indisputable that the collision of the Arab world's conservative Islamic heritage with Western colonial civilisation over the past two centuries, and the exposure...
This year marks the thirty-eighth anniversary of the martyrdom of Professor Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, whom the Muslim Brotherhood, clerics and jurists together conspired to have...
What we know, and what we are told by the audio-visual media and social media, is that Islam is a religion of freedom, love, tolerance,...
On the al-Kināna website, an article by Sawsan Maḥmūd takes up the same theme, denying the existence of sexual relations in Paradise. Here is an extract: BY...
The subject of the ḥūr al-‘ayn (‘the wide-eyed beauties‘) occupies a large space in Islamic belief, and opinions about them are contradictory. The shaykhs of Islam –...
The underlying text – erased or wiped – of one of the San‘ā’ manuscripts contained the same spelling without diacritic dots. So how did the...
The present theme presents models and case studies that shed light on the approaches, mechanisms and methods of the slippery apologetic, reverential mentality, as it...
There is no doubt that long before the advent of Islam writing was the primary means of preserving and documenting contracts and covenants, and what...
Whenever there was a change in the legal status of the components of the Muslim community, an equivalent amendment had to be made to reflect...
The impact of the highly changeable, reverential, apologetic mentality, has been dangerous and devastating for the Islamic intellectual and cognitive system, due to its annihilation...
There is a hadith which runs: “Most of the people of Paradise are idiots” (weak-minded). This in itself is a saying that one cannot believe...
The function of the intellect should never be by-passed, nor should things that are not compliant with reason and logic be incorporated and dressed in...
