Islam and Rationality
The historical relationship between faith and science
Islamic societies in particular and Arab societies in general passed through a dark period lasting for hundreds of years. Since the fall of Baghdad, the...
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...
Islam in History
‘The Best Centuries’ – How should we understand history? – 2
There is a question that takes priority over all other questions, and this is the isnād – the ‘train of transmission’ of hadith – an axiom taken...
‘The Best Centuries’ – How should we understand history? – 1
Heritage may be considered a sea that those who do not know how to swim will drown in or surrender to everything that floats on...
Spotlight on falsified history
The following are some general illuminations about the texts of the historiographers. In the Islamic heritage the account of wars and invasions were written by...
Myths of Islamists – The asceticism of the Companions
Among the stories and narrations repeated and chanted by the Islamists are tales about the asceticism of those they term the Companions: how one of...
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...
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 Hijab is a political slogan – 2
There is need for a different approach to thinking about the issue of hijab and female dress. Any campaign for the liberation of women in Muslim societies...
The Hijab is a political slogan – 1
The topic of hijab is the largest example of a sub-issue in the Islamic religion that has been turned into a central issue for political, social and...
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...
Religious Reform
The rights of women to religious spaces
Equality between human beings without distinction on the basis of sex, race or class is one of the core values of the Islamic religion, and...
The borderlines between the religious and the mundane
Every day, one becomes more convinced that the world today is being changed by science, knowledge, the means of communication and new technology, and by...
Awakening the humane in faith
Man as the 'caliph’ of God is the light of God in the world. If man disappears as the caliph the light of God is...
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...
The Doctrinal Dimension
The Islamic view on the Hebrew Old Testament
Non-Muslims generally see Islam as a political-religious movement, built entirely on a holy book – the Qur’ān – a book of paramount and fundamental importance...
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...
The Scriptural Dimension
The Qur’ān according to critical research – 15
Recent research confirms that the Qur’ān was widely distributed among the Arabs because of the spread of churches, monasteries and monks who transmitted the Bible...
The Qur’ān according to critical research – 14
The lack of scientific curricula for the study of religion in Arab and Islamic schools and universities, in the way that these exist Western countries,...
The Qur’ān according to critical research – 13
The first codices of the (Judaeo-Christian) Qur’ān were those compiled by the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwān and Al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf al-Thaqafī, for the purpose...
The Qur’ān according to critical research – 12
As for what is mentioned in manuscripts and non-Islamic heritage concerning the authors of the Qur’ān, perhaps the first to write on this was Saint...
The Qur’ān according to critical research – 11
The student of the Qur’ān will be confronted with the following facts that we discussed in our previous articles. The first of these is that...