Islam and Rationality
Intellectual self-isolation and the prospects of constructing a culture – 2
Arab Islamic societies experienced the difficulties of opening up to a contemporary human-focused culture following a near total isolation that lasted virtually nine centuries, without...
Intellectual distortion and societal suicide
After emerging from the long tunnel of time in the aftermath of the First World War, Arab Muslim societies now find themselves standing before two...
Dīn and Dunya and the failure of Arab Enlightenment
It is important that we make a distinction between Islam as a set of teachings, values, principles and legislations and between the reality of Muslims...
Contemporary Islamic thought and chronological alienation
The features of contemporary Islamic thought began to take shape about three centuries following the rise of Islam, that is, roundabout the 10th or 11th...
Our need for Enlightenment thinking
The youth should deepen their reading and culture and at the same time subject all they read and hear to critical evaluation and the application...
Islam in History
Orientalism and the historicization of the Islamic heritage – 1
There is no doubt that Orientalism filled a scientific and intellectual void with regard to the study of Islam. It applied the philological and historical...
The Arabs and Islam – 3
Progress depends on Arabs and Muslims endowing themselves with civilizational values, accepting the Other, having faith in pluralism, and realizing that countries are constructed on...
Arkoun and the defeat of reason in Islam – 1
Right up to the present day, speculation for the Muslims consequently turned into an effective weapon to be wielded against political opponents. One cannot understand...
The Arabs and Islam – 2
If we examine the condition of most Arab Islamic societies at the present day we find that the gap between theory and application, between words...
The Arabs and Islam – 1
The Qur'an, as a civilisational text, intended to turn the Arabs from oral communities to literate communities. But the collective discourse of these communities expressed...
Salafist Discourse
Psychological reflections on the phenomenon of Salafism
Definition of Salafism: Linguistically the term ‘salaf’ means ‘what has passed’. Technically speaking it is a Golden Age which represents the pure understanding and application...
Islamist terrorism: active, or reactive? – 2
In the first part of this essay we presented the main roots that led to the emergence of extremism and terrorism not being attributed to...
‘Umar’s Pact Conditions – A present caged in tradition
Of all the problems that the Islamist textualist trend faces with respect to modernity, one of the most thorny is their constant systematic recourse to...
Only an alternative mindset can defeat ISIS and its ilk
The world has got it wrong in analyzing the causes of its emergence and both qualitative and quantitative expansion. Any in-depth analysis of the hundreds...
ISIS and radical Islamism as sclerotic theology
ISIS has invented nothing for it to be qualified in any sense as ‘sectarian’. Other than its extreme brutality, this group is simply applying to...
Ethical Issues
Textual Islam and the slavery dilemma
The Mauretanian Association for Human Rights’ burnt some books of Mālikī fiqh which they saw as extolling the virtue of servitude and calling for it...
The Verse of the Sword and the jurisprudence of violence
The fifth verse of the Sūrat al-Tawba is considered to be the verse that presents the most problems in understanding the thinking on Jihad in...
Why religious narcissism impedes modernity
The lack of interest in the outside world, and exaggerated admiration for the image of one’s august self is a symptom of narcissistic affliction. The...
Terrorism: a political, military danger or a cultural, ideological challenge?
In 2015 the Carnegie Center for the Middle East published a study entitled Market for Jihad: Radicalization in Tunisia, by the researchers Georges Fahmi and...
Atheism and apostasy in Islamist discourse
The predominant Islamic discourse is not suitable to the nature of knowledge and the challenges of contemporary life. It is, instead, a discourse that lies...
Islamism
Why I do not want an Islamic state or an Islamic law
The terms ‘Islamic state’ and ‘Islamic law’ are modern political terms fashioned by ordinary folk and do not have any religious sanctity to them. The...
Is western civilisation collapsing?
The social component and society's culture that drives it play a great role in the building of a contemporary civilisation. Financial resources from oil may...
Is there a way in for democracy in Arab Muslim societies?
Democracy is a social right for societies who know how to deal with it and understand its laws. But in these societies democracy – much...
Turning back to Ali Abd al-Raziq
In these current circumstances in which the argument of the Islamic caliphate has come to the fore, we may usefully cast our minds back to...
Isis didn’t just fall from the sky
It is evident that the violent ideology - the best examples being the army of the Ikhwan, Juhayman and ISIS - didn't just fall from...
Religious Reform
Diagnosing the Arab Muslim Mentality as a Precursor to Reform
“Why did the Westerners advance and why did we fall behind? Where does the defect lie? How can we undertake reform and advance?” Questions like...
A Manifesto for Reform
Reform is the realization of a radical upheaval. It means the change of mindsets and the cultural frames through which the world is perceived. A...
The reform of religious discourse – fact or fiction?
The call to reform something is itself an implicit acknowledgement of a fault which has prevented it, or well-nigh prevented it, from carrying out its...
Clerics and the asinification of the people
Among us, the insignificant has become great, while the great is laid low, defeat has become victory, the means has become the end, the ignorant...
The case for Islamic reform – 2
‘Modernization from within’ is simply counter-productive and as part of the process of reforming Islam is an epistemological impossibility. Contemporary religious studies have been formed...
The Scriptural Dimension
A stiff-necked God!
Wherever it could, the Qur’ān attempted to break down these fixed immutables among the Arabs. At times it failed and at other times it succeeded,...
The Qur’ān – between the Meccan and Madinan sūras
What is the purpose of the division of the Qur'an into Meccan and Medinan suras? Is this a matter of geography, of the place where...
The meaning of the term ‘Israiliyat’
Islamists have a curious tendency to write off alternative interpretations to theirs as constituting evidence of 'Isrā’īliyāt'. They argue that the purpose of these is...
The Qur’ān and the Hadith – Homo Pervertens
There are many definitions attempting to summarise the essence of being human: a ’thinking animal’, a ‘speaking animal’ and so on. And here it would...
The person and the text – the Prophet and the Qur’ān
It is my long-held view that the Qur’ānic text is an interpretation of divine directives which the Prophet of Quraysh received through his mind and...
The Doctrinal Dimension
The Prophet Muhammad between al-Isra’ and al-Miʽraj
The strange and fantastic tale of the Isra' and the Mi'raj is one that is very similar to the tales and legends of the Thousand...
On the problem of the Prophet’s infallibility – 2
The Sunni jurisprudential field in general accepts the possibility of the Prophets committing venial, not mortal, sins and that they may have omitted or forgotten...
On the problem of the Prophet’s infallibility – 1
The question of divine infallibility in the prophets (and in the imams as well in Shi'ite doctrine) is considered to be a highly controversial issue...
Problematic issues in the biography of the Prophet – 2
The texts of the Prophet’s sīra (biography) contain within them a multiplicity of problems. These related to their late date of composition, lax editorial criteria,...
Problematic issues in the biography of the Prophet – 1
The biography (sīra) of the Prophet Muhammad represents something intuitive for most Muslims in the world today, at least within the general framework of this...