Islam and Rationality
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...
Intellectual self-isolation and the prospects of constructing a culture – 1
With the defeat of the culturally backward Ottoman state in the First World War Arabic Islamic societies began their difficult, fitful attempts at awakening and...
A critique of the Muslim mind
One of the negative aspects of confusing the invasion of imperialism with modern civilisation is the emergence of a narrow barrier between ourselves and humanistic...
Intellectual castration and the training of society
The ability to think logically, and thus maintain a logical intellectual productiveness capable of altering reality in a direction beneficial to mankind and his society,...
The need to strengthen the culture of difference
The failure to tolerate the legitimacy of denominational difference has led political authorities to engage in acts of expulsion, marginalisation, confinement and distortion, in acts...
Islam in History
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 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...
In praise of Orientalism!
The image of Orientalism has become tarnished in the Arab world. Yet European scholars, whether they were Orientalists or not, applied the same scientific methodology...
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...
Salafist Discourse
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...
Islamist terrorism: active, or reactive? – 1
Merely tapping on the shoulders of political and religious leaders in the Muslim world and claiming that what is happening now has nothing to do...
Ethical Issues
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...
On the punishment for Apostasy
Neither in the Qur'an nor in the mutawatir hadith is there any mention of a this-wordly punishment for one who apostatises from his faith. The...
Islamism
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...
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...
Religious Reform
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...
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 case for Islamic reform – 1
The reform of Islam today is both essential and possible; what is lacking is political courage. It is true that the age of the religious...
The revival of religious discourse – the missing human dimension
One of the consequences of the absence of the human dimension among the exponents of the religious discourse is that our societies are placed at...