One reason for backwardness: prohibiting comparative religion
TO ILLUSTRATE THIS, let us take one example: Is the study of comparative religion allowed in our universities? Religious phenomenology…
Problems in the ‘Arab Renaissance’ – 3
HISTORY, FOR MUSLIMS, proceeds from unity to diversity, “from perfection to imperfection, from pinnacle to base, and from faith to…
A backward Islam – Part 2
ASK THOSE CROWDS the same question: have you read the writings of Muḥammad Iqbal, one of the spiritual fathers of…
A backward Islam – Part 1
THE GROWTH OF religious extremism and its transformation in many cases into acts of terrorism, the suffocation it has caused…
Is religious reform possible?
ALL SECULARISTS RAISING the issue of religious reform as a means to overturn the three decade-long domination of fundamentalism are…
When fatwās turn on science – 2
TUNISIA SUFFERED in the year 1818 from a huge epidemic. Historians report that a doctor of European origin alerted the…
When fatwās turn on science – 1
THERE IS ANOTHER aspect of the Muftī’s transgression of the limitations of a religious fatwā, and this is when he…
Islam, the Arabs and civilization
WHAT, THEN, DO WE mean by ‘civilization’? Civilization is represented, geographically speaking, by a complex human society that demonstrates characteristics…
Can Muslim liberals renew Islam?
THE ARAB MUSLIM WOMAN reverted to the status that she had in the 19th-century – the hijab returned, as did…
Reform: a discourse of intellectuals or a rehabilitation?
YET ARAB AND ISLAMIC history did experience a renaissance prior to that which took place in the West, although it…