How Quaker Reads the Qur’an
Quaker Michael Birkel about his experience of reading Quran.
Quaker Michael Birkel about his experience of reading Quran.
Often the only things people in the West associate with Islam are stoning and hand chopping. These images permeate our culture, from the trailer of hits like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) to straight-to-cable pablum like Escape: Human Cargo (1998) (again, in the trailer… ‘If you can’t live by their rules, you might die by them’). There is no better example of how[Read More…]
In fact, there is no kind of modern criticism of the content of a hadith, there is no type of criticism that I have come across in the modern world of the content of hadith that does not have precedence amongst Muslims. Even Sunni scholars who nowadays are seen as the kind of arch proto-salafis like Shamsadeen ad Dhahabi or[Read More…]
Islam and European knighthood, part 2 The Inner Saracen There is a quite popular plot in some scholastic treatises and different chivalric proses of XIV-XV centuries. Saladin, in that plot, becomes seriously curious about Christianity, even considering to convert to it (or initially with a different purpose), he travels to the West in a company of his former captive, Hugh[Read More…]
My knowledge on this subject is obviously superficial and nothing I say is authoritative. However, in case setting out my understanding of the reasons that Islam is true might help others by communicating the ideas of far better minds than my own, I have done below. First, belief in the single, unitary God of the Abrahamic tradition (Islam, Christianity, Judaism)[Read More…]
Once I came across a YouTube video, representing a selection of engravings by Gustave Dore on King Arthur’s legends on the background of the overture from Wagner’s “Parsifal” — nice artistic work, I really liked it. What grabbed my attention were the comments below: “And now, all this great European culture is been destroyed by Muslims”, declared one; the other[Read More…]
When one passes from the darkness of the kufr to the light of iman, an enormous shift takes place, across an abyss. This is accompanied, in most cases, and it is logical that this is so, by a strong discomfort towards the world of kufr and towards one’s personality prior to the acceptance of Islam. A serious mistake committed by[Read More…]
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf speaks about relations of natural sciences, cosmology and theology.
He (Muhammad) ﷺ does not speak of his own desire. It is no less than an Inspiration sent down to him ﷺ (Surah Najm, 53:3-4) The Qur’an repeatedly commands every Muslim to follow the Prophetic example. The Traditions (Ahadith) of the Prophet ﷺ, often more than the Qur’an, govern Muslim life in their ability to articulate practice of the faith. The[Read More…]
René Descartes (c.1596–1650), was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, and the “father of modern philosophy”. As this title shows, René Descartes is considered one of the greatest and most influential philosophers of all time, due to his contributions to modern Western philosophy and his break from the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy widespread in his day. But were Descartes’ ideas original?[Read More…]
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