On Islam as a faith of Dīn and Dunyā - 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 in the past and in the present. Islam – as a set of rituals and beliefs – has continued to be conscientiously practised, whereas in the teachings of Islam the affairs of this world (dunyā) have not been fully inculcated.
The phenomenon of violence is considered to be multifaceted and incapable of being reduced to a single cause, being generated by a number of psychological, political, social and economic factors. The various causes intersect with one another to varying degrees in preparing the agent of violence. But the common factor behind all these causes is a system of ‘ideas’, or what we might call an ideology, by which the agent may be managed and controlled to the point of being prepared to kill even at the expense of sacrificing himself.
I would like to say something in defence of Orientalists,[1] to counter the widespread defamation of them among intellectuals of traditionalist Islam, the Islamic far right and those who mourn the passing of the religious isolationism of the Hanbalites. For over eight centuries these last have prohibited the teaching of the ‘Greek interloper sciences’ where these touch on the Qur’ān and the Sunna, as if they constituted the two sole, vital conditions for a Muslim to win happiness in this world and the next!
If we make an exception for the efforts of Ahmad al-Qubbanji and Abdolkarim Soroush,[1] everything that has been said about the noble Qur’ān from the death of the Messenger to the present-day has never once gone beyond what antiquity considered to be matters beyond dispute, or beyond its magical perceptions on the world, whereby the Qur’ān appeared to be the ‘word’, ‘language’ and ‘style’ of God, the explanation for its manifestation being one of the following:
The phenomenon of violence is considered to be multifaceted and incapable of being reduced to a single cause, being generated by a number of psychological, political, social and economic factors. The various causes intersect with one another to varying degrees in preparing the agent of violence. But the common factor behind all these causes is a system of ‘ideas’, or what we might call an ideology, by which the agent may be managed and controlled to the point of being prepared to kill even at the expense of sacrificing himself.
I would like to say something in defence of Orientalists,
If we make an exception for the efforts of Ahmad al-Qubbanji and Abdolkarim Soroush,
