Share this:

Ijtihad, Rethinking Islam

Sunday, Mar 29 2009

Is the idea of New Age Islam merely a restructuring of an unhealthy faith?
Does New Age Islam then not become a creation of Man and no longer a theology inspired by God? The question is that your site seems to defend Islam only on select passages of good intention, such as God creating us to get to know one another and so forth, but what of the other passages of malice? If your goal is to create a New Age Islam, does that imply that you ignore some aspects of the faith and apply others? It comes down to this: is Islam inspired by God or not? If God is perfect and the Koran is perfect, then why has Man found so much fault with it? … This isn’t some attack on Islam. You call on your readers to think. Here I am thinking. — Scott Bowen —— This seems a very honest and sincere question from an avowed non-believer in any faith. Readers are invited to think and express themselves on whether we should be engaging in Ijtihad and seeking to understand the relevance and practicability of some controversial aspects of our faith in the present New Age. This brings us back to the question of those belligerent verses in the Holy Quran, asking us to kill the non-believers wherever we find them. Only the enemies of Islam and the Jihadis own them as relevant and meaningful and binding on all Muslims for all times and in all situations but the rest of us too do not want to disown them and yet we claim to be a peaceful religion fit to be allowed to live in peace and in close proximity to others. Do these verses continue to provide us guidance today in the present situation and are they binding on us today? And if that is so, is the rest of the world justified in being afraid of us? Are we encouraging Islamophobia of the world by owning bellicose verses of the Holy Quran as our guide unnecessarily today, verses which provided us necessary and appropriate guidance in a certain situation in the 7th century A D., but clearly are no longer relevant in the present situation? Should we explain to the world that the Holy Quran is not a book that was revealed in one session, but is a collection of verses that were revealed to the Prophet (PBUH) at different times over a long period to guide us to tackle both universal questions of spirituality and day to day problems facing the community in those initial days and the relevance of these latter verses in the present age has to be judged by us individually and collectively on merit in case of each verse before we come to a conclusion if they are our guides in the present situation. Setting the agenda for a New Age Islam is clearly not just about the relevance or irrelevance for us today of the bellicose verses of the Holy Quran. There is a whole host of issues that we have to rethink and reconsider in order to be able to live in peace not only in relation to other religious or non-religious communities but also with and within ourselves. But certainly the issue of clarifying our stand on these war-like verses is the most urgent. Are they still relevant or are they now obsolete as our guide in this New Age is the question that brooks no delay. – Sultan Shahin, editor, New Age Islam
13 Comments	More..

Share this:

Radical Islamism & Jihad
How Abd Al Wahhab turned a great religion like Islam on its head?
It is difficult to understand how a single rough Bedouin from Nejd, one of the most impoverished areas of central Arabia, could turn a great religion like Islam on its head. …Mohammed Abd Al Wahhab, born about 1703, not only redefined Islam in a puritanically narrow and intolerant way but injected into it such a virulent hatred for its perceived enemies that this vicious creed could revive again and again after being repeatedly wiped out to rise like a phoenix and become the single greatest threat to world peace today. Wahhab demanded total surrender to the Supreme Being Allah disallowing any ceremonies, including ceremonies for marriage or death, or worship of any saints, adorning of graves, tombs or other sacred objects, holding religious processions and wanted all Muslims to wear simple clothes without colours or ornamentation and demanded the total suppression of women. He denounced art, music and dance though he permitted obedience to spiritual guides or `pirs’. — Murad A Baig
7 Comments	More..

Share this:

Spiritual Meditations
Humanistic Approaches in Gita and Quran
The fundamental principles of religion and ethics are quite the same in both Holy Books Islam, as enunciated in the holy Quran, is all for international understanding and unity of mankind for the great purpose of realization of human destiny. It does not recognize any barriers of racialism and all such aggressive ‘isms’ which are affronts to human dignity and worth, as the holy Quran regards men as the best creation. The message of Islam is that they should all go back to the true faith which may be designated Deen (religion), or Islam (surrender and submission to the will of God). The root Slm in Arabic means “to be in peace, to be an integral whole.” From this root comes Islam, meaning to surrender to God’s law and thus to be an integral whole. It asserts that religion does not teach that man should hate man. The object of religion is to increase love and unity among human beings by the recognition that “we are all the children of the one and only God.” This is Humanism. The message of Islam, as depicted in the holy Quran is the “unity of mankind under the fatherhood of God.” It is opposed to all forms of grouping –– racial, national, sectarian, or other. This then is the True Path, and for this we ask God’s grace. The right path is essentially one of sympathy and love for those human beings who are most in need of them – the orphan, the slaves, the deprived, those who are poor or those who are lonely. Having minutely gone through the Gita and the Quran, one may easily realize that both these sacred volumes are so similar in their intrinsic nature that they stand as a neck-vein to each other. Truly speaking, a true believer of 7th and 8th verses of the 4th chapter (Jnanayoga) of the Gita as well as the 48th verse of the Quranic Surah “Al-Maidah” will find no point of dissimilarity between these holy volumes. Both of these scriptures intend to establish religion on a firm footing for the protection of the virtuous, for the destruction of the evil-doers and for restoring order and peace in the society. The fundamental principles of religion and ethics are quite the same, in all respects in both. The similarity between the Gita and Quran extends on a larger scale, as most of the verses of the Quran were preached under similar circumstances in which the Gita was preached. — Dr. Debabrata Das
2 Comments	More…

Share this:

Islamic Society
What Muslims Really Want: Life in The Hereafter or Here and Now?
Are these poor Muslims not orthodox because Islamic organisations have not tried hard enough? The truth is that neither Jamaat-i-Islami nor Jamaat-i-Ulema-i-Hind is keen on advocating fundamentalist lifestyles. They have no interest in sponsoring madrasas that teach only Arabic and the Quran. Instead they have set up schools that provide secular education, and there is one such even in Naroda Patiya where Hindu violence was at its worst in 2002. These schools are not a ruse for Islamic organisations, or clerics, to pump religious fervour into Muslim kids. On the contrary, these Muslim institutions are clear that they want the boys and girls in their care to learn secular sciences and skills and heave themselves out of parental poverty. The curricula in these schools are so designed that they conform to the requirements of the state education board. There would be some religious instructions in these institutions, but they would be on the side, and a minor matter. — Dipankar Gupta
	More..

Share this:

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad
Terror and its roots in sexual frustration
I am as convinced as one can be about these things — that the impulse to terror in our times has its roots deep down in sexual frustration. I have observed, read about and have been peripherally acquainted with the young men who turned to Islamicist terror in Britain in recent years. Living in Britain one recognises the type. Even if one didn’t know these namak harams who are brought up, fed, housed and educated at the expense of the British tax-payer, what can one make of the motives of ugly young men who load a car with home-made explosives and attempt to blow up a night club? One may even distinguish between these losers and the 4,000 British citizens, the majority of them from Mirpuri immigrant backgrounds, who go to Afghanistan to fight American and British troops. One may understand the motives of a person who feels he should go and join Hamas in Gaza and shoot rockets into Israel, though one may wonder at his ignorance of the fact that there are enough people doing that anyway and it’s not the cleverest choice of revolutionary strategy. The fellows who want to bomb, in their own words “the bitches that drink and dance” at the night clubs of London — what sort of ideological commitment are they demonstrating? Are they setting out to prove some twisted Freudian thesis about cultural repression and sexual frustration finally breaking out in this rage of powerlessness? — Farrukh Dhondy
	More..