Muslim Scholars Quotes

It is for Muslim scholars to study the whole history of Islamic science completely and not only the chapters and periods which influenced Western science. It is also for Muslim scholars to present the tradition of Islamic science from the point of view of Islam itself and not from the point of view of the scientism, rationalism and positivism which have dominated the history of science in the West since the establishment of the discipline in the early part of the 20th century in Europe and America.

Brilliant Muslim scholars applied Qur’anic insights to spark the medieval Islamic Golden Age filled with a mind-boggling outpouring of creativity in science, math, medicine, fashion, philosophy, economics, mental health therapy, architecture, art, and beyond.

Infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world - wrote reams of commentary [after 9/11]. Their articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago; about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violent. These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew.

An Islamic university...structure is different from a Western University; [its] conception of what constitutes knowledge is different from what Western philosophers set forth as knowledge; [its] aims and aspirations are different from Western conceptions. The purpose of higher education is not, like in the West, to produce the complete citizen, but rather, as in Islam, to produce the complete man, or the universal man.... A Muslim scholar is a man who is not a specialist in any one branch of knowledge but is universal in his outlook and is authoritative in several branches of related knowledge.

A Muslim scholar is a man who is not a specialist in any one branch of knowledge but is universal in his outlook and is authoritative in several branches of related knowledge - Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas

I felt like the Islamic scholar Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), who said on his return from a trip to Europe to his homeland Egypt 'I saw no Muslims in Europe but I saw a lot of Islam,' and of his homeland 'There are a lot of Muslims here but no Islam.

Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity.

I constantly sought knowledge and truth, and it became my belief that for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge.

There are many lay people and scholars alike, both with and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its seventh-century Arabian origins. Apply twenty-first-century science, logic, or humanistic reasoning to it and it falls apart. They believe this is why Islam has always relied so heavily on the threat of death. Question Islam, malign Islam, or leave Islam and you will be killed. It is a totalitarian modus operandi that silences all dissent and examination, thereby protecting the faith from ever having to defend itself.

The myth of the Islamic Golden Age The medieval philosophers and thinkers who dedicated their lives to science and philosophy, who stood up to Islam and paid a dear price for rejecting its teachings and discrediting its founders are currently introduced as Muslim scholars.

A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality.

My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States.

Islam’s all about knowledge, right? Muslims know everything. We seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. We seek knowledge even if it be in China, Yusef, EVEN IN CHINA! And we’ve reduced our religion to fuckin’ academics. The guy who knows Islam best is the one who really hits the books hard, learns his shit. Muslims brag about having no priests but we’re getting molested by scholars. Yusef Ali, books are not Allah. Even a book by or from Allah is not Allah.

Based on the experience of history and civilization of mankind, which is more important for Muslims today, to no longer busy discussing the greatness that Muslims achieved in the past, or debating who first discovered the number zero, including the number one, two, three and so on, as the contribution of Muslims in the writing of numbers in this modern era and the foundation and development of civilizations throughout the world. But how Muslims will regained the lead and control of science and technology, leading back and become a leader in the world of science and civilization, because it represents a real achievement.

Muslim scholar Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) wrote, “Every branch reverts to its root.

The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never “lost” to be somehow “recovered” and “transmitted” by Islamic scholars, as so many academic historians and journalists continue to write: these texts were always there, preserved and studied by the monks and lay scholars of the Greek Roman Empire and passed on to Europe and to the Islamic empire at various times.

It is a common misinterpretation of Islamic intellectual history to say that Muslim scholars made scientific discoveries but then failed to follow up on them, so the torch of learning passed to the West. This is to read the empirical methodology and practical goals of modern science back into the intellectual methods and spiritual goals of the wisdom tradition. The goal was not to establish a fund of transmitted knowledge which other scientists could imitate and build upon and from which technologists could draw for practical ends. The goal was to discover the truth for oneself.

It is a sad commentary on the state of Muslim scholarship that Ibn Khaldun remained a virtual nonentity until he was discovered by Orientalists. Now that he has their stamp of recognition, many scholars - excepting Arab racialists and the extreme orthodox - have entered into a competition to see whose encomiums are the loudest

Muslim scholars have clarified that two basic conditions must be fulfilled for the acceptance of righteous deeds. Firstly, the intention must be to perform those deeds for Allah’s sake alone, without any showing off or desire to gain praise or fame. Secondly, such deeds must be performed in accordance with the Sunnah of Allah’s Messenger (sa)

The great scholars of Islam were often endangered not by Mongol hordes or infidel Christians but, instead, by homegrown religious orthodoxy.

The decadence which did occur in the Islamic world belongs to a much later period of Islamic history than is usually claimed. This fact would be fully substantiated if the integral history of Islamic science and civilization were to be written one day. Unfortunately to this day such a detailed history does not exist and moreover much of the scholarly work that has been done in this field has been carried out by Western scholars who have been naturally primarily interested in those aspects of the Islamic sciences that have influenced the West. It remains the task of Muslims scholars and scientists to look upon the whole of this scientific tradition from the point of view of Islam and the inner dynamics of Islamic history itself.

From the time of the birth of the madhabs around the second century until now, an overwhelming majority of the Umma (Muslim nation) has been following them. In fact, for hundreds of years, there was not a single Scholar worth the name except that he belonged to one of the madhabs including Al-Shaykh Ibn Taymiyya and his most famous student Ibn Al-Qayyim who were both followers of the Hanbali school.

Islam, however inadequate, was the only source of ethics and stimulus for political mobilization. And al-Afghani also presciently saw that a totally secular society- the dream of nineteenth-century rationalism- was doomed to remain a fantasy in the West as well as in the Muslim world. As he concluded in his response to Renan: The masses do not like reason, the teachings of which are understood only by a few select minds. Science, however fine it may be, cannot completely satisfy humanity’s thirst for the ideal, or the desire to soar in dark and distant regions that philosophers and scholars can neither see nor explore.

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

By the end of the eleventh century,” Edmond said, “the greatest intellectual exploration and discovery on earth was taking place in and around Baghdad. Then, almost overnight, that changed. A brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali—now considered one of the most influential Muslims in history—wrote a series of persuasive texts questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and declaring mathematics to be ‘the philosophy of the devil.

When Ala-ud-din Khilji, a fourteenth-century Muslim ruler in India, wanted to overtax his wealthy Hindu subjects, he was dissuaded by his top scholar because doing so would violate the property rights recognized by Islam.

The Christians’ “exaggerated fear of sex” continued until modern times, whereas Islamdom remained more sex-friendly until, again, modern times. Even the more conservative scholars of the Shariah had written about “women’s right to sexual pleasure.

The Prophet ﷺ said, “The most beloved people to Allah are those who are most beneficial to the people. The most beloved deed to Allah is to make a Muslim happy, or to remove one of his troubles, or to forgive his debt, or to feed his hunger. That I walk with a brother regarding a need is more beloved to me than that I seclude myself in this mosque in Medina for a month. Whoever swallows his anger, then Allah will conceal his faults. Whoever suppresses his rage, even though he could fulfill his anger if he wished, then Allah will secure his heart on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever walks with his brother regarding a need until he secures it for him, then Allah the Exalted will make his footing firm across the bridge on the day when the footings are shaken.”19

It is therefore obvious that as late as the fifteenth century there was by no means a scholarly consensus on the status of Qur’an 2:256 and that the most influential commentators of the pre-modern period continued to maintain the normative applicability of this verse.

The latter interpretation is obviously more tenuous, but only if one believes in the doctrine of abrogation. Surah 2:116 and 16:101 of the Quran both apparently teach that Allah can cancel older sections of the Quran with newer ones. Traditionally, Muslims developed a field of Quranic exegesis called “the abrogator and the abrogated” in which they strove to determine the criteria and history of Quranic abrogation. Some Muslim scholars taught that up to five hundred verses of the Quran no longer apply because later verses abrogated them. Other Muslim scholars taught that as few as five verses were abrogated.

Two of the most famous Baghdadi scholars, the philosopher Al-Kindi and the mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, were certainly the most influential in transmitting Hindu numerals to the Muslim world. Both wrote books on the subject during al-Ma'mun's reign, and it was their work that was translated into Latin and transmitted to the West, thus introducing Europeans to the decimal system, which was known in the Middle Ages only as Arabic numerals. But it would be many centuries before it was widely accepted in Europe. One reason for this was sociological: decimal numbers were considered for a long time as symbols of the evil Muslim foe.

It was common among Muslim scholars to discuss the delicate balance between hope and fear. If one is overwhelmed with fear, he enters a psychological state of terror that leads to despair (ya’s)— that is, despair of God’s mercy. In the past, this religious illness was common, but it is less so today because, ironically, people are not as religious as they used to be. However, some of this is still found among certain strains of evangelical Christianity that emphasize Hellfire and eternal damnation. One sect believes that only 144,000 people will be saved based on its interpretation of a passage in the Book of Revelations. Nonetheless, an overabundance of hope is a disease that leads to complacency and dampens the aspiration to do good since salvation is something guaranteed (in one’s mind, that is). According to some Christian sects that believe in unconditional salvation, one can do whatever one wills (although he or she is encouraged to do good and avoid evil) and still be saved from Hell and gain entrance to Paradise. This is based on the belief that once one accepts Jesus a personal savior, there is nothing to fear about the Hereafter. Such religiosity can sow corruption because human beings simply cannot handle being assured of Paradise without deeds that warrant salvation. Too many will serve their passions like slaves and still consider themselves saved. In Islam, faith must be coupled with good works for one’s religion to be complete. This does not contradict the sound Islamic doctrine that “God’s grace alone saves us.” There is yet another kind of hope called umniyyah, which is blameworthy in Islam. Essentially, it is having hope but neglecting the means to achieve what one hopes for, which is often referred to as an “empty wish.” One hopes to become healthier, for example, but remains sedentary and is altogether careless about diet. To hope for the Hereafter but do nothing for it in terms of conduct and morality is also false hope.

Islamic tradition does not recognize such presumptuous and conceited preoccupation as "reviewing", which is now widely practised among scholars who regard highly this legacy of the Western tradition modern scholarship. a Muslim scholar, with the work of another before him, would either - according to Islamic tradition - refute it (radd), or elaborate it further in commentary (sharh) as the occasion demands. there is no such thing as "reviewing" it, whether the "review" is termed as such or as any other term which describes it. If there are petty mistakes they turn a blind eye to them; if there are obscurities they explain them in commentary - they polish a positive work and make it shine.

the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today. Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian.

Ibn Rushd's writings were translated into Latin and Hebrew by European scholars. There soon appeared super-commentaries on his commentaries. Many of the writings exist only in these two languages, the original Arabic writings being long lost. This itself is a commentary on the extent to which Ibn Rushd, as a rationalist philosopher, was able to influence the mood of his times

I found it remarkable how many esteemed Muslim thinkers had philosophized at such length about precisely how much female skin could be bared without causing chaos to break out across the landscape. Of course, almost all these thinkers agreed that once a girl reaches puberty, every part of her body except her face and her hands must be covered when in the company of any men who are not immediate family, and at all times outside the home. This was because her bare skin would involuntarily cause men to feel an uncontrollable frenzy of sexual arousal. But not all thinkers agreed on exactly which parts of a woman’s face and hands were so beguiling that they must be covered. Some scholars held that the eyes of women were the strongest source of sexual provocation: when the Quran said women should lower their gaze, it actually meant they should hide their eyes. Another school of thought held that the very sight of a woman’s lips, especially full ones that were firm and young, could bring a man into a sexual state that could cause his downfall. Yet other thinkers spent pages and pages on the sensual curve of the chin, a pretty nose, or long, slender fingers and the tendency of some women to move their hands in a way that attracted attention to their temptations. For every limitation the Prophet was quoted. Even

Bistami watched his fellow scholars around the fire in the evenings, intent on a point of doctrine, or the questionable isnad of a hadith, and what that meant, arguing with exaggerated punctilio and little debater’s jokes and flourishes, while a pot of thick hot coffee was poured with solemn attention into little glazed clay cups, all eyes gleaming with firelight and pleasure in the argument; and he thought, these are the Muslims who make Islam good.

By digging up the buried tradition of women scholars, Akram has prepared the ground for radical social change. For Muslims, the Islamic past is not just a source of interest for historians but a blueprint for the present. Precedent, not innovation guides the devout on how to live and behave. So Akram's discovery of these women scholars isn't simply an interesting bit of long-buried history, but a quietly eloquent argument for changing the status quo.

The direct translations from the Greek enjoyed by Western scholars contrast with the twice-removed translations used by the likes of the Córdoban Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”) and the Persian Ibn Sina (Latinized “Avicenna,” from the Greek Aβιτζιαvoς), which were Arabic translations made by Christian scholars from Syriac translations also made by Christian scholars from those classical Greek texts preserved by the Greek scholars of the Christian Greek Roman Empire.

In fact, the term Byzantine Empire was invented in 1557 by the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf, who as a Protestant would not have been sympathetic to Eastern (or Orthodox) Christians, to indicate that these culturally Greek people of the Eastern Roman Empire were not Romans, and somehow not even Greeks. His scholarly decision may also have been influenced by the fact that the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and his successors had claimed the name Roman for itself.

Scholars still debate whether Jinnah’s equally adamant insistence on a full Pakistan was a bluff. An influential school of thought holds that the Quaid always intended to settle for a united India, after he had extracted as much power and autonomy as he could for himself and the five “Muslim” provinces. The League leader was perfectly rational, Liaquat told Mountbatten: he understood, or could at least be persuaded to understand, how fragile and unworkable a shrunken Pakistan would be.79

There is absolutely nothing divine about the Shariah and in no way can it possibly be considered fixed and infallible. The argument that the Shariah derives its divine nature from its first and primary source, the Quran, falls flat when one recognizes that the Quran, unlike the Torah, is not a book of laws. The Quran is God’s direct self-revelation to humanity. Certainly, it contains the moral framework for living a holy and righteous life as a Muslim. But it was never meant to function as a legal code, which is precisely why scholars had to rely so heavily on extra-Quranic sources like ijma (consensus), qiyas (analogy), istislah (which refers to the common good of the people), and ijtihad (independent juristic reasoning)—all of them, by definition, reliant on human judgment and historical context—in order to construct the Shariah in the first place. To say the Shariah is divine because the Quran is divine is akin to arguing that water and wine are the same, since water is a primary ingredient in wine.

At the end of my first attempt to write a biography of Muhammad, I quoted the prescient words of the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Writing in the mid-twentieth century shortly before the Suez Crisis, he observed that a healthy, functioning Islam had for centuries helped Muslims cultivate decent values which we in the West share, because they spring from a common tradition. Some Muslims have problems with Western modernity. They have turned against the cultures of the People of the Book, and have even begun to Islamize their new hatred of these sister faiths, which were so powerfully endorsed by the Qur’an. Cantwell Smith argued that if they are to meet the challenge of the day, Muslims must learn to understand our Western traditions and institutions, because they are not going to disappear. If Islamic societies did not do this, he maintained, they would fail the test of the twentieth century. But he pointed out that Western people also have a problem: “an inability to recognize that they share the planet not with inferiors but with equals.”   Unless

The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism. In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran. The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.

The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade. In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

However, the word Byzantine hides this continuity. It is a word even less justifiable to designate the inhabitants of the Christian Greek Roman Empire of the Middle Ages than the word Indian is to designate the sixteenth-century inhabitants of the Americas or the word Iberia (now almost universally adopted among specialists in the English-speaking scholarly world) is to designate medieval Spain. The word Indian is an involuntary error resulting from an unavoidable lack of knowledge about an existing continent, but the words Byzantine and Iberia are artificial academic constructions resulting from ideology.

One wonders what the classical Sunni scholars such as Imām Ibn Rajab would have said if they could see our state today, where we nd the Four Schools being actively targeted and made to seem deviant, and where Muslims who are not Sharī‘a experts, and thus choose to rely on one of the four great imāms, are maligned for doing so; and where people who do not accept the central role of the four schools, dishonestly portray classical scholars like Imam Ibn Rajab as being against taqlīd and, like them, not adherents of any of them, although in the case of Ibn Rajab, his name is never mentioned except with the open declaration that he was a Hanbali???

The Muslim sees the Koran as the perfect and final revelation of Allah. Allah was the revealer, and Mohammed was the receptor. The very words were dictated to him. He, to them, is the last and the greatest prophet. The proof of his supremacy is the beauty of the Koran. It is the book that is considered to be the ultimate expression of perfection and the repository of truth. The difficulty here is manifold. How does one sustain that this written text is perfect? Let us consider just one troublesome aspect, the grammatical flaws that have been demonstrated. Ali Dashti, an Iranian author and a committed Muslim, commented that the errors in the Koran were so many that the grammatical rules had to be altered in order to fit the claim that the Koran was flawless. He gives numerous examples of these in his book, Twenty-Three Years: The Life of the Prophet Mohammed. (The only precaution he took before publishing this book was to direct that it be published posthumously.) A further problem facing the early compilers of the Koran was the number of variant readings of some of the important texts. Now, in recent times, scholars have begun to look at the Koran and have raised some very serious questions regarding its origin and compilation. This has sent many Islamic scholars scrambling for a response.5

Muslim scholars have identified four essential qualities in human beings, which have been identified in earlier traditions as well. Imam al-Ghazālī and Fakhruddīn al-Rāzī adopted them, as did Imam Rāghib al-Isfahānī in his book on ethics. According to Imam al-Ghazālī, the first of them is quwwat al-ʿilm, known in Western tradition as the rational soul, which is human capacity to learn. The next one, quwwat al-ghaḍab, which may be called the irascible soul, is the capacity that relates to human emotion and anger. The third element, quwwat alshahwah, known as the concupiscent soul, is related to appetite and desire. The fourth power, quwwat al-ʿadl, harmonizes the previous three powers and keeps them in balance so that no one capacity overtakes and suppresses the others. In Western tradition, these capacities correspond to what is known as cardinal virtues. Muslims call them ummahāt al-faḍā’il. They are wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice (ḥikmah, shajāʿah, ʿiffah, and ʿadl). When the rational soul is balanced, the result is wisdom. Whoever is given wisdom has been given much good (QUR’AN , 2:269). Wisdom, according to Imam al-Ghazālī, is found in one who is balanced, who is neither a simpleton nor a shrewd, tricky person. If there is a deficit in the rational soul, the result is foolishness. When the rational soul becomes excessive and inordinately dominant, the result is trickery and the employment of the intellect toward the exploitation of others.

So why do people get obsessed with following the schools of law?" I asked. "Why not just go back to the Quran?" A wide, bright smile. "People can be lazy." Consulting scholars and obeying their rules was safer and easier, said the Sheikh. "You don't need to read or question, or think. You've got other people thinking for you. If you become open, it's a challenge." He glanced at his watch, checking to see how much time remained before the noon prayer. "You see, Carla, what's happened, really, is that we in the Muslim world have destroyed the whole balance. We've become obsessed with these tiny details, these laws. What does the Quran keep repeating? Purity of the heart. That's what's important! Why has cutting off a thief's hand - something it mentions once! - become of such importance to some people?

After the loss of so much of the learning of the past, the destruction of manuscripts and the slaughter of scholars, it was more important to recover what had been lost than to inaugurate more change. Because the Mongol military code made no provision for civil society, the ulama continued to govern the lives of the faithful, and their influence tended to be conservative. Where Sufis such as Rumi believed that all religions were valid, by the fourteenth century the ulama had transformed the pluralism of the Quran into a hard communalism, which saw other traditions as irrelevant relics of the past. Non-Muslims were forbidden now to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and it became a capital offence to make insulting remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The trauma of the invasions had, not surprisingly, made Muslims feel insecure. Foreigners were not only suspect; they could be as lethal as the Mongols.

You know when they get really against women? When all the scholars start studying philosophy.” The misogyny running through fiqh, said the Sheikh, was a matter not merely of scholars’ medieval mores, but of the influence of the Greek philosophers on them. Aristotle, a man who held that the subjugation of women was both “natural” and a “social necessity,” influenced key Muslim thinkers who shaped medieval fiqh, argued Akram. Before Aristotle became a core text, and before the medieval scholars enshrined their views on gender roles in Islamic law, men and women were accorded far more equal freedoms in Islam, he explained. He sketched peaks and troughs in the air, as if plotting the rise and fall of sexism through history. “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” was reaching its crescendo above us. “So why do people get obsessed with following the schools of law?” I asked. “Why not just go back to the Quran?” A wide, bright smile. “People can

Many would have excommunicated her as well, for in Christian circles the reigning consensus over the years has been that one cannot be simultaneously a Christian and a Muslim. This consensus has been recently unsettled, however. Now a spirited debate rages around it, especially in evangelical circles. It centers primarily on Muslims who insist that they can be followers of Christ without abandoning Islam. In an article on Muslim-background believers, Joseph Cumming tells of such a person: Ibrahim was a well-respected scholar of the Qur’an, a hafiz [a person who has memorized the entire Qur’an]. When he decided to follow Jesus, he closely examined the Qur’anic verses commonly understood as denying the Trinity, denying Jesus’ divine Sonship, denying Jesus’ atoning death, and denying the textual integrity of the Bible. He concluded that each of these verses was open to alternate interpretations, and that he could therefore follow Jesus as a Muslim.18 Again, 100 percent Muslim and 100 percent Christian—or so Ibrahim would claim.

The media suffer from an internalised as well as institutionalised Islamophilia. They could never broadcast, or print, during Ramadan, Eid or any other Muslim festival a programme or article explaining from the Christian – or any other – point of view why Islam’s founding story simply doesn’t stack up. It wouldn’t be hard to write or make it. Let any scholar loose on the materials and they could do it. Biblical or Torah scholars using the tools of criticism could use them on the Koran and have a wonderful and fascinating time of it. But would the nation’s broadcaster run it? Or the ‘paper of record’ print it? If during any day of the year – let alone a major Muslim festival – the main newspapers in Britain or America chose to commission a Christian scholar to review a book casting doubt on the likelihood of Mohammed’s existence, say, or his claims to be a prophet, I think everybody knows what would happen. The papers and broadcasters know what would happen too. Which is why they don’t do it. And which is why when it comes to Islam we begin by avoiding it, go on to treat it with kid gloves,

First, the biblical descriptions regarding the coming of Jesus the Jewish Messiah bear many striking resemblances to the coming Antichrist of Islam, whom Muslims refer to as the al-maseeh al-dajjaal (the counterfeit Messiah). Second, the Bible’s Antichrist bears numerous striking commonalities with the primary messiah figure of Islam, who Muslims call the Mahdi. In other words, our Messiah is their antichrist and our Antichrist is their messiah. Even more shocking to many readers was the revelation that Islam teaches that when Jesus returns, He will come back as a Muslim prophet whose primary mission will be to abolish Christianity. It’s difficult for any Bible believer to read of these things without becoming acutely aware of the satanic origins of the Islamic religion. In 2008, I also had the opportunity to coauthor another book on the same subject with Walid Shoebat, a former operative for the Palestine Liberation Organization. This book, entitled God’s War on Terror, is an almost encyclopedic discussion of the role of Islam in the last days, as well as a chronicle of Walid’s journey from a young Palestinian Muslim with a deep hatred for the Jews, to a Christian man who spends his life standing with the Jewish people and proclaiming the truth concerning the dangers of radical Islam. Together these two books have become the cornerstone of what has developed into a popular eschatological revolution. Today, I receive a steady stream of e-mails and reports from individuals expressing how much these books have affected them and transformed their understanding of the end-times. Students, pastors, and even reputable scholars have expressed that they have abandoned the popular notion that the Antichrist, his empire, and his religion will emerge out of Europe or a revived Roman Empire. Instead they have come to recognize the simple fact that the Bible emphatically and repeatedly points us to the Middle East as the launchpad and epicenter of the emerging empire of the Antichrist and his religion. Many testify that although they have been students of Bible prophecy for many years, never before had anything made so much sense, or the prophecies of the Bible become so clear. And even more important, some have even written to share that they’ve become believers or recommitted their lives to Jesus as a result of reading these books. Hallelujah!

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.

Muslims in the West regularly refer to Islam as the “religion of peace.” Yet of the roughly 400 recognized terrorist groups in the world, over 90 percent are Islamist groups. Over 90 percent of the current world-fighting involves Islamist terror movements.120 The endless goal of moderate Muslim apologists is to make the claim that the radical terrorist groups are not behaving in an Islamic way. While many nominal and liberal Muslims have a strong disdain for the murderous behavior of many of the most violent groups, the terrorists are actually carrying out a very legitimate aspect of Islam as defined by Islam’s sacred texts, scholars, and representatives. They are indeed behaving in an Islamic way. They are behaving like Mohammed and his successors. While it is often said that the terrorists have high-jacked Islam, in reality it is the so-called moderate Muslims who are trying to change the true teachings of Islam. Many in the West today are calling for a “reformation” within Islam. The problem is that this reformation has already happened and the most radical forms of Islam that we are seeing today are the result—violent Islam is true Islam. Yet few have the courage to declare the obvious. The Bible warns us that in the Last-Days, the Antichrist would be given power, “over all peoples, and tongues, and nations.” (Revelation 13:7) Today throughout the world, Islam is pushing for precisely that. In the days to come, it appears as if, although for a very short time, the Muslim Antichrist will come very close to accomplishing this goal.

The black magic that evil-minded people of all religions practice for their ugly and inhuman motives. The modern world ignores that and even do not believe in it; however, it exists, and it sufficiently works too. When I was an assistant editor, in an evening newspaper, I edited and published such stories. As a believer, I believe that. However, not that can affect everyone; otherwise, every human would have been under the attack of it. No one can explain and define black magic and such practices. The scientists today fail to recognize such a phenomenon; therefore, routes are open for black magic to proceeds its practices without hindrances. One can search online websites, and YouTube; it will realize a large number of the victims of that the evil practice by evil-minded peoples of various societies. The magic, black magic, or evil power exists, and it works too. Evil power causes, effects, and appears, as diseases and psychological issues since no one can realize, trace, and prove that horror practice; it is the secret and privilege of the evil-minded people that law fails to catch and punish them, for such crime. I exemplify here, the two events briefly, one a very authentic that I suffered from it and another, a person, who also became a victim of it. The first, when I landed on the soil of the Netherlands, I thought, I was in the safest place; however, within one year, I faced the incident, which was a practice of my family, involving my brothers, my country mates, who lived in the Netherlands. The most suspected were the evil-minded people of the Ahmadiyya movement of Surinam people, and possibly my ex-wife and a Pakistani couple. I had seen the evidence of the black magic, which my family did upon me, but I could not trace the reality of other suspected ones that destroyed my career, future, health, and even life. The second, a Pakistani, who lived in Germany, for several years, as an active member of the Ahmadiyya Movement, he told me his story briefly, during a trip to London, attending a literary gathering. He received a gold medal for his poetry work, and also he served Ahmadiyya TV channel; however when he became a real Muslim; as a result, Ahmadiyya worriers turned against him. When they could not force him to back in their group, they practiced the devil's work to punish him. The symptoms of magic were well-known to me that he told me since I bore that on my body too. The multiple other stories that reveal that the Ahmadiyya Movement, possibly practices black magic ways, to achieve its goals. As my observation, they involve, to eliminate Muslim Imams and scholars, who cause the failure of that new religion and false prophet, claiming as Jesus. I am a victim of their such practices. Social Media and such websites are a stronghold of their activities. In Pakistan, they are active, in the guise of the real Muslims, to dodge the simple ones, as they do in Europe and other parts of the word. Such possibility and chance can be possible that use of drugs and chemicals, to defeat their opponents, it needs, wide-scale investigation to save, the humanity. The incident that occurred to me, in the Netherlands, in 1980, I tried and appealed to the authorities of the Netherlands, but they openly refused to cooperate that. However, I still hope and look forward to any miracle that someone from somewhere gives the courage to verify that.

The hadith, insofar as they addressed issues not dealt with in the Quran, would become an indispensable tool in the formation of Islamic law. However, in their earliest stages, the hadith were muddled and totally unregulated, making their authentication almost impossible. Worse, as the first generation of Companions passed on, the community had to rely increasingly on the reports that the second generation of Muslims (known as the Tabiun) had received from the first; when the second generation died, the community was yet another step removed from the actual words and deeds of the Prophet. Thus, with each successive generation, the “chain of transmission,” or isnad, that was supposed to authenticate the hadith grew longer and more convoluted, so that in less than two centuries after Muhammad’s death, there were already some seven hundred thousand hadith being circulated throughout the Muslim lands, the great majority of which were unquestionably fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs and practices by connecting them with the Prophet. After a few generations, almost anything could be given the status of hadith if one simply claimed to trace its transmission back to Muhammad. In fact, the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher has documented numerous hadith the transmitters of which claimed were derived from Muhammad but which were in reality verses from the Torah and Gospels, bits of rabbinic sayings, ancient Persian maxims, passages of Greek philosophy, Indian proverbs, and even an almost word-for-word reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer. By the ninth century, when Islamic law was being fashioned, there were so many false hadith circulating through the community that Muslim legal scholars somewhat whimsically classified them into two categories: lies told for material gain and lies told for ideological advantage. In

My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it. For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’. Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme.

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

The politics of the 1970s were the second factor in this social shift. In his efforts to confront the Nasserite and socialist forces in Egypt, President Anwar Sadat unleashed Egypt's Islamic forces. He released thousands of the Muslim Brotherhood's leaders and members from jail (after years of imprisonment and prosecution under Nasser), and allowed the Brotherhood's old newspaper the Call (Al-Dawaa) to be reissued. He tried to assume the mantle of Islam by calling himself ‘the guardian of the faith’; emphasized that his first name was ‘Mohamed’ not ‘Anwar’; promoted religious schools; authorized a major increase in the budget of Al-Azhar and an expansion of its parallel educational system; opened the door for leading religious scholars and commentators to dominate the state-controlled media; introduced apostasy laws in Egypt after years of a highly liberal intellectual atmosphere; declared sharia law (Islamic jurisprudence) as the principal source for the Egyptian constitution (after decades during which religion was generally marginal to legislation with the exception of personal status laws); and declared himself the leader of ‘an Islamic pious country’.

The charm offensive was complemented by the work of a number of Islamic intellectuals with strong links to the Egyptian Islamic movement in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Tariq Ramadan was the most famous of these. The grandson of Hassan Al-Banna and a scholar at Oxford University, he argued for a heterogeneous Islam that combined the religion's traditions with new aspects rooted in the experiences of Muslims living in the West.

In his Epistle on Free Will, the leader of the Qadaris, an ascetic scholar named Hasan al-Basri, openly challenged Umayyad caliph Ibn Marwan.14 One of al-Basri’s followers, Ghaylan al-Dimashqi, went even further. Rulers did not have the right to regard their power as “a gift of God,” he argued; they had to be aware of their responsibility for people before God. He even asserted that if all Muslims truly obeyed God and His law, there would be no need for any caliph.

[The Verdict on Hanging Qur'an Verses on the Wall]: Praise be to Allah Alone, and prayers and peace be upon the last Prophet Muhammad. The Holy Qur'an has been revealed to be a proof against the mankind and the jinns. It is a constitution and a system to be followed by all Muslims. They should act according to its permissible rulings and avoid the acts it prohibited. They should believe in its verses that are not entirely clear in themselves but are explained and manifested in the light of the clear-cut verses, learn it by heart, and write it down in Mushafs, pieces of cloth, and the like, so that it can be recited and arbitrated to when needed. This is what the earlier Muslims understood and acted accordingly. As to the nowadays phenomena of writing down some decorated verses of the Holy Qur'an on a placard or a piece of cloth, and hanging them in rooms, cars, and the like, it does not conform with the acts of the salaf. Priding in committing such acts is the preoccupation of those who let aside the original purposes for which the Holy Qur'an has been revealed. It is rather better for the Muslim to abandon such acts and keep away from buying or selling such placards or pieces of cloth, even though they are originally permissible. If they are widely used, people will turn away from the original purpose for which the Holy Qur'an has been revealed. May Allah grant us prosperity. Peace and prayers be upon our Prophet Muhammad.

It would take a cosmic level of cynicism to accuse Muslim scholars of feigning entirely their commitment to preserving the Prophet’s Sunna and concocting the vast body of Hadiths out of whole cloth to justify received practice.

Fundamentalism itself—whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—is modern. It is a reaction to modern culture.7 Christian fundamentalism as an identifiable religious movement originated early in the twentieth century in the United States, with its immediate roots in the second half of the nineteenth century.8 It stressed the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible in every respect, especially against Darwinism and what it called “the higher criticism” (by which it meant the scholarly study of the Bible as it had developed primarily in Germany in the nineteenth century). The roots of the evangelical understanding of the Bible are older, going back to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation replaced the authority of the church and church tradition with the sole authority of scripture. John Calvin and Martin Luther, the two most important leaders of the Reformation, both had a strong sense of biblical authority. But it was in the second and third generation of the Reformation that claims for the infallible truth of the Bible were made. “Plenary inspiration”—the notion that the words of the Bible were dictated by God and are therefore free from error—was emphasized by those later Reformers.9 The realization that these developments are relatively recent is important. The explicit description of the Bible as inerrant and infallible by fundamentalists and some conservative-evangelicals cannot claim to be the ancient and traditional voice of the church. Yet both fundamentalism and the notion of the Bible as “God’s truth” (and thus without error) have their roots in an older, conventional way of seeing the Bible widely shared by most Christians for a long time.

Although many Islamic clerics and theologians participated in the campaign to demand Pakistan’s transformation into an Islamic state, the blueprint for a step-by-step transition was offered by Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), the South Asian analogue of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood. Maududi, joined by Mufti Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, a cleric elected to the Constituent Assembly on the Muslim League platform, called for the future constitution of Pakistan to be based on the underlying assumption that sovereignty rested with Allah and that the state’s function was solely to administer the country in accordance with God’s will. Both Islamic scholars also insisted that only the ulema (those trained in Islamic theology) could interpret the laws of Allah.

Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. The Muslim civilization provided an ideal cradle for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms, and the economic success of the Abbasid caliphate meant that scholars had the time, money, and materials required to fulfil their duty. They endeavoured to acquire knowledge of previous civilizations by obtaining Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Farsi, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew and Roman texts and translating them into Arabic. In 815, the Caliph of Ma'mun established in Baghdad the Bait al-Hikmah ('House of Wisdom'), a library and centre for translation.

The Hindu scriptures actually fall into two broad categories—the Smriti and the Sruti. Smriti means, “That which is remembered.” The authors are many and the assertions they make are diametrically different. In this corpus lie the speculations of Indian sages, ranging from the profound to the utterly bizarre, by their own admission. Sruti, on the other hand, means, “That which was revealed.” This is the eternally true revelation of the devout Hindu. If this revelation is eternally true, then the religion cannot claim that all ways are true for the simple reason that some religions deny the eternal veracity of the Vedas. Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians would deny such a claim. As a matter of fact, even some Hindu scholars would deny that claim. Either their denial is true, or the claim of the Hindu is true. But,

In 2015, in a BBC interview, President Barack Obama said that he felt “frustrated” and “stymied” in failing to get the gun control laws he wanted. In fact, he said, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings. And you know, if you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.” You read that right: Barack Obama said that American gun owners are a bigger threat to our safety than are Muslim terrorists; and he said that Americans who believe in the Second Amendment lack “common sense.” My first response is that this just exposes how liberals like Obama have no grasp of the reality of the terrorist threat. They downplay the dangers of Islamist terrorism. Second, they have no respect for the Constitution. They treat that noble document with contempt. Third, they fail to consider how many crimes are prevented, deterred, or foiled by gun owners. Scholar John Lott has shown repeatedly that in American cities, in his famous phrase, more guns equals less crime. That’s a fact.

Real Fact about Angles: Angels are material but ethereal (Latif), more ethereal than the gaseous phase of matter. They are Nurani( Luminous, Spiritual). They are alive. They have reason ( ). Evils peculiar to human beings do not exist of angles. They can take any shape. As gases turn into liquid and solid and take any shape when becoming solid, likewise angles can form beautiful shapes, Angles are not souls that have parted from the bodies of great men. Christians presume that the angles are such spirits. Unlike energy and power, they are not immaterial. Some ancient philosophers supposed so. all of them are called Malaika "Malak" (angel) means 'envoy, messenger' or 'power.' Angles were created before all other living creatures. Therefore, we were commanded to believe in them before believing in the heavenly books, which come before belief in prophets; and in the Holly Quran the names of these tenets of belief are given in thes succession. Belief in angles has to be as follows: angels are creatures of Allahu Talal (God). They are not His Partners, nor are they His daughters as disbelievers and polytheists suppose. They Obey His Commands (God's Commands) and never commit sins or disobey the commands. They are neither male or Female. They are do not get married. They do not have children. They have life; that is, they are alive. When Allah (the God) announced the He was going to create human beings, angels asked, "Ya Rabbi! (Oh God) Are You going to create creatures who will corrupt the world and shed blood?" Such questions, called Dhella, from angles do not changes the fact the they are innocent. Of all creatures, angels are the most plentiful. No one but Allah (the God) knows their number. There is no empty space in the skies where angels do not worship. Every place in the skies is occupied by angels in Ruku (blowing during Namaz) " a kind of worship or pray" or in the Sujda (Prostrating) " a kind of worship or pray to God". In the skies, on the earth, in grass, on stars, in every living and lifeless creature, in every rain-drop, plant leaf, atom molecule, in every reaction, motion, in everything, angels have duties. They carry out Allahu Tala's (the God) commands everywhere. They are intermediaries between Allahu tala (The God) and creatures. Some of them are the commanders of other angels. Some of them brought messages to Prophets among human beings. Some angels bring good thoughts, called "Ilham" (inspiration), to the human heart. Some others are unaware of all human beings and creatures and have lost consciousness upon feeling Allah Tala's (The God) beauty. Each of theses angels stays in a certain place and connot leave its place. Some angels have two wings and some have four or more. Angels belonging in Paradise stay in Paradise. Their superior is Ridwan. Angels of Hell, Zabanis carry out in Hell what they are commanded. The fire of Hell does not harm them, as the sea is not harmful to fish. There are nineteen leading Zabanis. Their chief Is Malik. For each human being, there are four angels who record all their good and bad acts. Two of them come at night and the other two come during the day. They are called Kiram Katibin or angels or Hafaza. There is another scholarly report stating that the on one’s right side is superior to the one on the left and records the good deeds. The one on the left writes down the evil deeds. There are angels who will torment disbelievers and disobedient Muslims in their graves, and angels who will ask questions in graves. The questioning angles are called Munkar and Nakir. Angels who will question Muslims are also Called mubashshir and Bashir. At the first sound of the “Sur”, all angels except the Hamalat al-Arsh and the four archangel’s will be annihilated. Then the Hamalat al-Arsh and then the four archangels will be annihilated. At the second sound all angels will be annihilated after all the living creatures, as they were created before all.

Islamic scripture is vast, encompassing not only the Qur’an but also the ahadith, the words and deeds attributed to Muhammad by his followers. Collections of ahadith run into the hundreds of volumes, and that’s just the Sunni variety. The Shi’a have their own collections, adding more volumes to the pile. Want to find passages justifying peace and concord? They’re in there. Want to find passages justifying violence? They’re in there too. Medieval Muslim scholars spent their whole careers trying to reconcile the contradictions between them. It’s extremely difficult to do, which is why early Muslims called the effort ijtihad, or “hard work.” People chuckled at the news of two men buying a copy of Islam for Dummies on their way to join the Islamic State.14 But having spent two decades studying the intricacies of Islamic scripture, I empathized with their bewilderment.

To be sure, many of the Islamic State’s foot soldiers are ignorant of their own scriptures. Islamic scripture is vast, encompassing not only the Qur’an but also the ahadith, the words and deeds attributed to Muhammad by his followers. Collections of ahadith run into the hundreds of volumes, and that’s just the Sunni variety. The Shi’a have their own collections, adding more volumes to the pile. Want to find passages justifying peace and concord? They’re in there. Want to find passages justifying violence? They’re in there too. Medieval Muslim scholars spent their whole careers trying to reconcile the contradictions between them. It’s extremely difficult to do, which is why early Muslims called the effort ijtihad, or “hard work.” People chuckled at the news of two men buying a copy of Islam for Dummies on their way to join the Islamic State.14 But having spent two decades studying the intricacies of Islamic scripture, I empathized with their bewilderment.

As a matter of fact, Islam does not negate critical inquiry. Muslim scholars who understand this viewpoint are supportive of stem cell research, genetic engineering and robotics within ethical bounds. Even traditional Muslim scholarship in early-twentieth century was not skeptical of evolution as a scientific explanation, which can be seen in the writings of Syed Qutb and Maulana Syed Abul-Ala Maududi. Several Muslim scientists conduct research in evolutionary biology and also teach it including Mohammed Alassiri of King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Ehab Abouheif, Canada Research Chair at McGill University; Fatimah Jackson, Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of North Carolina and Rana Dajani, Associate Professor at Hashemite University, Jordan.

For those who fought the Soviets, however, the Afghan War was something else. It was “the first successful resistance to a foreign power,” one Western scholar observed,2 “which was not based on either nationalist or socialist principles” but instead on Islamic principles, which was waged as a jihad, and which gave a tremendous boost to Islamic self-confidence and power. Its impact on the Islamic world was, in effect, comparable to the impact which the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 had on the Oriental world. What the West sees as a victory for the Free World, Muslims see as a victory for Islam.

Anatolia is made up of a mixture of religions, peoples, and cuisines. If we can eat the same food, sing the same sad songs, believe in the same superstitions, and dream the same dreams at night, why shouldn’t we be able to live together? I have known Christian babies with Muslim names and Muslim babies fed by Christian milk mothers. Ours is an ever-liquid world where everything flows and mixes. If there is a frontier between Christianity and Islam, it has to be more flexible than scholars on both sides think it is.

Whatever their many vices, wrote Shushtari, the English welcomed and rewarded talent: ‘the English have no arbitrary dismissal,’ he noted, ‘and every competent person keeps his job until he writes his own request for retirement or resignation. More remarkable still is that they take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of Muslims and Hindus, mixing with the people. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.

Some Islamic scholars explain these injunctions by saying that they apply only when war is initiated by the infidels, or when Muslims are persecuted, or when Islam itself is threatened. The Quran, these thinkers point out, also bids the Muslims to “fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, and be not aggressive; surely God loves not the aggressors

This critical distinction between Palestine as a country and Palestinian nationality should also be kept in mind when reflecting on the fact that some historians of modern Palestinian nationalism have overlooked the links between land and country (and Palestine-based territorial consciousness) which was evident in the works of Palestinian Muslim scholars and writers such al-Maqdisi (Shams al-Din Abi ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Muqaddasi, ) (1866, 1994, 2002), Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi (c. 1495), Khair al-Din al-Ramli (1585–1671) and Salih ibn Ahmad al-Tumurtashi in the 10th‒17th centuries and the reimagining of Palestine in modern Palestinian territorial nationalism.

As Arab armies conquered Syria (which had been part of the Roman and Byzantine empires), they found Syriac translations of Greek philosophical works. These writings were translated into Arabic, and for a time they became the foundation of Muslim philosophy. Eventually, they were rejected as being inconsistent with Islam. The mullahs decided that Muslims could accept practical works from the conquered people, but speculative thought was out. Christians, however, had long since made their peace with integrating pagan philosophy with the Bible. In fact, since the time of the early Christian writers, theologians had argued that just as the Hebrew prophets were the Jewish world’s road to the truth best expressed in Christianity, philosophers were the pagan world’s road to that same truth. So when Christian scholars found out about the works of Aristotle in Spain, they began to translate them into Latin, the language of the church and of scholarship. These new texts immediately caused a buzz in the scholarly community, because here was a complete, well-developed worldview that answered all of the key philosophical questions that medieval scholars had grappled with. The only question was how to integrate the “New Aristotle” into the intellectual synthesis already in place with the advent of Platonic humanism.

While other Muslim scholars wrote plague tracts without generating the same kind of hostility, Ibn al-Khatib’s fate is illustrative of an important worldview difference between Islam and Christianity. In Europe, plague may have caused popular hysteria, but the church and the scholars agreed that it was a natural event and sought to find both the physical explanation for the plague and a cure. The church opposed efforts to scapegoat Jews for causing the plague, pointing out that they were dying from it just as Christians were. Church and government officials also rejected the idea, put forth by groups such as the Flagellants, that the plague was a direct judgment of God on a corrupt society. Instead, they argued it was a natural phenomenon.

Muslim scholars excelled at practical learning such as geography, astronomy, and medical practice, as well as mathematics (including inventing algebra). What they did not do, however, was develop science, in the sense of explanations of why the physical world works the way it does. This highlights the second difference between orthodox Muslim thinkers, such as al-Ghazali, and the Condemnations of 1277. Islam teaches that Allah directly controls everything and can do as he pleases with the world. Seeking explanations of physical processes was thus either not possible or inappropriate

Because the Arabic-Muslim accounts of the Prophet and early Islamic history are based on later materials, some scholars reasoned that the only way to know the true history is to use non-Muslim sources. One result was an account of the origin of Islam as a messianic Jewish sect in Palestine and North Arabia that much later was redefined as a new religion. In general, however, this effort has failed, because the non-Muslim sources are themselves fragmentary, poorly informed, and prejudiced.

that they take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of Muslims and Hindus, mixing with the people. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.’ Intermarriage, he wrote, was common, though the Indian women who took European partners were, he maintained, rarely respectable: ‘The women of people with no future, of corrupt Muslims, of evil Hindus, who of their own desire enter into the bonds of wedlock with the English, they do not interfere with their religion nor compel them to leave purdah veiling; when any son born of the union reaches the age of 4, he is taken from his mother and sent to England to be educated.

The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave, and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult, but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.

In the same era, Jamal al-Din Afghani (1838–97), a scholar and activist from Iran, embarked on an ambitious mission to “awake” Muslims from obscurantism and encourage them to embrace Western science and rationalism, which he considered already inherent in the Qur’an. Egyptian scholar Muhammed Abduh, a professor at the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, embraced al-Afghani’s views and developed a reformist Islamic view that clearly was inspired by the Mutazilites of the earliest centuries of Islam. Abduh criticized some of the established Hadiths, including the ones that promote misogyny, and argued for the emancipation of Muslim women.92

The question for Saudi stability remains not whether the official government scholars will desert the monarchy—that prospect remains unlikely—but whether they will be outflanked by more radical clerics who incorporate Muslim Brotherhood ideas into their preaching and contest the ulama al-hakim’s authority to lead the Wahhabi mission.

Sherman Jackson, a Muslim scholar from the University of Southern California said of Ali’s passing ‘Something solid, something big, beautiful and life-affirming has left this world.

The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as "nominal Christians," and those they brand with the curse of "secular humanist," are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.

Moderate’ Muslims, and apologists and propagandists for Islam, will attempt to deny or obscure the real meaning, nature, and intent of jihad. Some will say that jihad means only a Muslim’s ‘inner struggle’ to be a better person, and that jihad has no military meaning whatever. Others will acknowledge that Muslims have a religious duty to spread Islam throughout the world, but insist that it is to be spread only peacefully, through dawah—literally ‘the call’— meaning persuasion and reasoning. Finally, some will go so far as to admit that it can also mean warfare, but insist that in Islam, warfare is allowed only in self-defense or against oppression. However, all of these assertions are examples of a tactic that Islam encourages in waging jihad: taqiyya or Kithman—‘lying,’ ‘deception,’ ‘deceit.’ Muslims are encouraged to lie if, in the opinion of the liar, telling the lie will be ‘good’ for Islam. This is a documented fact according to both ancient and modern scholars of Islam.

Among the conventional adab anthologies, we encounter a somewhat different organization of the traditional material in the Kitâb Adab ad- dunyâ wa-d-dîn of al-Mâwardî (d. 450/1058).84 The five large chapters of the work deal with 1. the excellence of the intellect and intelligence and the blameworthiness of instinctive desire and blind prejudice (hawâ); 2. the âdâb of knowledge; 3. the âdâb of religion (dealing mainly with the negative aspects of the material world); 4. the âdâb of this world; and 5. the âdâb of the soul. As the plural âdâb indicates, the various ways in which intellectual, religious, practical/material, and spiritual/ethical behavior is to be practised are illustrated by preferably brief and aphoristic statements in prose and, quite often, in verse. As is to be expected, the chapter on knowledge shows no systematic arrangement. It starts out with strong expressions of praise for knowledge and the appropriate Qur- ânic citations and statements by the Prophet and early Muslim authorities. Evidence is presented for the superiority of knowledge over ignorance. The impossibility of attaining complete knowledge is explained, and the need to acquire knowledge of all kinds wherever possible is stressed. The relationship between knowledge and material possessions is explored in the usual manner. It is recommended that the process of studying begin at an early age. Knowledge is dif- cult to acquire. Again, the prevalence of ignorance is discussed. The objectionable character of using knowledge for ulterior purposes comes in for customary mention. There are sayings explaining the best methods of study and instruction, the qualities students ought to possess, the need for long and strenuous study, and the drawbacks of forgetfulness. Then, we read remarks about handwriting, about the usually bad handwriting of scholars, and about their constantly being engaged in writing. Remarks on the qualifi cations of students, the hadîth that “good questions are one half of knowledge,” and sayings about the character qualities of scholars complete the part of the work devoted to knowledge. Its predominantly secular outlook is indicated by the fact that knowledge here continues to precede the discussion of religion and ethics. The basic role conceded to the intellect with respect to both intellectual/educational and religious/ ethical activity is formally acknowledged by placing the chapter on it at the beginning, as was also the case in the work of al-Marzubânî.

Al-Askarî gives examples of the high esteem shown to scholars and the important position in society they occupy, often in spite of their lowly origins which ordinarily would not have allowed them to advance far beyond their fathers’ menial situations. Much more numerous, and more interesting, are the anecdotes and remarks on the diffi culties that must be overcome on the road to knowledge. He cites the statement concerning the six qualities needed: a penetrating mind, much time, ability, hard work, a skilful teacher, and desire (or, in the parlance of our own time, “motivation,” shahwah). On his own, he adds the very elementary need for “nature,” that is, an inherited physical endowment, such as Muslim philologians of al-Askarî’s type always claimed as essential for their intellectual pursuits. The search for knowledge must be unselfi sh. As the author repeats over and over again, it is a never ending process. Persistent study sharpens the natural faculties. The hunger for knowledge is never stilled, as proclaimed by traditions ascribed to the Prophet. Stationariness means ultimate failure, according to the widely quoted saying that “man does not cease knowing as long as he studies, but once he gives up studying, he is the most ignorant of men.” Constant travel in search of knowledge and regular attendance at the teacher’s lectures are mandatory. The prospect of learning something not known before should make a man forget his home and his family and endure all possible hardships, as illustrated by an anecdote about al-Asmaî. Scholars refrain at times from certain foods as too luxurious or as harmful to the powers of memory. They study all night long.

That the essence of Islam is permanent war with non-Muslims was the standard view of Islam held by Western scholars before 9/11.

Any acquaintance with recent history made nonsense of any claim that God was on the side of Christian states. As one scholar suggests, what turned Christians to Islam was “the common acceptance by Muslim and Christian alike of the error that the favor of God is shown by worldly success.”22 Self-evidently, Islam represented growth, expansion, and success, in contrast to the tattered shreds of Christianity. Any traveler could see the splendid mosques rising amid the landscape of ruined churches and deserted monasteries. The heart-breaking consistency of defeats, generation after generation, carried a deadly message.23

Christianity in this region remained as much a colonists’ religion as it would be once again during the French Empire of the twentieth century, and, just as in that later period, when the colonists left, so did the religion. Long wars during the sixth and seventh centuries forced many Romanized Africans to flee to other parts of the Mediterranean, and the Arab conquest virtually completed this process. As a Victorian scholar noted, “[T]he African churches were destroyed not because they were corrupt but because they failed to reach the hearts of the true natives of the province…. They fell because they were the churches of a party and not of a people.”4 Muslims did not have to eradicate African Christianity, because its believers had already fled.

For the study of Middle Eastern history, and at the present time one might even add of world history, some knowledge of Islam’s origins and of its scriptures is necessary. Already in my student years I was reading the Koran, the biography of the Prophet, and the extensive literature concerned with them. But at no time did I specialize in these topics. I am not an expert in theology or scripture, and I looked at these, if at all, only with a historian’s eye. I am, by vocation and profession, a historian, principally interested in the history of civilization. Looking back, I see that by this choice I saved myself a lot of trouble. This was not my purpose at the time but I have become well aware of my narrow and fortunate escape from one of the most difficult and dangerous topics of our profession. Even for Muslims, and far more so for non-Muslims, the study of the sacred biography and the sacred text has become highly sensitive, not so much a field of research as a minefield. This has not prevented my critics from attacking me for my treatment of Muslim scripture and sacred biography. In this as in other matters, the attacks came from both sides. On the one side I am accused of traducing Islam and its sanctities, on the other of defending and even concealing its flaws. As long as the attacks continue to come from both sides, I shall remain confident of my scholarly objectivity. Once,

Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves, with living quarters made of wood and mud lining the walls. But this will be more than a home. This converted drying-ground and cemetery will serve as the first masjid, or mosque, of a new kind of community, one so revolutionary that many years later, when Muslim scholars seek to establish a distinctly Islamic calendar, they will begin not with the birth of the Prophet, nor with the onset of Revelation, but with the year Muhammad and his band of Emigrants came to this small federation of villages to start a new society. That year, 622 C.E., will forever be known as Year 1 A.H. (After Hijra); and the oasis that for centuries had been called Yathrib will henceforth be celebrated as Medinat an-Nabi: “The City of the Prophet,” or more simply, Medina. There

An apparently old and often cited dictum extolling the superiority of scholars over statesmen was attributed to the legendary grammarian of the seventh century, Abû l-Aswad ad-Du- alî, and couched in this form: “There is nothing more powerful (a- azz) than knowledge. This is shown by the fact that kings exercise control (hukkâm) over people, and scholars exercise control over kings.” If the scholars themselves cannot be in positions of political power, then at least, the rulers should have knowledge. “Knowledge,” Aristotle says, “is an ornament of kings.” Again, Greek statecraft is transferred to Iran in the form of a statement ascribed to Anûsharwân: “When God means well for a nation, He places knowledge in its kings, and kingship in its scholars.” The concept of the philosopher-king appears in Muslim adab under the name of Diogenes. “Asked when the world was in good shape, Diogenes replied: When its kings philosophize, and its philosophers are kings.

Its insistence upon “knowledge” has no doubt made medieval Muslim civi lization one of great scholarly and scientifi c productivity, and through it, Muslim civilization made its most lasting contribution to mankind.