Scholars In Islam Quotes

The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.

يظن الغمر أن الكتب تهدى ... ... أخاً فهم لإدراك العلوم وما يدرى الجهول بأن فيها ... ... غوامض حيرت عقل الفهيم إذا رمت العلوم بغير شيخ ... ... ضللت عن الصراط المستقيم وتلتبس الأمور عليك حتى ... ... تصير أضل من 'توما الحكيم

... classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur'an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then.

Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur'an.

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.

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.

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.

Prophet (PBUH) considered the ink of a scholar to be holier than the blood of a martyr.

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.

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

The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether.

While various popular translations of the Qur’an exist, readers should be aware that there is no definitive scholarly consensus on accurate translation. Translators understandably struggle to capture the Qur’an’s sophisticated and layered nuances in a foreign language, and renderings can often sound bland or abstruse.

Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad’s decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today.

Inexperience people think that books will lead the one of intellect to understanding. But the ignoramus doesn't know that in these books are ambiguos that will confuse even the most intelligent of people. If you try to learn this knowledge without a teacher you will go astray and affairs will become so confusing to you that you will be more astray than Toma*, the physician. *توما الحكيم

Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theatres, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion.

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!

The translations presented in this book attempt to capture at least some of the Qur’an’s depth and uniquely compelling exploration of human psychology, emotions, and behaviors. Readers familiar with past translations are asked to keep an open mind as they explore the following pages. The Qur’anic translations presented here aim to convey an appreciation of the original text as traditional Islamic scholars understood it—and not necessarily as some ideologically motivated translators have at times sought to portray it.

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.

At age ten, I set out to find a Qur’an teacher who could open a gateway into this unknown world. Every other day after school I would ride the bus for an hour to study with a young African scholar for two-hour sessions. He sat opposite me cross-legged on the floor, our knees touching. I was captivated by the huge bookcases behind him laden with decorated Arabic tomes. My teacher placed a large blue book between us and began guiding me to read the opening chapter of the Qur’an. In our first session, it took two hours just to limp through the first line as I struggled to precisely pronounce the letters.

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.

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometimes taken as evidence of derivation. The Islamic interpretation is that religion is of one origin, differences being due to local or historical causes.

The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.

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.

Allah, Most High, has truly blessed us. He has created just for us the mysterious spirit that He has breathed into us and by so doing distinguished us from all other physical creation. He has adorned us with our incomparable intellect, which further distinguishes us from all else in this creation. What other creature on this planet -another gift He has blessed us with- can even begin to create the likes of this Internet? Will we not stop, give thanks to our Merciful and Generous Lord? Will we not stop and realize how precious our lives are and begin to show each other more love, mercy, kindness and empathy? Will we not stop, take time, and reflect?

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.

For the early scholars of Islam, there would have been no conflict between religion and science. The early thinkers were quite clear abou their mission: the Qur'an required them to study alsamawat wal'arth (the skies and the earth) to find proof of their faith. The prophet himself had besought this discipline to seek knowledge 'from the cradle to the grave', no matter how far that search took them, for 'he who travels in search of knowledge, travels along Allah's path to paradise

the testing of the believer is like medicine for him. It cures him from illness. Had the illness remained it would destroy him or diminish his reward and level (in the hereafter). The tests and the trials extract these illnesses from him and prepare him for the perfect reward and the highest of degrees (in the life to come).

Ibn al-Rawandi (...) wrote that a god who inflicts illness upon his subjects cannot be counted as one who treats them wisely, “nor can he be said to be looking after them or to be compassionate toward them. The same is true concerning he who inflicts upon them poverty and misery. Also, who punishes the disobedient by eternal fire is a fool.

The aim has priority in estimation, it is the last in existence, it is the principle according to the mind, and it is the end of the journey.

Islamic scholars developed a doctrine known as “abrogation” (an-Nasikh wa’l Mansukh), whereby Allah issues new revelations that supersede old ones.

God’s love is earned by a man through being a scholar and at the same time behaving as inconspicuously and modestly as if he were an ignoramus.

Books are the gardens of scholars.

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 a legal text, the Qur’an reflects its origins in a tribal or clan-based society, particularly on issues concerning inheritance, male guardianship, the validity of a woman’s testimony in court, and polygamy. This is even more obvious in the hadith, the compilation of sayings attributed to the Prophet or documenting his actions. This combination of the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad forms the basis of sharia. The derivation of these legal rules, known as fiqh, is the responsibility of Islamic jurists and takes place on the basis of ijma (consensus). When conflicts of interpretation arise, scholars consult the Qur’an and hadith.

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.

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.

By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers. Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks.

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.

If anything, the genesis of colleges in the Islamic world seems to have been a way to organise those scholars who were opposed to philosophy and rationalism. Knowledge and science in ancient times were supported by individual patrons and when these patrons changed their priorities, or when they died, any institutions that they might have built often died with them. This is a major reason why no observatory lasted more than 30 years in any of the Islamic empires.

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.

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.

15. Specific mentions of Keats, Swan Lake, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Othello, Islamic architecture, Shakespeare, Monet’s lilies, Hemingway, Milton, and libraries appear throughout this collection. How do these scholarly and artistic references enhance the more informal tone of Keegan’s prose?

In contemporary Islam, the problem is not the text, but the reader. In most cases, the Islamic heritage is lost between analytically competent readers who are woefully incapable of penetrating the classical texts and readers who can decipher the classical texts, but who live in a time warp and are largely oblivious to the hermeneutic and analytic strategies of modern scholars. Put simply, the first group is equipped to handle modernity, but not the classical tradition, while the second group is in precisely the opposite position. This dilemma ought to be recognized as the real tragedy of modern Islamic scholarship.

While the details of the Amirs’ religion have been lost to history, most scholars are convinced that by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had become the standard belief of the vast majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only accepted Allah as their High God, but insisted that he was the same god as Yahweh, the god of the Jews.

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)

Pastor Daniel, meanwhile, is sipping water on the balcony of a former sailing clubhouse, I ask if he can show me which parts of the Qur'an cause him concern. He tells me he's not the best person to ask. 'I can introduce you to a guy – I wouldn't call myself a scholarly person on Islam.' Strange response, considering his travelling roadshow routine.

The stubborn of a captive mentality can be clearly seen in the formulation of national development plans in most developing nations where the fundamental meaning and criteria of knowledge and development, modernization and reform, progress and change, happiness, tolerance, pluralism and their respective antonyms - such as under-development and corruption - are all derived from Western frameworks. Sometimes the strangest phenomenon surfaces - such as when the methodology of understanding and teaching indigenous religions is regarded as being uncritical and less objective if it does not utilize the methods developed by Western scholars in the understanding and teaching Western religions and religious texts.

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.

Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one’s own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.

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

Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya, famous scholar and saint, was the dauther of 'Ali al-Zubaydi, a man belonging to the martial Zubaydi clan of the tribe of Bani Haritha, itself an offshoot of the major tribe of Kinda, one of the most ancient and best known tribes of Southern Yemen. [...] she became known as the Rabi'a of Hadramawt. [...] Shaykha Sultana became so engrossed in her spiritual pursuits that she never found it in herself to marry and beget children as was expected of her. Instead, she visited all the great men of the valley, sitting at the back of the mosques where the gatherings were held, and listening intently until she became well known and greatly respected by them. Mostafa al-Badawi, A blessed Valley, Volume One, Wadi Hadramawt & the Alawi Tradition, Chapter 10, S. 95-97

There was a natural overlap, for example, between the deep anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime and that of some leading Islamic scholars. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muḥammad al-Ḥusaynī, had welcomed the rise of a man he later referred to as “al-ḥajj Muḥammad Hitler.” The German leader’s anti-Semitic views were grist to the mill of a man happy to call for the death of Jews, whom he referred to as “scum and germs.

Why did the burst of activity fade so rapidly? The specific explanations diverge in their particulars, but they agree on the central point that, as H. Floris Cohen, put it, “the root cause of its decline is to be found in the Faith, and in the ability of its orthodox upholders to stifle once-flowering science.”16 To Islamic scholar G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam was never able to accept that scientific research is a means of glorifying God.

The 'ulama', by tightly controlling what went into the history books, were able to propagate an understanding of their own dazzlingly rich and complex civilization that attributed almost every single thing of value within it to the Prophet, and the Prophet alone. There was no question of acknowledging the momentous roles played in the forging of Islam by countless others - be they autocrats such as Abd Al-Malik or scholars such as themselves.

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.

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.

One of the distinctions that religious scholars make about various religions is the monotheistic and polytheistic world views. It seems to me that if one were to describe to a Hindu the myriad of divine beings in Christianity (and by relationship Judaism and Islam), such as angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, putti, Satan and his crew, Mother Mary, Jesus the son of God – who threw out demons; not to mention the saints and martyrs, who can be contacted and prayed to as divine guides, etc., I dare say this Hindu would consider the Christians polytheistic like himself. If we then include holy relics, the cunning snake and the talking fiery bush, then we are moving towards animism. Monotheism in this light is actually referring to One ruling (and jealous) god over many lesser “gods,” deities, angels and souls, which is describing a polytheistic hierarchy and not monotheism. My conclusion: there is no monotheism. It may be heretical to say, but perhaps the Western religions have more in common with Hinduism and with the Roman or Scandinavian pantheons than they care to admit.

The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown

The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.

There has recently been a revived interest in mythology, which may indicate a widespread desire for a more imaginative expression of religious truth. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell has become extremely popular: he has explored the perennial mythology of mankind, linking ancient myths with those still current in traditional societies. It is often assumed that the three God-religions are devoid of mythology and poetic symbolism. Yet, although monotheists originally rejected the myths of their pagan neighbors, these often crept back into the faith at a later date.

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.

It is all too often the case with certain types of scholars of Malay-Indonesian Islam, when dealing with Islamic texts such as the one in question in which they are confronted with a word they do not quite understand, that instead of admitting their failure to explain the word in the text as due to their own lack of understanding, they would proceed to conjure up some excuse for branding the word as an enigma, and then, because it is an enigma to them, they would proceed further to reject it with such pronouncements as: “it seems obvious that this puzzling word is due to a scribal error”, so that they might suggest their own futile substitute.

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

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.

One of the photos Yaken posted on social media after he made it to Syria showed a bucket filled with severed heads, hashtagged “#headmeat.”36 Irrespective of whether his adventure to the land of the caliphate was spiritually fulfilling, the imagery it produced was a kind of pornography. And like all pornography, it aroused strong reactions, ranging from titillation to revulsion, and sometimes both at once. These reactions share an intellectually disarming effect. As in the case of porn, they resist detached analysis. The scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith noted a similar tendency in the failure to understand the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978. The problem, he said, was an unwillingness to undertake the difficult task of “looking, rather than staring or looking away.”37

If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars and ordinary people. After all, today’s debate between today’s religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organisation could be Communist or capitalist, or that their genders could be male or female.

But his friend and colleague the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905) was a deeper and more measured thinker. He believed that education and not revolution was the answer. Abdu had been devastated by the British occupation of Egypt, but he loved Europe, felt quite at ease with Europeans and was widely read in Western science and philosophy. He greatly respected the political, legal and educational institutions of the modern West, but did not believe that they could be transplanted wholesale in a deeply religious country, such as Egypt, where modernization had been too rapid and had perforce excluded the vast mass of the people. It was essential to graft modern legal and constitutional innovations on to traditional Islamic ideas that the people could understand; a society in which people cannot understand the law becomes in effect a country without law.

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to All Religions Are One (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing.¹ No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so obviously at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, essentially the same, and this view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture, not least in Dan Brown's multi-million-dollar Da Vinci Code franchise.

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.

Generational Patterns Since the beginning of recorded time, certain writers and thinkers have intuited a pattern to human history. It was perhaps the great fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun who first formulated this idea into the theory that history seems to move in four acts, corresponding to four generations. The first generation is that of the revolutionaries who make a radical break with the past, establishing new values but also creating some chaos in the struggle to do so. Often in this generation there are some great leaders or prophets who influence the direction of the revolution and leave their stamp on it. Then along comes a second generation that craves some order. They are still feeling the heat of the revolution itself, having lived through it at a very early age, but they want to stabilize the world, establish some conventions and dogma. Those of the third generation—having little direct connection to the founders of the revolution—feel less passionate about it. They are pragmatists. They want to solve problems and make life as comfortable as possible. They are not so interested in ideas but rather in building things. In the process, they tend to drain out the spirit of the original revolution. Material concerns predominate, and people can become quite individualistic. Along comes the fourth generation, which feels that society has lost its vitality, but they are not sure what should replace it. They begin to question the values they have inherited, some becoming quite cynical. Nobody knows what to believe in anymore. A crisis of sorts emerges. Then comes the revolutionary generation, which, unified around some new belief, finally tears down the old order, and the cycle continues. This revolution can be extreme and violent, or it can be less intense, with simply the emergence of new and different values.

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.

Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said, "The Hour will not be established (1) till two big groups fight each other whereupon there will be a great number of casualties on both sides and they will be following one and the same religious doctrine, (2) till about thirty Dajjals (liars) appear, and each one of them will claim that he is Allah's Messenger (ﷺ), t(3) till the religious knowledge is taken away (by the death of Religious scholars) (4) earthquakes will increase in number (5) time will pass quickly, (6) afflictions will appear, (7) Al-Harj, (i.e., killing) will increase, (8) till wealth will be in abundance ---- so abundant that a wealthy person will worry lest nobody should accept his Zakat, and whenever he will present it to someone, that person (to whom it will be offered) will say, 'I am not in need of it, (9) till the people compete with one another in constructing high buildings, (10) till a man when passing by a grave of someone will say, 'Would that I were in his place (11) and till the sun rises from the West. So when the sun will rise and the people will see it (rising from the West) they will all believe (embrace Islam) but that will be the time when: (As Allah said,) 'No good will it do to a soul to believe then, if it believed not before, nor earned good (by deeds of righteousness) through its Faith.' (6.158) And the Hour will be established while two men spreading a garment in front of them but they will not be able to sell it, nor fold it up; and the Hour will be established when a man has milked his she-camel and has taken away the milk but he will not be able to drink it; and the Hour will be established before a man repairing a tank (for his livestock) is able to water (his animals) in it; and the Hour will be established when a person has raised a morsel (of food) to his mouth but will not be able to eat it.

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

The Qur’an has not merely been revealed in Arabic: it has been revealed in eloquent Arabic. The language is clear and cogent, and there is no vagueness in it; every word is unambiguous and every style adopted is well known to its addressees. The Qur’an says: The faithful Spirit has brought it down into your heart [O Prophet] that you may become a warner [for people] in eloquent Arabic. (26:193-195) In the form of an Arabic Qur’an, free from any ambiguity that they may save themselves [from punishment]. (39:28) This is an obvious reality about the Qur’an. If this premise is accepted, then it must be conceded that no word used or style adopted by the Qur’an is rare or unknown (shadh). Its words and styles are well known and conventionally understood by its addressees. No aspect of the language has any peculiarity or rarity in it. Consequently, while interpreting the Qur’an, the conventionally understood and known meanings of the words should be taken into consideration. Apart from them, no interpretation is acceptable. Thus in the verses: وَالنَّجْمُ وَالشَّجَرُ يَسْجُدَانِ (6:55), the meaning of the word اَلنَّجْمُ can only be “stars”. In وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا مِن قَبْلِكَ مِن رَّسُولٍ وَلَا نَبِيٍّ إِلَّا إِذَا تَمَنَّى أَلْقَى الشَّيْطَانُ فِي أُمْنِيَّتِهِ (52:22), the word تَمَنَّى can only mean “desire”. In أَفَلَا يَنظُرُونَ إِلَى الْإِبِلِ كَيْفَ خُلِقَتْ (17:88), the word الْإِبِلِ has only been used for “camel”. The only meaning of the word بَيْضٌ in the verse كَأَنَّهُنَّ بَيْضٌ مَّكْنُونٌ (49:37) is “eggs”. In the verse فَصَلِّ لِرَبِّكَ وَانْحَرْ (2:108), the word نَحْر only means “sacrifice”. They do not mean “plants”, “recital”, “clouds”, “the hidden sheath of eggs” and “folding hands on the chest” respectively. Similar is the case with declensions and styles adopted. Scholars of grammar and rhetoric have regarded many such aspects of the Qur’an as rare and as exceptions; however, the truth of the matter is that this conclusion is based on incomprehensive research. In recent times, the works of the two pioneers of the Farahi school: Imam Hamid al-Din al-Farahi and Imam Amin Ahsan Islahi have fully proven that the declensions and styles adopted by the Qur’an are all in fact well-known and conventionally understood by the Arabs. Taking into consideration this principle is a requisite of the eloquence of the Qur’anic language, which as stated above, is mentioned in the Qur’an itself. No explanation of the Qur’an is acceptable while disregarding this principle.

If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars and ordinary people. After all, today's debate between today's religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organizations could be Communist or capitalist or that their genders could be male or female. And yet the great debates of history are more important because at least the first generation of these gods would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions. Most people prefer not to think about it. Even the field of bioethics prefers to address another question: 'What is it forbidden to do?' Is it acceptable to carry out genetic experiments on living human beings? On aborted fetuses? On stem cells? Is it ethical to clone sheep? And chimpanzees? And what about humans? All of these are important questions, but it is naive to imagine that we might simply hit the brakes and stop the scientific projects that are upgrading Homo sapiens into a different kind of being. For these projects are inextricably meshed together with the Gilgamesh Project. Ask scientists why they study the genome, or try to connect a brain to a computer, or try to create a mind inside a computer. Nine out of ten times you'll get the same standard answer: we are doing it to cure diseases and save human lives. Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing psychiatric illnesses, this is the standard justification given, because nobody can argue with it. This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science. It serves to justify everything science does. Dr Frankenstein piggybacks on the shoulders of Gilgamesh. Since it is impossible to stop Gilgamesh, it is also impossible to stop Dr Frankenstein. The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?, but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

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’.