The Ultimate Programming Crash Course (Learn with JavaScript)

Master the Basics of Coding in Under Two Hours in Interactive Steps and Visual Examples Methods for using this guide: View the online version on this page (scroll down) Download a free PDF version Download a free Mobi version (for e-readers and ebook-reading apps, zipped) Buy the Kindle version on Amazon Buy the paperback version […]

Reconciling Free Will and Predestination in Islam with al-Māturīdī and Ibn Taymiyya

Recently I have been reading many works on Islamic theology (kalām) in order to find answers to certain questions and paradoxes inherent within the Islamic theological worldview. Since I was already familiar with Ashʿarite theology (Islam’s dominant theological school), I decided to focus on al-Māturīdī (d. 944 CE), who represents Islam’s alternative yet orthodox theological […]

A Hadith Scholar Presents New Evidence that Aisha was Near 18 the Day of Her Marriage to the Prophet Muhammad

The age of Aisha bint Abu Bakr, may God be pleased with her and her father, at the time of her marriage to the Prophet Muhammad PBUH is one of the thorny issues in modern Islam, used as one of the main talking points against Islam by Islam’s detractors. How could God’s Prophet, a widower […]

Learn Quranic Arabic

This page contains the full text of Learning Quranic Arabic for Complete Beginners by Ikram Hawramani. You can get this book on Amazon.com as a paperback and Kindle ebook. Learning Quranic Arabic for Complete Beginners ✽ A Step by Step Self-Teaching Guide to the Arabic Language of the Quran Ikram Hawramani 2019StewardsPublishing STEWARDS PUBLISHING Copyright © 2019 Ikram Hawramani First […]

The Modern Islamic Studies Curriculum

This page presents a list of books meant for modern students of Islamic studies. These books are essential reading for any Muslim who wishes to be a capable modern intellectual who is able to think and write at the highest level and gain the respect of the other intellectuals. InshaAllah this page will be continually […]

Setting the default search path for Catfish File Search

The Problem It was surprisingly difficult to find out how to set a default search path for Catfish. On the command line, you can simply do this to always make Catfish search from the root directory: alias catfish=’/usr/bin/catfish –path=\/’ But adding this line to your ~/.bashrc file will not affect the default search path for […]

A Study of the Hadiths on Qadar (Predestination): Judging Between Fatalism and Free Will

This is a supplement to my essay Reconciling Free Will and Predestination in Islam with al-Māturīdī and Ibn Taymiyya Qadar (divine predestination) is one of the most controversial issues in Islam. Muslim thinkers are generally divided into two groups on this issue. There are the rationalists and semi-rationalists like the Matūrīdīs, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and most mainstream intellectuals […]

The Muslim Plan for Western Civilization: There is No Plan

Do Muslims hope to establish a World Caliphate? It is undeniable that some Muslims, including religious scholars, look forward to one day there existing a new Islamic empire that represents “true” Islam and that brings back the glory of the olden days. As is usual with fantasy-land Islam, the thinking is top-down, the caliphate has […]

How cyber pirates anonymously torrent movies on the internet

For my views on Internet piracy see my essay: Why Digital Piracy is Ethical and Necessary We all know that you, as a law-abiding citizen, would never download a car. And yet there are people out there who download movies for free and refuse to add a few more bucks to the billions of dollars that […]

An Islamic answer to Sam Harris and other deniers of free will

This article is an Islamic answer to Sam Harris and those who follow in his tracks. Below is a video that shows the dynamics of the free-will-denying discourse; the way it uses a collection of scientific facts to leap to the conclusion that there is no room for free will: The main argument of the […]

IslamQA: Islam’s theory of free will versus physical determinism: Why humans are responsible for their actions even though God operates the universe

In your essay “God, Evolution and Abiogenesis,” you said an atom has no power to move on its own. It is God who has to move every single thing that moves in this world. Given that, does that mean we don’t have free will? On the atomic level, it is due to the chemical reactions […]

An Islamic defense of free speech (a critique of Ziauddin Sardar’s views on Rushdie’s Satanic Verses)

I have had Ziauddin Sardar’s Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim since 2010, but I only got around to reading it recently. This is one of the funniest books written by a Muslim, rivaling the books of Turkey’s Aziz Nesin. In what is perhaps my favorite scene of the book, Sardar camps out in […]

IslamQA: Understanding Islam’s Sophisticated Approach to Slavery: Why Muslims Practiced Slavery in the Past, and Why They Reject it Today

Below are my preliminary thoughts on why Islam’s tolerance for slavery is not necessary unethical. It may sound like nothing but empty apologetics to defend Islam’s toleration of slavery and say that Islam’s goal was to abolish it, when Islam’s Prophet ﷺ and his companions all practiced it widely. And generally this is what much of […]

A new approach to the Quran’s “Wife-Beating Verse” (al-Nisa 4:34)

In this essay, I present a plausible framework in which traditional scholarly interpretations of 4:34 can be considered correct without this becoming support for violence against women. I argue that the error has not been in understanding 4:34 but in scholarly efforts to justify it. There is a new line of justification that has so […]

A guide to using PHP to download Google Drive files selected by users in the Google Drive Picker

Let’s say you’ve managed to get the Google Drive JavaScript Picker API to work, and have also managed to coerce your users into logging into the Picker and selecting one of their files: And you have verified that the onSelect function works properly: function initGoogleDrivePicker() { var picker = new FilePicker({ apiKey: api_key, clientId: client_id, […]

A guide to using PHP to download OneDrive files selected by users in the OneDrive Picker

In my previous blog post  I described how to get the OneDrive picker to work on a local development server. In this post I will describe the second piece of the puzzle, downloading the file to a local server using PHP after the user selects it: First, below is the JavaScript/jQuery used to open the file […]

Reconciling Islam and Darwinian Evolution: Al-Ghazali’s Matrix and the Divine Template

Introduction (Download this essay as a PDF) This essay demonstrates the relationship between Islam and science/rationality through my effort to reconcile Darwinian evolution with the Quran. I am as much a “Darwinian” as any evolutionary biologist and as much a believer in the literal meaning of the Quran as any conservative Muslim. By showing how […]

A guide to adding Google Drive (and OneDrive) upload functionality to Froala

Froala is a great JavaScript editor until you try to extend its functionality. Its documentation is horrible and there is little extra functionality you can add without having to do a lot of reverse-engineering and reading of GitHub comments. Below is a guide to my solution for adding a Google Drive button to the Froala […]

IslamQA: Answers about Islam and misogyny

Hey assalamu alaikum I’ll forward some messages here from previous conversations with someone who gave me worse explanations Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah, I broken up your question to address them individually. there’s something called child support he pays money to support his family not to pay his supposed to be wife I feel worse about myself […]

How to get a demo of the OneDrive File Picker JavaScript SDK to work on a local development server

After getting the Google Drive file picker working on the page of a project I’m working on within just a few hours, I was faced with the task of getting the OneDrive JavaScript Picker to work, which I almost abandoned because of Microsoft’s brain-dead documentation. After hours of watching Microsoft videos and piecing together documentation, […]

The Closing of the Muslim Mind and the Decline of Islamic Civilization

A response to Robert R. Reilly’s book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. Last I year I published then took down an early version of this essay. This is the updated version (also published as chapter 3 of my book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Understanding Islam […]

IslamQA: The Islamic ruling on building new churches in Muslim lands

Ideally, Muslims should treat Christians in Muslim-majority lands the way they want Muslims to be treated in Christian-majority lands. The following fatwa by the widely respected Islamic scholar Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi finds it unproblematic for Christians to build churches in Christian-majority villages and cities where they have a need for it. He also supports the […]

Jordan Peterson eclipsed Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in 2018 when it comes to search interest

Jordan Peterson doesn’t really have too many insights to offer, he tries to teach what the best religious mysticism teaches but without the religious ingredient. He may change a few lives, and he may have a good influence on changing many people’s notions about leftism. But I do not expect him to have a lasting […]

In the Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan

In the Footsteps of the Prophet is a long-needed biography of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ that focuses on his character, manners and experience, rather than merely narrating dates and facts. Many classical Islamic books are somewhat out-of-touch for modern readers, so that while they may have been satisfactory to their original (often Middle Eastern) readers, when […]

How to ignore accents and other diacritics in WordPress/MySQL search (Arabic, French, etc.)

On my new Asmaa.org website, which is an Arabic-language baby name resource, I use a simple loop to show the posts in alphabetical order. Each post title is a baby name: $args = array( ‘paged’ => $paged, ‘orderby’=> ‘title’, ‘order’ => ‘ASC’, ‘cat’ => $cat_id); query_posts($args); ?> while ( have_posts() ) : the_post() Since the […]

Is Islam really pluralistic? An Islamic defense of pluralism

If Islamic teachings can be used to defend pluralism, that tells us something very important about the future of Islam. My views are not unique; they are similar to those of the great twentieth century Egyptian scholar Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh Drāz (1894 – 1958 CE), who defended a similar vision in many of his articles and […]

IslamQA: Can a Muslim also be a free thinker?

Can a Muslim also be a free thinker? It depends on what you mean by “free thinker”. “Freethinker” usually means someone who rejects revelation; if that is the meaning used here then one cannot be a Muslim and a freethinker since the two would be contradictory. But if by it you simply mean being skeptical […]

IslamQA: The Islamic ruling on celebrating national holidays (such as New Year’s Day)

Beginning of translated IslamOnline fatwa Question: What is the opinion of our religion on the fact of certain countries celebrating holidays such as Victory Day, Workers’ Day or New Year’s Day and others? Answer: In the second part of a long study in the book Bayān li-l-Nās min al-Azhar al-Sharīf [A Proclamation to the People from […]

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Understanding Islam and Muslims

Free download (PDF) Free download (Mobi) (for e-readers and ebook reading apps) Buy as a paperback on Amazon.com Buy as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.com My new book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Understanding Islam and Muslims is now available on Amazon.com. This book grew out of a review of Shahab Ahmed’s wonderful What is Islam? that […]

Why God Allows Evil to Exist, and Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

Introduction There is a surprising amount of confusion among the religious, even among clerics and scholars, when it comes to understanding why evil exists and why God stands aside when so much suffering happens throughout the world. Most of us express wonder when we see some horrible catastrophe happen, or when we see evil individuals, […]

IslamQA: What to do when your spouse is less religious than you

A question I received recently: I am in my early twenties and have married a woman who comes from a Muslim family. After marrying her, I have found that religion is not very important to her. I had wished to marry a woman who was my equal in faith, so that we could create a […]

Probablistic Hadith Verification: Combining the Science of Hadith with Legal Theory

A Quick Preview Let us say we are faced with two hypothetical authentic (i.e. ṣaḥīḥ) hadiths from a respected collection such as Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, with the following chain diagrams, and we are trying to decide which hadith is stronger and better attested. The first hadith below has four transmitters (the four on the right), all […]

Why Digital Piracy is Ethical and Necessary

Disclaimer: This is an academic essay on the ethics of digital piracy. It is not a call for breaking the law by pirating. Some jurisdictions punish piracy severely, therefore the risk is entirely your own if you choose to break the law by pirating content. For my proposal for a digital library that makes piracy […]

A Biography of Ahmad Moftizadeh

Kak Ahmadi Muftizada: Darwazayak bo Xabateki Nanasraw (کاک ئەحمەدی موفتیزادە: دەروازەیەک بۆ خەباتێکی نەناسراو, Ahmad Moftizadeh: A Gateway to an Unknown Struggle) is a 394-page Kurdish biography of the great Iranian Kurdish leader Ahmad Moftizadeh written by Sarwat Abdullah, apparently published in 2010. I have been reading all available materials on Ahmad Moftizadeh, since he is […]

Conflicts of Fitness: Islam, America, and Evolutionary Psychology

Conflicts of Fitness: Islam, America, and Evolutionary Psychology by A.S. Amin is a highly original examination of the dynamics of gender and sexuality within Western societies on the one hand, and within Islamic societies on the other. As someone who has been working on reconciling Islam and evolutionary theory and on developing a post-feminist theory […]

IslamQA: Islam and cruelty-free products

Should we as Muslims go for cruelty free products? because I know its haram that animals are harmed, but I haven’t heard anyone speak against it Sure, the moral and ethical teachings of the Quran should inform our day-to-day decisions wherever possible. Companies known for cruelty to animals, pollution, anti-consumer practices and other unethical behavior […]

How to search a document on Linux while ignoring diacritics (harakat/accents)

The Problem Most applications are not smart enough to ignore accents when searching through the text of a document. Here is a screenshot of LibreOffice 5.2 failing at finding the word Arabic word “bsm” because I didn’t type in every single diacritic: This is an especially serious problem when searching through Arabic text because the […]

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne

There are times when you read a book that completely change your understanding of the world, answering questions you have had for most of your life, and even better, answering questions you did not know you had. This is such a book. Duchesne unites economic analysis, anthropology, history and philosophy in order to make a […]

Recovering from a SAXParseException error with no data loss

I was working on a book I’m writing in LibreOffice Writer. I am using the docx format for the book, as I plan to finish its formatting in Microsoft Word, not knowing that LibreOffice Writer has a tendency to corrupt docx files. After closing and opening the file again, I received the following error: I […]

IslamQA: Why did God let His scriptures (the Torah and the Gospels) become corrupted?

Why did Allah allow other books beside Quran to be changed by man like the Torah, gospel and bible? It was his own sacred word too when they were revealed and they were still his words so why did he allow that to happen? Why they became secondary when at one point they were the […]

My new book: Learning Modern Standard Arabic for Complete Beginners

In August last year I thought I could start working again, but I was wrong. In March this year things changed and I was able to start working on my book Learning Standard Arabic (MSA) for Complete Beginners, a book I have wanted to write since 2019. It is based on the same learning method […]

The Sayings of Ibn al-Jawzi

Selected and Translated by Ikram Hawramani Copyright © 2017 Ikram Hawramani A Brief Primer on Ibn al-Jawzi Abū l-Faraj ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn al-Jawzī (1116 – 1201 CE) was a major historian, hadith scholar, jurist and popular preacher in medieval Baghdad. He is said to have written over a hundred works (some mention as many as […]

The 12-Year Min-Max Average: A Simple Method for Calculating Real, Legitimate Economic Growth and Canceling Out Central Bank Manipulations and other Noise

Introduction Real economic growth is different from the increase in GDP that comes from monetary expansion. The 12-year min-max method that I have come up with is a way of calculating a country’s GDP growth rate over a 12-year period that aims to cancel out “fake” growth caused by monetary expansion and boom-bust cycles by […]

Measuring Economic and Military Potentials of World Nations with the Human Genetic-Cultural Quality Index (HQI)

Introduction What is the biggest predictor of a country’s scientific output, industrial capacity and military prowess? It is not geographic size. For instance, Kazakhstan and Mongolia are huge compared to Israel and Switzerland, yet Israel and Switzerland far outdistance them in all measures of intellectual, technological and military attainment. It is not population. India’s 1.28 […]

The Point of Marriage in Islam (and the Problem with Romantic Relationships Outside of Marriage)

An essay on the question of whether romantic relationships outside of marriage are acceptable in Islam, and if not, why. Why is marriage such a big deal in religiously conservative societies? Why can’t people just enjoy themselves without involving everyone and their mother in their private affairs? Islamic law does not have anything strict to […]

The Road to Maturity: On Dealing with Life’s Unsolvable Problems

Every person’s life seems to contain problems that have no solution. Such problems can last for years, even decades. Among such problems are: Poverty: A person’s life may be denied many joys and contain many indignities brought about by poverty. Having a disabled child: An otherwise happy and wealthy couple may be force to worry […]

Why People Dislike Middleman Minorities: A Fix for Thomas Sowell’s Blind Spot

On most days of Ramadan, fasting makes it impossible for me to do my usual programming and writing work. For this reason I spent most of the daytime hours of this Ramadan reading books, finishing over 20 books (mainly audiobooks). For years I have been aware of Thomas Sowell as perhaps the greatest living African […]

A Selection from Aqiday Mardia of Mawlawi Tawagozi by Baba Ali Qaradaghi

Mawlawi Tawagozi (1806-1882, known simply as Mawlawi in Kurdish) was an Islamic mystic and one of the great poets of Kurdistan, belonging to the Hawrami minority that I belong to. This book is a 160-page commentary on a small selection of Mawlawi’s 2450-verse poem Aqiday Mardia (The Approved Aqeedah), which tries to offer a journey through the field […]

Mysticism without Sufism: A Guide to Tahajjud, Islam’s Meditation Practice

What does mainstream Islam offer to someone who wants a deep, meaningful and permanent connection with God? When it comes to Islamic mysticism, Sufism is often treated as its main and perhaps even only outlet. But the truth is that it is quite possible to have deep, mystical practice as a Muslim without going through […]

Solving the Problem of the Codification of the Sharia

Abstract I argue that the existence of an inherent contradiction between the Islamic Sharia and codification is imaginary and caused by paying insufficient attention to the nature of the workings of the Sharia and how it relates to the state. So far codification has meant the imposition of the hegemony of the state over the […]

IslamQA: The issues surrounding the reliability of authentic narrations (al-Bukhari and Muslim)

I’m the one who asked for the explanation of how we should deal with hadiths. Thank you for your answer, it put things to perspective. Is there any book in which the author (scholar) himself has done the Quranic focused model of hadith as you described it, so I don’t have to read directly from […]

Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Studies in Honor of Farhat J. Ziadeh

Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Studies in Honor of Farhat J. Ziadeh (published 1990) is a collection of papers written in honor of the Palestinian-American professor Farhat Jacob Ziadeh (1917-2016), founder and first chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington. I bought this book after seeing it cited […]

Why We Should Stop Using the Word “Islamophobia”

Recently the British philosopher Roger Scruton was sacked from his government position for stating in an interview that Islamophobia is a propaganda word “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood”, among other statements. The interview was intentionally redacted by the journalist to put Scruton in the worst light possible. Since then the journalist has disappeared from social […]

Inconsistencies in the Harry Potter Books

Introduction This page lists all of the errors and inconsistencies I’ve found throughout my many readings of the entire series (I have Stephen Fry’s reading of the books on my phone as an audiobook, to which I sometimes listen when I’m resting or trying to fall asleep). Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone What Object […]

Forecasting the World’s Top 50 Most Powerful Countries in 2035 Using the HQI

The following table is a list of 50 countries that are predicted to have the most economic, technological and military power in the world by the year 2035, according to HQI theory. The projected power of the United States is set to 100 to make it easy to compare other countries with it. China’s projected […]

Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy [Short Book Review]

Professor Jonathan Brown’s Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy is one of the best English-language books about Islam written by a Muslim (he converted to Islam in 1997). While the book’s focus is on the issues surrounding the authenticity and interpretation of hadith, it provides a good general history of the development of […]

IslamQA: What happened to Islamic civilization? Why did Muslims fall behind in science and technology?

I wanted your in depth opinion on a particular observation. Muslims, historically speaking, have been responsible for hundreds and thousands of scientific discoveries. What happened to us? Why are we in the stage we are? Only 100 years ago, which is just a little more than one human lifetime, the Ottoman Empire was a sovereign […]

IslamQA: On Islam, Homosexuality and Homosexual Muslims

You don’t have to answer this because its a very complex question but do you think you can be Muslim and gay? And how should we as Muslims feel about gays? How shall we treat them? How do you reconcile Islam (in the sense it is a religion that discourages/disagrees with homosexuality) with homosexuality? Is […]

The Universal Digital Library: A Platform that Makes Digital Piracy Unnecessary, Funds Creators, and Makes eBooks, Games and Software Affordable

In my previous essay Why Digital Piracy is Ethical and Necessary I discussed why there are no proper digital libraries: publishers pretend that digital goods cannot be sold. They demand continuous rents for digital products they give to libraries, making things like ebooks costlier (and for more difficult to lend due to various licensing clauses) than printed […]

Believing Women in Islam (2019) by Asma Barlas and David Raeburn Finn

Believing Women in Islam: A Brief Introduction by Asma Barlas and David Raeburn Finn is a short book that attempts to present the main ideas of Barlas’s longer work “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Quran. First, I should mention that I believe that any self-respecting and civilized man should demand that his female mate […]

Ijmāʿ as Scientific Consensus: Defining Consensus in Islam and Ending Its Abuse

Ijmāʿ  (“consensus”) is one of the most abused concepts in Islam, used as a weapon by many in order to claim that no one has the right to disagree with them. It helps shut down free discussion and intimidate independent Muslim thinkers into keeping silent about their views. Ijmāʾ, as it is used in scholarly rhetoric […]

Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science

Nidhal Guessoum’s Islam’s Quantum Question (originally published in French in 2009, published in English in 2011) is well worth reading, mainly for its detailed refutation of various pseudo-scientific defenses of Islam and the Quran that have been offered by others. His detailed critique of Iʿjāz literature and its supporters (such as Zaghloul El-Naggar), who purport to show scientific […]

A postmodern critique of postmodernism

The postmodern mode of critique is to try to “read between the lines” to discover what structure of power the text is supporting. A person who reads the Bible and sees in it support for a patriarchal society might actually be “reading patriarchy into the Bible” rather than “reading patriarchy out of the Bible”. Humans are often hopeless […]

IslamQA: Dealing with missing someone after a breakup

Assalamualaikum,what do we do when we miss someone so dearly,It just literally kills us on the inside,I wanted him to make me halal but he rejected me in a kind way Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah, Tragic life events such as breaking up with someone we love will invariably cause us to suffer. There is no way […]

IslamQA: Determining start of fajr prayer in the UK

I’ve recently started to pray but I’m having difficulties with fajr and the timing. I’m from the uk and at my local mosque fajr start time is 3.05am but dawn is at 4.07am will my prayer be accepted or have I been praying too early There are multiple definitions of “dawn”. You have probably looked at […]

A bash script for automatically restarting an unresponsive Apache server only when needed

One of my servers responds to about 100,000 requests per day. Apache would randomly hang a few times a day, taking all of the websites down. I tried every solution I could find online to prevent Apache from hanging, but nothing helped, so I decided to stop wasting time on it and simply develop a […]

[Book Review] Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane by S. Frederick Starr

Lost Enlightenment is a highly readable overview of the history of the Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia, an area that gave Islamic civilization the majority of its great philosophers and thinkers (Jabir ibn Hayyan, al-Khwarizmi, al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Biruni, al-Ghazali)  and many of its great scholars (such as the creators of five of the six “canonical” hadith […]

The Qur’an (Oxford World’s Classics) by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem

The Qur’an by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem is one of the best translations of the Quran available in English. With its many clarifying footnotes, the book is especially helpful to people new to the study of the Quran.

The 1599 Geneva Bible Notes or Study Bible (Downloadable eBook Versions)

Download links: PDF – Word – ePub – Mobi (kindle) The text was sourced from Sacred Texts. It uses modern spelling and the quoted verses are apparently from the KJV (only the notes come from a Geneva commentary). Michael Hoffman, in his Usury in Christendom: A Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not, made a reference to the 1599 Geneva Bible Notes as a […]

Import and play your own audiobooks on the Amazon Fire Phone

[Update: I now recommend using these steps to install the Google Play Store (which does not “root” the device and does not cause any permanent changes), then buying the highly rated Listen Audiobook Player (which has up to 3x playback speed with pitch correction and a slider that shows your place in the book and […]

Become a Contributor

We are inviting capable writers and bloggers to become contributors to Hawramani.com by writing essays, articles and book reviews. If you are interested, please send us an introductory email at: contact@hawramani.com Requirements Good knowledge of English. A love of learning. Benefits Get a PhD-level education in Islamic studies for free. Join a light-hearted community of […]

The Sayings of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah

Selected and Translated by Ikram Hawramani Copyright © 2017 Ikram Hawramani Hawramani.com All Rights Reserved A Brief Primer on Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah Ibn al-Qayyim[1] was born in Damascus on January 28th of the year 1292 CE, equivalent to the seventh of Ṣafar of the year 691 AH. His full name is Abū ʿAbd-Allah Shams al-Dīn […]

IslamQA: Is it wrong to not be a traditionalist Muslim?

Is it wrong to not be a traditionalist Muslim? I am a Muslim and I value Islamic tradition and history, but we are now living in a different era and probably there are things that is irrelevant to us now, like hand-cutting or stone-throwing. Every generation of Muslims faces the challenge of reconciling Islamic tradition […]

My Chronic Fatigue Treatment Program

[August 28, 2017 Update: I have unpublished this book as the program, which seemed to work well for many months, has stopped working reliably. As I’m not certain of the value of the information presented in it, for now I will keep the book unpublished.] In this essay I will summarize the treatment program I […]

IslamQA: Balancing worship with productive work

Salam Alaykum. Do you have any guide for one to be consistent to his routine, of practising night prayers & reading the quran, while still working hard on improving themselves (worldly skills like writing & other craftsmanship)? I find night prayers really pleasuring, but I also want to balance it with my studies and self-improvement […]

Professor Abu Zahra: The Egyptian Islamic Scholar who Rejected the Punishment of Stoning

Muhammad Abu Zahra was one of the foremost authorities on Islamic law in the 20th century, whose works on the various schools of Islamic law continue to be used in academia. He was a member of Al-Azhar University’s Academy of Islamic Research and a professor of Islamic law at Cairo University. He was loved by […]

How to: Become wise

If you want to become wise, read 100 books that interest you. The books you choose to read can be about any topic and they can be of any quality, good or bad. The important thing is that you should find them interesting, because the fact that you find a book interesting means it contains […]

IslamQA: Balancing materialism and fatalism

Do we as Muslims count on what is written/ decreed by Allah for us, and not worry about anything? Or do we ourselves need to take action due to the free will granted to us by Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala, even if that might involve risk? My question is, to what extent do we take […]

IslamQA: Why Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslims

Why are Muslim men allowed to marry a non-Muslim but Muslim women are not allowed? One theory is due to genetic and psychological differences between men and women, Muslim men will be better able to  remain practicing Muslims and to bring up devout Muslim children even if their wives are Christian or Jewish, while Muslim […]

IslamQA: Islam versus Feminism

My professor told me that men and women have different purposes, so we can’t protest how men are more “free”. We can’t protest on how wives have to do what the husbands say as long as it’s right. My Mom also told me that if your husband says no, then you don’t do it. However, […]

Mashing two regular expressions together in JavaScript on the fly

var pattern1 = /Aug/; var pattern2 = /ust/; var fullpattern = (new RegExp( (pattern1+”).replace(/^\/(.*)\/$/,’$1′) + (pattern2+”).replace(/^\/(.*)\/$/,’$1′) )); Explanation: pattern1+” turns (“casts”) the regular expression object into a string. .replace(/^\/(.*)\/$/,’$1′) removes the beginning and ending slashes from the pattern new RegExp() turns the resultant string into a regular expression object. There is no need to add […]

The Early Development of Hanafi Usul al-Fiqh by Murteza Bedir

Download [PDF – 23 MB] Murteza Bedir’s PhD thesis The Early Development of Hanafi Usul al-Fiqh is an interesting study of the development of usul al-fiqh in the Hanafi school. It describes a process of slowly eliminating the freedom of intellect of the early Hanafi school as succeeding generations tried to reform the school to fit more with […]

Book giveaway

This is a limited-time giveaway for my new book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Understanding Islam and Muslims. Choose which file type to download: Download PDF version Download Mobi ebook version (for Kindle and other ebook readers and apps, extract after downloading it)

IslamQA: The Problem with Quranism

What do you think about Quranism? (The idea that we should rely on the Quran, augmented by reason and experience, for our spiritual and ethical lives, and not the Hadith? It makes a lot of sense to me that God would want us to follow his message, with the aid of the gifts of feeling […]

How to automate and throttle Relevanssi indexing on large websites

First of all, update Relevanssi to the latest version. This significantly increased indexing performance on my 80,000+ page website. Next, I created the following hacky solution for a problem that shouldn’t exist; the fact that Relevanssi cannot silently index everything without hogging all server resources. First find out the number of pages Relevanssi can index […]

Women may travel without a mahram for three days and nights: A study of the hadiths

There are numerous authentic hadiths that mention restrictions on women traveling without a mahram (a relative like a husband or father). I was recently asked about the exact nature of the restriction, so I decided to do a thorough hadith study using the probabilistic hadith verification method. For those who want the conclusion immediately: the […]

A Short Introduction to Usury: How to Make the Rich Richer, the Poor Poorer and Destroy the Middle Class

Download links: PDF – ePub – Mobi (Kindle) In this short ebook I discuss the history of usury, how it works, its effects on society and how the system can be reformed. An important part of the discussion is how today automation leads to wealth inequality and wage slavery, and how through using a usury-free […]

IslamQA: Why are we supposed to control our sexual desires in Islam?

Why do we have to suppress our sexual desires in Islam? I’m unmarried and always have sexual thoughts, but in Islam we’re told masturbation is haram and that we should fast to control our desires. It just doesn’t seem fair to those who are struggling to find someone. Masturbation is not clearly forbidden as I explain […]

What the Prophets Teach Us About the Proper Etiquette of Dua (Supplication)

In answer to questions regarding the nature and ideal manner of supplication in Islam The true servant of God is the one who accepts whatever the Creator decrees. If he asks of Him and He answers, he considers that a privilege granted by Him, and if he is denied, he considers that an act of […]

Islam and Depression: A Survival Guide

Please note that this article is not meant as a replacement for medical help, but as a supplement to it. What does Islam have to offer someone who has been suffering depression for years and sees no end in sight to their suffering? Depression is not sadness and cannot be cured by thinking positively as […]

Ending technological servitude: On the need for tariffs on Internet companies (and others)

In my view the most important reason why protectionism is necessary, or at least one of the most important reasons, is the prevention of technological servitude. A simple example illustrates the point: Your country cannot be a pioneer in aerospace technologies if your country is not producing airplanes. If all of your airplanes come from China, the […]

Just an update

The last time I did any serious work in Islamic studies was four years ago, in March-April 2019, when I was busy showing that, according to my hadith verification method, none of the pro-predestination hadiths were reliable. I was never able to finish that work. I might possibly be “back” and I might be able […]

On the Scrabble and IQ debate, or why mastering Scrabble doesn’t require genius

My answer to the Scrabble-IQ debate which keeps coming up on the Unz Review, from a comment I wrote on there: The entire debate may be about crystallized versus fluid intelligence. Scrabble requires that one be intelligent enough to be able to “crystallize” the patterns for solving each situation, so that a person can do […]

IslamQA: How to learn Quranic Arabic

Assalamualaikum. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to learn Arabic in the Qur’an? I already know how to read the Arabic, but since I want to understand deeply about Qur’an maybe you have learning methods which you can suggest. Jazakallah brother Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah, You may be interested in my book Learning Quranic […]

About

Email: contact@hawramani.com | Twitter Languages: English, Arabic, Persian / Farsi, Southern Kurdish I am a US-based Islamic studies researcher, software engineer and writer. I am currently working on completing Al-Azhar University’s curriculum for ʿālims (PhD Islamic scholars) on my own. I consider the Quran the unchanged Word of God and I derive my worldview from […]

IslamQA: The Islamic View of Sex Education and Adolescent Exposure to Sexual Scenes in Novels and Films

My child loves to read books. Some of the books she wants to read mention sex. She is 13 years old and I don’t know when to allow her to read those books or even when to tell her about sex. I need help with this. Thank you! When a child reaches puberty (and I […]

IslamQA: What to do if the Quran (in English) does not touch your heart

I have an issue I feel bad about. Whenever I read the Qur’an i can’t connect to it. At worst I haven’t even had a clear feeling it’s from God. Idk why. Maybe because I don’t know Arabic. But whenever I watch a religious video explaining the religion i feel very connected. You could try […]

IslamQA: Should Muslims boycott the Hajj because of Saudi repression and war crimes?

I’ve read that when we do hajj we are financially supporting the Saudi government to oppress people in it’s country and also to kill people in Yemen. Is it true that they use hajj revenue for bad stuff? I doubt there is a major country in the world that does not kill innocent people whenever […]

Page 1 of 5
1 2 3 4 5