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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Is it true that philosophy is considered a dangerous topic to discuss or do a study or just dive deep into it for knowledge? Some religious people in my country think that philosophy is dangerous to Muslims and we should not study about it. The mainstream opinion is that there is nothing wrong with studying […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I feel like I failed God’s test that was sent to me, miserably. What do I do? Ask for forgiveness and realize that you will be tested again and again every day of your life. If you fail one test, you still have the opportunity to pass thousands of tests in the future. Never let […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
assalamu aleikum, is astrology still haram if we read it not to know our traits or future but out of pure curiosity? Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah, The problem with astrology is that it attributes mystical powers to things other than God. If it is studied purely out of curiosity without adopting its teachings then that is […]
A famous hadith of the Prophet PBUH states: I looked into Paradise and I saw that the most of its people were the poor; and I looked into the Fire and I saw that most of its people were women. Sahih al-Bukhari 3241 Note that this hadith does not actually say that the majority of […]
A review of Livnat Holtzman’s article “Does God Really Laugh? Appropriate and Inappropriate Descriptions of God in Islamic Traditionalist Theology.” There are a few hadith narrations that mention the laughter of God, which is something not mentioned in the Quran. One of the best-known hadiths mentioning God’s laughter is the following from Abū Hurayra: So […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is pretty easy to put a table on reddit. Below are step-by-step instructions: If the data is on a website, or in an Excel spreadsheet (you can skip these if not): Create a new spreadsheet and paste your data in there. Save your data as a comma-separated text file (CSV). Open the file in […]
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 […]
Assalamualaikum,is it possible if someone has studied hard but probably not enough,but has full faith towards Allah to be a successful person? Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah, Even if you do all the right things to be successful, “chance” or God’s decree (qadar) can make you unsuccessful. And even if you get everything wrong, God can still give […]
There are numerous narrations that mention ruqya (the use of certain words, prayers or Quran recitations as charms or spells to heal or protect a person). I decided to to conduct a search of all major hadith collections and some minor ones to find all the hadiths that mention ruqya in order to find out […]
A hadith found in three places in Sahih al-Bukhari suggests that birth control is not recommended in Islam: We asked (the Prophet PBUH) about it and he said, ‘There is no harm if you do not do [coitus interruptus], for if any soul (till the Day of Resurrection) is predestined to exist, it will exist.” […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Brother, I’ve heard that orientalists are westerners studying Islam and their purpose is to cause distortion of knowledge among people about Islam. My question is, what orientalists really are and for what purpose do they study Islam? Thank you. “Orientalist” is a word that was used to refer to Western scholars of Islam until the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This book is a beautiful tribute to the memory of Ahmad Moftizadeh, may God have mercy on him, containing a detailed and well-supported biography of the man and detailing his works and beliefs. As someone whose (Sunni) family spent the late 80’s and most of the 90’s in Iranian Kurdistan, Ahmad Moftizadeh and Nasir Subhani, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is common in religious thought to dismiss atheists as obstinate wrongdoers who reject religion out of a combination of irrationality, egotism and their preference for their base desires. But if we appreciate the great honor and dignity that God bestowed on all of humanity (the angels bowed down to us), we should perhaps be […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
19 year old boy here. It’s a serious issue but I’ll keep it short. I was exposed to pornography at a very young age and I still haven’t been able to get over it. And then came the time when I could mingle with the opposite sex and actually do things and since then I […]
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 […]
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 […]
I became interested in the Christian theologian William Lane Craig after reading Jacobus Erasmus’s The Kalām Cosmological Argument: A Reassessment, a 2018 book that reconsiders Craig’s views on this argument for God’s existence and tries to strengthen it. I was surprised by just how strong this argument is, although it does not reach the level […]
Assalamu alaikum. What is the rule for using a free-downloaded software from the internet? Do we have to buy the original software from the publisher so that we don’t violate the copyright? Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah, I have seen no intelligent juristic voice on digital piracy, so I decided to do my own research on the […]
Henri Lauzière’s 2016 book The Making of Salafism is about how Salafism as we know it today was invented in the 20th century. I discovered Lauzière’s work through reading his 2010 article “The Construction of Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the Perspective of Conceptual History,” in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. That article overturned many of my […]
As a parent, you spend years tiring yourself to raise a child, only to watch them become a hostile teenager who thinks of you as something of an enemy who wants to control their lives. No matter how much you tell them that you have their best interests at heart and that you want them […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. —George F Kennan, American Cold War diplomat and father of “Containment Theory” Introduction A […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In Q1 2006, the fastest, most expensive CPU could do 12.421 GFLOPS on the Whetstone test. In Q4 2014, the fastest consumer CPU (Intel Core i7-5960X) can do 169.79 GFLOPS. I added two trend lines to the chart. The green one is a linear trend line, showing that in January 2018 we will have a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Why is it wrong to watch pornography? Even if a person is not religious, they will still feel guilt and shame about a porn-watching habit. Where does this come from? Even the most free-thinking and atheistic person will have reservations about watching pornography with their family, even if everyone in the family is an adult. […]
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 […]
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 […]
The contemporary Azhar-educated Egyptian scholar Dr. Khālid ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Rifāʿī says in a fatwa that the four schools agree that piercing the ear is permissible due to the fact that it serves a common need among women, and that there is no clear evidence against it. He quotes the Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350 CE) saying […]
According to a study by the Egyptian scholar ʿAbdallāh al-Najjār, who belongs to Al-Azhar University, hymen reconstruction surgery (hymenorrhaphy or hymenoplasty) is permissible in Islam. He says at the end of his study: We conclude from our study that there is nothing in comparative Islamic jurisprudence that implies reconstructing the hymen is impermissible. This is the case whether […]
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 […]
A review of Arezou Azad, “Female Mystics in Mediaeval Islam: The Quiet Legacy.” (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013) 53-88). Andrea Cabrera The article, “Female Mystics in Medieval Islam: the Quiet Legacy” was written by Arezou Azad, who is a Leverhulme Research Officer of the Oriental Studies Faculty at […]
Salamu alaikum. Is the story about The End of Times true, like the Imam Mahdi, the descend of Prophet Isa (alaihi as-salam), the Ya’juj & Ma’juj, Daabbatul Ardh, etc? Are these all in an authentic hadith? Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah, I don’t believe in the Mahdi due to the lack of strong evidence in support of […]
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 […]
Assalamu alaikum. I am a 30 year old male from the USA. I fear that Allah has abandoned me. He has given me test after test for years now. I am a good, practicing Muslim, I am involved in my community and do good work. I am without a spouse and fear I never will […]
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)
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 […]
IQ and intelligence, as a topic of study in themselves, no longer interest me very much because they are largely a foregone conclusion for me. Long ago I was convinced of the very realness and importance of IQ and of the fact that it is largely a genetically-mediated trait. What interests me these days is […]
[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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
A review of Shakh Yasir Qadhi’s paper “‘The Unleashed Thunderbolts’ of Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧawziyyah: An Introductory Essay.” This 2010 paper by Yasir Qadhi is a study of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s al-Ṣawāʿiq al-mursala ʿalā al-Jahmīya wa-l-Muʿaṭṭila (The Unleashed Thunderbolts against the Jahmites and the Negators [of Divine Attributes]). I will focus on Ibn al-Qayyim’s positions as […]
The religion of Islam, perhaps more than any other religion, is characterized by its emphasis on scholarship (daneshmandī دانش مندی in Farsi/Urdu), on the acquiring of knowledge (ʿilm) and wisdom (ḥikma), and on the sharing of knowledge through education (Rosenthal, 2007). The responsibility of the education (taʿlīm) of mankind is taken up by Allah [swt] […]
Is there anything that contradicts itself in Islam There is nothing in the Quran that contradicts itself. I have read it over 100 times and have never been able to detect a single contradiction or unwise saying in it. I have never had the same experience with any other book. I read the Harry Potter […]
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 […]
The issue of whether making pictures or paintings of living things (taṣwīr) is permitted in Islam has led to a great amount of controversy. Mainstream scholars (such as those of al-Azhar University) have chosen to permit it due to considering the evidence for the prohibition not strong enough, while those who consider themselves true followers […]
Assalam brother, Islam encourages us to seek knowledge and in one of the hadith said it is better to seek knowledge than to perform the daily spiritual activities (e.g. zikr, reads quran, perform sunnah), my question is what kind of knowledge do we need to seek according to the hadith? I think I’m lacking in […]
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 […]
if one were to have a mental illness that causes them to be very impulsive such as they engage in zina/drugs/etc… are they charged by Allah the same as one who commits these acts but does not have a mental illness that sometimes impairs their judgement or that makes abstaining from these acts difficult? i […]
/ Mar 13, 2019 08:53 PM / 6 Comments on Reconciling Free Will and Predestination in Islam with al-Māturīdī and Ibn Taymiyya / 9484 views
