Author Archives: Ikram Hawramani

Ikram Hawramani

About Ikram Hawramani

The creator of IslamicArtDB.

IslamQA: Dealing with Sufism making you feel arrogant and superior

Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh. Thank you in advance for answering the questions. Last year I learned about tasawwuf & was immediately hooked. The problem now is lately I've been feeling rather self-righteous & troubled that other doesn't have the same 'in-tasawwuf' way of thinking. I feel this is a sign of arrogance and try to fix it, but somehow I always automatically compare others' view with mine & dismiss them. Do you have any advice? Thank you very much again for answering.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh

I would say that is a natural stage on the way of a person who seeks spirituality. It is a strong sign that you still have much further to go until you acquire spiritual maturity and start to appreciate the divinely-given transcendence of each human soul and love them and appreciate them as your equal before God. I recommend reading the Quran daily, an hour a day seems sufficient to wipe out feelings of self-satisfaction and arrogance.

Whenever you see a negative characteristic develop in yourself, it is a sign that your connection with God is not close enough or is on the wrong grounds. The Quran is the best foundation for building and maintaining a relationship with God because it constantly points out our errors, failings and smallness in the sight of God, helping us never fall into the trap of self-satisfaction. Merely focusing on other acts of worship such as dhikr is not good enough and is bound to allow bad characteristics to grow in you. You need the Quran to constantly nudge you back onto the right track so that you remain guided. There is no alternative to the Quran for building and reforming your character.

Best wishes inshaAllah.

The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology by Tim Winter

Get it on Amazon

The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology is a good introduction to the topic of Islamic theology and its relationship with Sufism. It was edited by Timothy Winter, known to Muslims as Shaykh Abd al-Hakim Murad. The essays are by many well-known and highly respected scholars, such as Shaykh Umar Faruq Abd-Allah and Yahya Michot.

The essays are mostly introductions to their topics and do not delve too deeply into the details. In fact many of them end right when things seemed to start to get interesting to me, for example Steffen A. J. Stelzer’s highly interesting chapter on ethics.

The book could have as well been titled An Introduction to Islamic Theology. This makes it different from other Cambridge Companions I have read where scholars delve deeply and present new interpretations and theories of their own. Here the scholars almost entirely limit themselves to presenting overviews of the topics they discuss, which is beneficial for beginners to the topic, but not so beneficial for those wishing for detailed discussions.

The two exceptions are Steffen A. J. Stelzer’s essay on ethics and Toby Mayer’s essay on theology and Sufism, which present new and interesting analysis.

The History of Salafism: The Making of Salafism by Henri Lauzière

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 assumptions about Salafism that are commonly repeated today by Muslim intellectuals: that it somehow started with Muhammad Abduh (1849 – 1905) and that later on it was “stolen” by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis.

Henri Lauzière, Northwestern University Associate Professor

Lauzière 2010 article presents convincing evidence that Muhammad Abduh never considered himself a “Salafi”, and that the people who originally used the “Salafi” epithet did not usually have today’s Salafism in mind. On the one hand there were scholars like the Syrian Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī (1866 – 1914) and the Iraqi Maḥmūd Shukrī al-Ālūsī (d. 1924) who stood for modernism, criticized the Wahhabis, and considered themselves a followers of theological Salafism, which Western scholars today call Traditionalism.

Maḥmūd Shukrī al-Ālūsī

This school of thought took its inspiration from Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (known reverentially as Imam Aḥmad) and among its followers are the imams al-Bukhārī and Muslim and many of the best known members of the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī schools: Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāʾīnī (Shāfiʿī), Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrazī (Shāfiʿī), Ibn al-Jawzī (Ḥanbalī), Ibn Ṣalāḥ al-Shāhrazūrī (Shāfiʿī), Imam al-Nawawī (Shāfiʿī), Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (Shāfiʿī), Ibn Taymīya (Ḥanbalī) and Ibn al-Qayyim (Ḥanbalī).

This theological Salafism is nothing new within Islam, it is in fact one of the oldest intellectual strains within it and, unlike today’s Salafism, was never a challenger to the madhhabs (schools of thought).

Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī

In parallel to such theological Salafis, a Salafiyya Bookstore was established in Cairo by Muḥib al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb (d. 1969) and Abd al-Fattāḥ Qatlān (d. 1939). It is clear from the activity of this bookstore that they did not have today’s Salafism in mind either when they used the “Salafi” title, whether in naming their bookstore or their magazine. They published books by philosophers like al-Farabi and were highly modernist in their thinking. “Salafism” to them was the use of Islam’s ancient heritage (including philosophy and kalām, disliked Islamic fields of study according to today’s Salafis) in order to promote a sense of hope and pride among the colonized Muslims of the time.

Muhammad Abduh

At this point Rashid Rida (1865 – 1935), a disciple of Muhammad Abduh, comes on the scene to promote his vision of Islamic reform. While at first he continued to promote Muhammad Abduh’s teachings, in the 1920’s he started to increasingly describe himself and his movement as “Salafi”. For him, claiming to be “Salafi” was a way of breaking away from the traditional schools of thought without being called a deviant or liberal. By claiming to follow a version of Islam even more authentic and original than the version followed by the scholars of his day, he could break away while maintaining his credentials as a respectable Muslim thinker.

Muḥib al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb

Things changed with the establishment of the Saudi state and their conquest of Mecca and Medina in 1924. Rashid Rida considered the Saudi state the only viable successor state to the Ottomans and apparently put all of his hopes in them. He started to defend the Wahhabis and their actions, apparently thinking that their ways of thought could eventually be softened and modernized (he was quite wrong). 

Rashid Rida

With the establishment of the Saudi state, the Salafiyya Bookstore largely abandoned its modernist tendencies. With the involvement of Rida, a Salafiyya Press and Bookstore was established in Mecca in 1927 that was little more than a Wahhabi propaganda press, printing works like Ibn Bishr’s pro-Wahhabi History of Najd, in which the slaughter of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians is proclaimed as a great victory (the 1801 Wahhabi sack of Karbala). I recently saw a quotation from Saudi Arabia’s founder Ibn Saud (1871 – 1953) saying that not only was he not sorry that the Wahhabis had engaged in that massacre, but that he would happily do it all over again if he had the chance. This explains Winston Churchill’s opinion of him:

The British recognised Ibn Saud's control of Arabia, and by 1922 his subsidy was raised to 100,000 a year by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill. At the same time, Churchill described Ibn Saud's Wahhabis as akin to the present-day Taliban, telling the House of Commons in July 1921 that they were 'austere, intolerant, well-armed and bloodthirsty' and that 'they hold it as an article of duty, as well as faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette.'

However, Churchill also later wrote that 'my admiration for him [Ibn Saud] was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us', and the British government set about consolidating its grip on this loyalty. In 1917 London had dispatched Harry St John Philby--father of Kim, the later Soviet spy--to Saudi Arabia, where he remained until Ibn Saudi's death in 1953. Philby's role was 'to consult with the Foreign Office over ways to consolidate the rule and extend the influence' of Ibn Said. A 1927 treaty ceded control of the country's foreign affairs to Britain.

Professor Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam

Throughout this time, there was no such thing as “Salafism” the way we understand it today. Salafism was a fluid and largely undefined concept that started as a movement to promote the greatness of the ancients of the Islamic world as a way of fighting off the cultural influence of the West.

Rashid Rida became increasingly pro-Wahhabi and did everything in his power to support the Saudi state, most importantly sending his own disciples to work in the Saudi educational establishment in the Hijaz. The people of Mecca and Medina had no love for the Wahhabis and considered them backward and ill-educated, while they respected Egyptian scholars and intellectuals.

Rashid Rida never became a Wahhabi himself. He continued to maintain his reformist views that the Wahhabis had no interest in while also continuing to write apologetics in support of the Wahhabis.

The Making of Salafism

That brings us to Lauzière’s 2016 book The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century. This monograph expands on the 2010 article but adds a major new element with its focus on the career of Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali, the Western-educated Moroccon Sufi who became a modernist reformist and disciple of Rashid Rida only to become increasingly Wahhabized over the decades until he became one of the best known figures of the international Wahhabi mission.

Lauzière starts with a discussion of the fact that “Salafism” as we understand it today was completely non-existent before the 20th century. Salafi claims about the existence of a “Salafi” doctrine in the works of great scholars like Ibn Taymiyya are misplaced (although I believe seeds for today’s Salafism do exist in his writings–for example in his refusal to be called a Ḥanbalī, wherein he refused to be defined by madhhab boundaries similar to today’s Salafis). Salafism to them was the well-known Traditionalism I mentioned earlier; it simply meant to refuse to engage in philosophical speculation about the nature of God. It was in no shape or form a worldview that defined everything, nor was it a competitor to the traditional madhhabs. As late as the first two decades of the 20th century, we have textual evidence from Nuʿmān al-Ālūsī, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī and Muhammad Abduh using “Salafism” to refer only to theological Salafism. Later Rida tried to claim that Abduh was a Salafi in the modern sense, but the complete lack of evidence to that, and evidence to its contrary, show that this was just an effort to revise history.

A comical misunderstanding

Louis Massignon

The great French Orientalist Louis Massignon (1883 – 1962) was in contact with Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī and other scholars and was receiving a magazine published by the Salafiyya Bookstore. In a 1925 paper, Massignon tried to make sense of this new “Salafi” movement and attributed it to Muhammad Abduh and his mentor Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 – 1897). He considered it a reformist and modernist movement founded by these two scholars. This myth of a “reformist Salafism” that continues to be repeated today appears to have originated here with Massignon.

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani

ʿAllāl al-Fāsī (1910 – 1974), a Moroccan political activist and religious intellectual, appears to have been inspired by Massignon’s writings on Salafism so that he took it up, later becoming one of the main representatives of “modernist Salafism”, which he believed had started with al-Afghani and Abduh.

ʿAllāl al-Fāsī

This reformist Salafism was everything Massignon thought it was: a movement of religious intellectuals who admired the West, desired reform and wished to restore the glory days of Islamic civilization. Later Westerners who tried to study Salafism really believed that Salafism had started as a reformist movement because they knew of prominent people like al-Fāsī who called themselves Salafis.

The reality, of course, was that al-Fāsī had been misled by Massignon’s erroneous writings about the existence of a modernist movement named Salafism into adopting that form of Islam.

Therefore the idea that Salafism was “hijacked” by the Wahhabis, as Khaled Abou El-Fadl states in a 2001 article, is incorrect because there was no Salafism at the time to be hijacked. There was one group that called itself Salafi but used it only in the theological sense, as al-Qāsimī did. There was also a modernist group, the Moroccan Salafis, who had taken up the “Salafi” epithet based on Massignon’s writings. There was also Rida, who started to take up the “Salafi” label in the 1920’s despite having no clear idea what exactly it had to mean. He considered the Wahhabis the Islamic world’s best hope for fighting colonialism and therefore defended them despite his misgivings about their beliefs and actions and sometimes wrote absurd articles in which he portrayed the Wahhabis as not so different from the modernist readers of his journal al-Manar.

Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali

Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali

Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali (1893 – 1987) is best known in the West for the Saudi-sponsored translation of the Quran known as The Noble Quran, which was written by Muhammad Muhsin Khan and al-Hilali, sometimes referred to as the Hilali-Khan translation. Al-Hilali’s career is a good representation of how Salafism became the Salafism we know today. Al-Hilali’s career is one of the central themes of Lauzière’s book.

Al-Hilali was originally a Sufi of the Tijaniyya order. In explaining his abandonment of Sufism, al-Hilali claimed that at one point (in the late 1910’s perhaps or early 1920’s), while praying on a cold night in the desert, he had a vision of the Prophet Muhammad PBUH in which the Prophet instructed him to study religious science. When al-Hilali asked him whether to study bātin science (mysticism) or ẓāhir (non-mysticism-related Islamic studies), the Prophet says to study the ẓāhir.

Al-Hilali arrived in Egypt in 1922 and soon became a student of Rashid Rida. Later he traveled to India and Iraq. As part of the support of Rida and his disciples for the Saudi state, al-Hilali was invited to work as a teacher in the Saudi educational establishment in 1927. He became faculty supervisor at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.

At this time al-Hilali was extremely anti-Sufi and considered Sufism an evil and corrupt doctrine. When he discovered that one of the professors at the Prophet’s Mosque was a Sufi (Alfa Hashim), he wrote an anti-Sufi polemic and gave it to a Wahhabi judge, requesting that Hashim be fired. Hashim, in order to absolve himself from al-Hilali’s accusations, was made to write an anti-Sufi tract in which he condemned various doctrines of the Tijaniyya order.

When a Wahhabi scholar Ibn Bulayhid (d. 1940) discovered that al-Hilali was teaching that the earth is round, he made a big fuss and called it a bidʿa (heretical innovation), saying that the proper Islamic doctrine is that the earth is flat. He ordered al-Hilali and Hamza (another Egyptian and Rida disciple) to repent. The rest of the Wahhabi faculty started to treat the two of them as deviants and heretics. Al-Hilali managed to find supporting evidence from Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim’s writings on the earth being round, which made Ibn Bulayhid calm down, although he never admitted to having erred. Rida had to assure his readers in al-Manar that not all Wahhabis believe that the earth is flat.

Decades later, al-Hilali voiced support for Ibn Baz’s fatwa in which Ibn Baz declared that (a) the earth is flat and (b) anyone who disagrees with that can be put to death. Al-Hilali spoke French, had spent years in Europe and was very familiar was Western science (and early in his career worked to promote it). It seems unlikely that he would have really accepted the earth’s flatness, therefore his support for Ibn Baz’s fatwa appears to have been nothing but an effort to ingratiate himself with this all-important Saudi religious authority. It is, however, not impossible that later in his life he became so Wahhabized that he could convince himself to prefer Wahhabi “truths” to mere scientific truths.

In 1927 Rida had changed his moderate reformist tone so that he start to publish anti-Shia articles by al-Hilali. Rida had hoped that his disciples could spread his ideals of balanced reform among the Wahhabis. But quite the opposite happened. In their eagerness to fit in within the Saudi establishment, nearly all his disciples became increasingly Wahhabized.

Between 1930 and 1950 al-Hilali lead a double public life. On the one hand, he supported anti-colonial efforts among all Muslims without caring too much about how deviant their religious doctrines were according to Wahhabi standards. On the other hand, he continued to publish polemics in Wahhabi journals against various Muslim groups he accused of deviance and unbelief. Thus while he was increasingly becoming a Wahhabi purist, he continued to hold onto his ideals for reform and adopted tolerant attitudes toward certain “deviant” Muslim groups when he considered it beneficial to do so, something authentic (Najdi) Wahhabis would have never done.

Al-Hilali returned to Morocco at the end of his life, being paid by the Saudi state to continue spreading Wahhabism. From the 1970’s onwards Salafism slowly crystallized into what we know today, largely due to Wahhabi influence. Many individuals came on the scene to define a “Salafi method” for judging legal and theological issues outside the madhhabs. In his conclusion, Lauzière states:

The idea of a distinctive Sunni methodology applicable to Islamic theology, law, and virtually all other aspects of the religious and human experience was itself untraditional. Therefore, the purist version of Salafism should not be understood as a medieval or early modern concept or movement. To say that it dates from the time of Ibn Taymiyya or Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab not only is anachronistic but also obfuscates the development of modern Islamic thought. Although many of the ingredients of purist Salafism are old, the recipe and the final product (including the term Salafism) are not.

The Making of Salafism is an admirable work of scholarship–thorough and balanced. I looked forward to reading Henri Lauzière’s future works.

IslamQA: If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer?

Lately this hasn’t been making sense to me - I am at a low place in my life where I have no emotional relationships at all and I don’t feel needed/wanted. So when I turn to Islamic advice, I keep reading things along the lines of “You need to pray more because you need God, God doesn’t need you” and I find that even more depressing? How can God not need me at all yet love me more than my own mother? I don’t understand how I’m suppose to increase my worship knowing that I am insignificant to Him

Sorry to read about your situation. When it is said that God does not need you, it is to impress upon you your utter dependence on Him. All goodness and happiness comes from God and we as insignificant servants of Him have to utterly submit to Him and rely on Him to take away our hardships. God does not need us and can destroy all of humanity in an instant if He wished. When you take this fact to heart, you recognize that God is not like a parent who will love you regardless of what you do. Instead, God is like a mentor who is forgiving toward those who repent to Him, so the proper way to relate to Him is through obedience.

We are social creatures. It is very depressing to be isolated and feel like you are not wanted. Your Islamic belief cannot magically cure this–there is no way to make God replace the importance of your relationships with humans except for a very small minority of people who attain a high spiritual status and are able to make God the center of their lives. For most people, for their own mental health it is essential that they are surrounded by good and loving people. Since you do not have this in your life, the correct path is to acknowledge your depression and recognize that for it to be taken away there is a need for your situation to change. Your solution is patience while the difficulty lasts, while relying on God to change your situation.

Narrated `Abdullah: I visited Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) while he was suffering from a high fever. I said, "O Allah's Messenger (ﷺ)! You have a high fever." He said, "Yes, I have as much fever as two men of you." I said, "Is it because you will have a double reward?" He said, "Yes, it is so. No Muslim is afflicted with any harm, even if it were the prick of a thorn, but that Allah expiates his sins because of that, as a tree sheds its leaves." (Sahih al-Bukhari 5648)

The above also applies to psychological suffering. It is a chance for your sins to be forgiven and for you to earn the rewards of patience. There is no fun, joy or glory in psychological suffering. We seem to suffer needlessly while God watches on, doing nothing to help us. But remember that the Prophet PBUH suffered years of hardship, loss and failure at the beginning of his prophethood. Why did God allow this? God could have given him instant success and relief if He had wished. The answer is that suffering helps prove our character. How can we claim to be truly submissive toward God and truly patient if God always solves our problems for us? The best people you meet in your life are people who suffered greatly but who found a way to hold onto God until God took the suffering away.

Please see my following essay where I expand more on the purpose of suffering: Islam and Depression: A Survival Guide

IslamQA: Is it permitted to sing in the shower/bathroom?

Also, why is singing in shower/bathroom not permitted? I know the reason and it's because the shower/bathroom is a place where jinns and shaytaan live in, but I seek a more logical reason behind it. Thank you.

A fatwa by Dr. Ahmad al-Kurdi mentions that it is permitted to sing in the shower or outside of it as long as the words of the song are not un-Islamic and immoral.

Sources:

IslamQA: Can you make wudu when your awra is visible?

Salaam. I have couple things to ask. Is it okay if we take wudlu while our awrah is visible, e.g. our chests (for women), navel or knees revealed?

Hiding the awra is not necessary for the correctness of wudu. A person can perform wudu naked during the performance of ghusl (i.e. during showering).

Sources:

IslamQA: How do I balance between being a programmer and a writer?

Hi,this maybe not an question asking about islam,but i am quite interested about how you manage your time between becoming a programmer and writer. I am deeply inspired and amazed by your writings as it shows your erudition. I would also like to know how you learned programming. Thank you

I do not have a 9 to 5 job. I do contract software engineering on a project basis while my main income relies on an online business I built years ago that requires little day-to-day work. This alhamdulillah gives me a lot of free time to read and study. My writing ability comes from reading a great deal of books since my teenage years. Most of the books are listed on my about page. If you want to be a good writer, my advice is to read a great deal, especially Victorian classics and scholarly works on Islam and other topics as listed on my about page.

I learned programming at the beginning from a course I took in college which taught JavaScript. That gave me a foundation for continuing my learning on my own. Since then I have read many books on JavaScript, SQL and other languages. But the most important part of my learning came from practice. I was put in charge of my college newspaper’s WordPress website which forced me to learn some PHP in order to perform programming tasks. That in turn led me to create my own WordPress sites like IslamicArtDB which required a great deal of learning.

If you to learn programming, after learning the basics the most important thing is practice. You need projects to work on. My projects were all Islamic websites and others like Lisaan.net.

IslamQA: Was Abu Talib a Muslim?

Wa Alaikum salaam wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh. I like to know about what is Abu talib's real in hadith sources and was he a muslim or no ?

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh,

Authentic narrations mention that Abu Talib was not a Muslim and that he did not convert to Islam even at his death bed. Here is a relevant hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari:

When the time of the death of Abu Talib approached, Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) went to him and found Abu Jahl bin Hisham and `Abdullah bin Abi Umaiya bin Al-Mughira by his side. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said to Abu Talib, "O uncle! Say: None has the right to be worshipped but Allah, a sentence with which I shall be a witness (i.e. argue) for you before Allah. Abu Jahl and `Abdullah bin Abi Umaiya said, "O Abu Talib! Are you going to denounce the religion of `Abdul Muttalib?" Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) kept on inviting Abu Talib to say it (i.e. 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah') while they (Abu Jahl and `Abdullah) kept on repeating their statement till Abu Talib said as his last statement that he was on the religion of `Abdul Muttalib and refused to say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.' (Then Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said, "I will keep on asking Allah's forgiveness for you unless I am forbidden (by Allah) to do so." So Allah revealed (the verse) concerning him (i.e. It is not fitting for the Prophet (ﷺ) and those who believe that they should invoke (Allah) for forgiveness for pagans even though they be of kin, after it has become clear to them that they are companions of the fire (9.113). (Sahih al-Bukhari 1360)

IslamQA: How to get up for fajr prayer when you keep falling asleep after the alarm

Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh. I hope this question finds you in high imaan & good health, aamiin. I would like to ask for your tips on getting up for Fajr prayer. I've set up my alarm and get awaken in time (usually 1 hr before syuruk) but instead of getting up to do wudhu I would just lay there on my bed thinking if it would be any different if I pray or not, or other pointless things... It mostly ends up with me fallen asleep again and end up praying Fajr after sunrise (with a long sujud session afterwards profusely asking forgiveness for my heedlessness). This rarely happens to other prayers, for which I would immediately go to perform them after 15 mins of adzan time. Do you have any tips to immediately get up for Fajr prayer without aimlessly laying around & daydreaming? Jazakallahu khairan

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh,

My advice is to buy an alarm clock (rather than relying on a smartphone) and placing the alarm clock somewhere away from your bed so that when the alarm goes off you have to get out of bed to turn it off. Once you are out of bed it is much easier to continue to the prayer than to go back to bed. Make sure that the alarm clock is distant enough that you cannot reach it from the bed.

Best wishes inshaAllah.

IslamQA: Should you tell your fiance about your hymenoplasty?

I read your answers about hymenoplasty but my case is specific, please help! I was 15 when I lost my virginity, stupid and naive- the guy was 10 years older than me so I changed my mind when it was about to happen, but he did it anyways. I was not a Muslim back then. Now I am a Muslima, 22 years old, shall I tell my fiance I did hymenoplasty, or does it count as my past (we shouldn’t talk about our previous sins; and Allah forgives the past, before islam and repentance). However, I feel like that big of a lie (deception) would cause a break of our relationship sooner or later and a heavier reason, I don’t want to stain my soul by lying! People nowadays underestimate what lies do to our character. On the other hand, I am very content I did it because it helps me guard from zina now. And it somehow healed me. May Allah bless you for your research and knowledge you share with us.

According to a fatwa by the Qatari Fatwa Authority, a person who committed zina should not tell the future spouse about it since the Prophet PBUH recommends that we do not tell others about our sins when God has allowed them to remain secret. This is also the opinion of Shaykh Muhammad al-Hasan al-Shanqiti in a fatwa. For this reason it may be best if you keep your history and your hymen reconstruction a secret. I understand the burden of feeling like you are living a lie. What you should do may change based on the character of your future spouse. If they are pious, open-minded and forgiving, then letting them know may not harm your relationship with them, while if they have some immaturity then it may be best to keep it a secret from them. It is a difficult choice, but as far as I know there is no easy way out. If you keep it a secret, you can make it up through repentance and worship, especially through developing a close relationship with the Quran through tahajjud and Quran-reading.

Best wishes inshaAllah.

 

IslamQA: If God is responsible for guidance, why are humans punished for being misguided?

Assallamualeykum! I was wondering if there is any proper answer for this question I was asked the other day: "If it is God who decides whether the person believes in Him or not, why would He still send people who don't believe in him to hell, isn't that decision made by Himself already?" And then there's an ayat in Quran 10:100 where it says that no person will believe if Allah doesn't wish for it. and that He doesn't like people who don't believe in Him. Jazakallahu khairan.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

There are various Islamic theological theories that tried to answer that question. My favorite so far is Ibn Taymiyya’s who says that guidance is like a conversation between humans and God. God guides the human, and the human responds by accepting this guidance or rejecting it. If they accept it, God guides them further, and if they reject it, God either ignores them or causes them to become even more misguided.

This “conversation” takes place every single day of our lives. The more we choose guidance, the more we are guided by Him, and the more disobey and turn our backs on Him, the more misguided He makes us.

So it is not a case of God forcing total guidance or misguidance on us from the beginning. It is a case of Him guiding us, then ourselves choosing whether we want to be guided further or not.

There are some hadiths that suggest that humans are choiceless in whether they are guided or not, for example:

While the Prophet (ﷺ) was in a funeral procession. he picked up something and started scraping the ground with it, and said, "There is none among you but has his place written for him either in the Hell Fire or in Paradise." They said, "O Allah's Messenger (ﷺ)! Shall we not depend upon what has been written for us and give up deeds? He said, "Carry on doing (good) deeds, for everybody will find easy to do such deeds as will lead him to his destined place for which he has been created. So he who is destined to be among the happy (in the Hereafter), will find it easy to do the deeds characteristic of such people, while he who is destined to be among the miserable ones, will find it easy to do the deeds characteristic of such people." Then he recited: 'As for him who gives (in charity) and fears Allah, and believes in the best....' (92.5-10) (Sahih al-Bukhari Vol. 6, Book 60, Hadith 474)

While we cannot escape God’s decrees, He guides or misguides us based on our choices. The above hadith therefore has to be re-interpreted through the theory of a dynamic fate; from birth your place in the Hell or Paradise may be “written”, but based on your choices as you grow up, God may change what He has written. So the fate is always written by God and decreed by Him, but our choices change what He decrees for us. There are hadiths that support the idea of a changeable fate, for example:

لَا يَرُدُّ القَضَاءَ إلَّا الدُّعَاءُ، وَلَا يَزِيدُ فِي العُمُرِ إلَّا البِرُّ

Nothing counters God's decree except supplication, and nothing increases lifespan except righteousness. (Narrated in al-Tirmidhi, authenticated by al-Albani in al-Silsila al-Sahiha 154 and in Sahih al-Jami` 7687.

According to this hadith if your fate is to be misguided, all that you need to do is pray for guidance, and this will change your fate.

The Quran itself never suggests that our fate is sealed as soon as we are born, instead supporting the theory of a changeable fate. The Quran says:

God erases whatever He wills, and He affirms. With Him is the Mother Book. (The Quran, verse 13:39)

The above may refer to the Divine Registry (al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūḍ) where our fates are written, and it says that God erases and affirms as He wishes.

The Quran’s theology and the above hadith support the idea of a written fate that changes by God’s choice, but in response to our choices. So guidance and misguidance is decreed by God, but He decrees them based on our choices. If we choose guidance, God chooses guidance for us and increases us in guidance. And if turn away from Him, He chooses misguidance for us. While it is always God who guides us and misguides us, it is our own choices that lead to this, so we are held responsible for it.

A misguided person can never say to God, “I asked for guidance but you misguided me!” because that is not how the universe works. God guides constantly everyone who sincerely asks Him for guidance. A misguided person is one who chooses misguidance constantly. God calls them to Himself and places reminders in their path, and but they constantly turn away and based on that choice God punishes them.

... Say, “God leads astray whomever He wills, and He guides to Himself whoever repents.” (The Quran, verse 13:27)

... God chooses to Himself whom He wills, and He guides to Himself whoever returns to Him (with repentance). (The Quran, verse 42:13)

Sources I benefited from:

IslamQA: The evidence for the permissibly of drawing and painting in Islam

Salam, I am drawn to the approach of Islam you & others like you take, and when I read the understanding of the permissibility of things like music or drawing it makes sense to me. However, I worry that I'm actually just accepting the rulings that align more with my personal preferences rather than doing what's right because it makes life more difficult. After learning that 3 of the Sunni schools reject the permissibility of drawing, I feel there might be a flaw in the minority opinion. Advice?

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

I understand your worries. When it comes to the issue of drawing the evidence is very confused, therefore there is room for doubt and interpretation. Unfortunately there is no way to synthesize the evidence to come up with an opinion that completely settles the heart. But the evidence is sufficient to avoid condemning drawings and to let people do what they choose to do. The strongest support for drawings being permissible comes from al-Qasim b. Muhammad, one of Medina’s Seven Jurists who lived after the generation of the Companions. It is incredibly unlikely that this scholar would have supported a baseless opinion.

The two strongest pieces of evidence for drawing being permissible is that:

  1. The Quran does not contain the slightest hint of drawings of living things being prohibited.
  2. This is a case where hadith creates an entirely new category of prohibition not mentioned in the Quran. Should hadith be allowed to create entirely new categories of prohibitions? The correct answer seems to be “no”. Prohibitions should have a basis in the Quran that is further explicated in hadith. If the Prophet had received a revelation on drawings of living things being evil and prohibited, he should have made it clear–so the question is did the Prophet PBUH fail to transmit revelation to us? The hadiths on drawings of living things being disliked or impermissible are few and may reflect a personal dislike of the Prophet PBUH for drawings, rather than a rule meant to be followed. If there was meant to be a prohibition, the Prophet PBUH would have clearly stated it to his Companions and we would have had dozens of hadith narrations mentioning his statement and the Companions’s response to it, similar to the hadiths mentioning the story of how alcohol was banned and how the Companions responded by destroying their alcoholic drinks. Why did the Prophet PBUH fail to make a clear statement on prohibition? The answer could be that because there was not meant to be a prohibition. Drawings of living things were very widespread in Arabia at the time and we should have had numerous hadiths mentioning that they were destroyed and prohibited.

Numerous hadiths are mentioned from the likes of Aisha about the Prophet PBUH saying angels do not enter houses in which there are pictures, for example:

I purchased a cushion with pictures on it. The Prophet (came and) stood at the door but did not enter. I said (to him), "I repent to Allah for what (the guilt) I have done." He said, "What is this cushion?" I said, "It is for you to sit on and recline on." He said, "The makers of these pictures will be punished on the Day of Resurrection and it will be said to them, 'Make alive what you have created.' Moreover, the angels do not enter a house where there are pictures.'" (Sahih al-Bukhari 5957)

Yet we have hadiths like the following where Aisha refutes the above hadith supposedly from herself, saying she did not hear the Prophet saying angels do not enter a house in which there are pictures:

Abu Talha Ansari reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:

I came to 'A'isha and said to her: This is a news that I have received that Allah's Apostle (ﷺ) had said: Angels do not enter the house in which there is a picture or a dog, (and further added) whether she had heard Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) making a mention of it. She said: No, but I narrate to you what I saw him doing. I bear testimony to the fact that he (the Holy Prophet) set out for an expedition. I took a carpet and screened the door with it. When he (the Holy Prophet) came back he saw that carpet and I perceived signs of disapproval on his face. He pulled it until it was torn or it was cut (into pieces) and he said: God has not commanded us to clothe stones and clay. We cut it (the curtain) and prepared two pillows out of it by stuffing them with the fibre of date-palms and he (the Holy Prophet) did not find fault with it. (Sahih Muslim 2106 f, 2107 a)

Below is further evidence for making drawings of living things legal:

  1. Prophet Sulayman had statues built for him. If statues were inherently evil and disliked by God, how could a prophet do such a thing?
  2. The Prophet PBUH and his Companions used Byzantine coinage that had human portraits on them, yet there is no mention whatsoever of the Prophet PBUH disliking them or considering it impermissible to use such coinage.
  3. As mentioned, the highly respected Successor al-Qasim b. Muhammad, one of Medina’s Seven Jurists, considered drawings of living things to be permissible.
  4. The Prophet PBUH ordered Aisha to take away a curtain that had the picture of bird on it because “it reminds me of the worldly life”. He did not say it is prohibited or evil–just that it was distracting.
  5. Aisha used to have a toy horse with wings, the Prophet PBUH laughed at it and did not say it should be destroyed.
  6. The Companions did not destroy the paintings and statues in Khosrow’s palaces or in Egypt. Their inaction shows that there was no universal agreement on such things being evil and harmful.

Sources:

IslamQA: What to do if you cannot pray on time at school or work

Salam. I live in a non Muslim country where prayer space is not provided in buildings and stuff. I have a job that makes me skip two prayers. Is there some other way I can pray my prayers?

According to a fatwa on IslamOnline (which is overseen by the respected Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi), a person may combine the ẓuhr and ʿaṣr prayers and the maghrib and ʿishāʾ prayers if they have no other choice. You could perform the first two prayers at noon and the other two prayers at night. The prayers should be performed in full rather than shortened as is done when traveling.

Fatwas by the Qatari Fatwa Authority and the UAE Fatwa Authority also permit combining the prayers if a person has no choice.

IslamQA: Does bleeding from the gum nullify wudu or fast?

Salam brother, does swallowing blood break fast/wudu? what if it’s only a small amount? I have a tooth that constantly bleeds and it’s frustrating worrying about it all the time.

According to a fatwa by the Qatari Fatwa Authority bleeding from the gum does not nullify wudu, but a person should avoid swallowing it as much as possible. As for fasting, a fatwa by the respected Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi states that bleeding from the gum does not nullify the fast as long as a person does not intentionally swallow the blood. If some of the blood mixes with the saliva and a person swallows some of it unknowingly or because they are unable to avoid it (since it may not be possible to remove all blood from the mouth), then there is no issue with this either.

Source:

The Crucible of Islam by G. W. Bowersock

Get it on Amazon

G. W. Bowersock’s 2017 book The Crucible of Islam is a very brief survey of the religious and political situation of Arabia in the centuries leading up to the coming of Islam. There is mention of the relationship of the Byzantines, Persians and Ethiopians with the Jews and Christians of Yemen and Arabia.

The purpose of the book is to shed light on the “crucible” in which Islam was made. Due to the extreme lack of documentary evidence on the situation in Mecca and its surroundings, the book is restricted to retelling the stories of a few major events in the surroundings that may (or may) not have had an important influence in the way Islam came about. The Ethiopians conquered Yemen and Christianized it. The Persians and Byzantines competed for influence over the region through their relationships with allied Arab tribes. I cannot really say that much light has been shed on the crucible of Islam; due to its briefness and the lack of documentary evidence, the book serves mostly to show how little we know about the reality of the facts on the ground.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is Michael Lecker’s theory that the Ghassanids in Medina may have had a role in encouraging the Jews and pagans to unite under the rule the Prophet Muhammad PBUH. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius may have encouraged his clients the Ghassanids to do this in order to ensure that the Persians did not regain influence over the Medina region.

Below are some notes on (mostly minor) issues and errors that I encountered in my reading.

On page 39 he says there are no daughters of Allah mentioned in the Quran. While it is true that no daughters of Allah are mentioned by name, the Quran does contain mention of the pagans attributing daughters to Allah:

Glen Bowersock, Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

And they attribute to God daughters—exalted is He—and for themselves what they desire. (The Quran, verse 16:57)

Ask them, “Are the daughters for your Lord, while for them the sons?” (The Quran, verse 37:149)

Or for Him the daughters, and for you the sons? (The Quran, verse 52:39)

He considers the Wars of Apostasy an inappropriate label because he assumes they were majorly aimed at false prophets like Musaylama. But according to Muslim sources these wars were aimed first at tribes that refused to pay the zakat which they had paid during the time of the Prophet PBUH. The war on Musaylama was a sequel to these, and rather than being directed at extinguishing a rival religion specifically, the war was an act of statecraft; Musaylama had established a state that was at war with the Muslim state, and the Muslim state responded.

He mentions the word ukhdūd as referring to the Trenches in the Battle of the Trench, even though the name universally used is khandaq. He mentions that chapter 85 of the Quran al-Burūj commemorates this battle when there is no relationship between the chapter and the battle whatsoever. This chapter in fact commemorates that killing of Christians by Yemeni Jews, a chapter of pre-Islamic history that Bowersock himself mentions often. The chapter of Quran the actually commemorates the Battle of the Trench is chapter 33, al-Aḥzāb (“The Confederates”).

He mentions that the relics of the True Cross had been moved to Baghdad in 614, possibly meaning al-Madāʾin because Baghdad did not exist at the time.

He says that the Prophet’s cousin ʿAlī b. Abū Ṭalib did not belong to the Quraysh tribe but to the Banū Hāshim, confusing clan differences with tribal differences. Banū Hāshim were actually a clan within Quraysh.

He mentions that the Prophet PBUH “reconstructed” the Kaʿba. The phrasing implies that he did this as part of his mission. There is no evidence as far as I know that the Prophet PBUH made any changes to the Kaʿba. He had taken part in repairs to the Kaʿba before he became a prophet.

His treatment of the Dome of the Rock seems to suggest that he is unaware that the mosque (al-Masjid al-Aqṣā) is actually the original mosque that was established on the Mount. He expects the traveler Arculf to have seen the rock in the mosque, but since the mosque does not actually include the rock and is hundreds of meters away from it, it is quite natural that Arculf does not mention the rock. The Dome of the Rock itself is not a mosque but merely a shrine.

IslamQA: Is it permitted to eat and drink while standing up?

Salaam. I was wondering if Muslims are allowed to eat food and drink while standing up?

There are hadiths mentioning the Prophet PBUH and the Companions eating or drinking while standing up, walking and while riding animals. For this reason it is considered permitted. There is however one hadith from Anas b. Malik that suggests eating and drinking while standing up is disliked if a person has no good reason for it. But this is not a prohibition (since the Prophet PBUH himself did it) and is considered a recommendation for sitting down while eating and drinking.

Sources:

IslamQA: Is alcohol in tinctures and drugs halal?

I was wondering if grain free alcohol in tincture supplements is halal? Thank you

The general rule regarding alcohol is that any alcohol-containing liquid that can cause intoxication is forbidden to drink. So beer is forbidden despite containing a small amount of alcohol. However, vanilla extracts that are dissolved in alcohol are permitted (according to some scholars) since it is nearly impossible to get intoxicated by it since the amount of vanilla extract used in foods is so small. The same principle applies to types of vinegar (such as Balsamic) that contain trace amounts of alcohol that has no possibility of causing intoxication since it is humanly impossible to drink sufficient vinegar to cause intoxication.

Regarding a tincture or drug, if the amount used is so small that there is no chance of intoxication from it, then it would be closer to the permitted side. It depends on the specific tincture or drug. If the alcohol amount is high and the drug is dilute so that a person can easily abuse it and get intoxicated, then that is closer to the forbidden side. But if it is similar to vanilla extract where the chance of intoxication is almost non-existent, then the presence of alcohol would not be an issue.

Sources:

IslamQA: Feeling guilty about sexual fantasies

SelamunAleykum! I'm 19 years old boy,sometimes I'm thinking of very very bad things,that things mostly are sexual fantasies,I'm thinking that things about anyone but I don't wanna think things about like that,Sometimes I feel like these thoughts take me over and move me, I think too much bad, but I don't hurt anyone, I don't want to think about it, I don't want to think about such disgusting things,I feel so bad, what do I have to do to prevent bad thoughts?Sometimes it makes me forget who I am.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

Sexual fantasies are a natural byproduct of the body and brain’s functioning. There is no way to shut these thoughts down because they are not voluntary. What you can do is avoid acting on them as you mentioned. Putting an end to your sexual thoughts may impossible until you get older and your hormones calm down. Consider this a test like any other. Your task is to do your best to remain a good Muslim and maintain a high character by controlling your desires and not letting them cause you to sin. We cannot always be perfect, but admirable and pious young Muslims are those who go back to God as soon as they can after a sin and do not let their sins dishearten them from seeking God’s mercy and forgiveness, even if they have failed a thousand times in the past.

For more on sexual fantasies in Islam please see this page: Islam and sexual fantasies

IslamQA: The ruling on breaking a fast that you are making up for Ramadan

Is it haram to break a fast that you’re making up for Ramadan?

While breaking optional fasts is permitted without issue, according to multiple fatwas it is not permitted to a break a fast that one is performing in place of an obligatory fast.

If a person breaks such a fast without having an excuse, they will have to make it up along with making up the original fast they intended to make up.

Source

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 and Muslims).

In his essay “The Problem of Islamic Decadence”, the British historian J. J. Saunders (1910 – 1972) mentions the many theories that Westerners have proposed to explain why Muslims went from being the all-powerful rulers of the world to being backward and politically weak.

Considering Islamic civilization a weak and backward one is a relatively new thing. Saunders writes:

Not until the Age of Enlightenment did the West awake to the fact that its enemy and former mentor had slipped so far behind: only then were attempts made to account for this decline. Up to the end of the seventeenth century Islam presented the appearance of great strength and viguor, at least politically: the three leading Muslim States, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia and Mogul India, ranked among the world’s great powers, and even the Sharifian kingdom of Morocco was treated with respect by Christian nations as late as the age of Louis XIV. Around 1700 there was a noticeable change. The final repulse of the Turks from Vienna (1683), the Christian reconquest of Hungary, and the Peace of Carlowitz (1699), registered the unmistakable decay of Ottoman might. The death of Awrangzib (1707) was followed by the rapid disintegration of the Mogul Empire. The fall of the Safavid dynasty (1722) ended the political greatness of Persia.[1]

Among undeniable signs of the decline of Islamic civilization were the fact that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb needed a Dutch passport to perform the Hajj in 1706,[2] and the fact that the Ottomans were so geographically ignorant that they were taken aback by the appearance of a Russian fleet in the Mediterranean in 1770, not knowing that the Baltic Sea was connected to the Atlantic Ocean according to Saunders.[3] As early as 1670, a European traveler through Persia and India noticed the lack of intellectual curiosity and the low technological sophistication of these lands.[4]

The French intellectuals Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Voltaire (1694-1778) and the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) blamed government tyranny and mismanagement for the state of Muslim societies.[5] Ernest Renan, one of the most prominent intellectuals of the 19th century, blamed Islamic theology. According to Renan:

Only by freeing themselves from the paralysing grip of the Koran and the Law could the Muslim people hope to contribute again to the general advance of civilisation.[6]

Since Renan, the idea that Islam causes backwardness has been thoroughly taken up by the West’s intelligentsia so that it is taken for a fact these days—despite its banality and its sociologically amateur understanding of the functioning human societies. The works of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis are a more sophisticated restatement of Renan’s ideas. One of the latest contributions to this field of Islam-blaming is The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis by Robert R. Reilly.[7] This essay focuses on a critique of Reilly’s writing while introducing an alternative, and far more plausible, explanation.

Reilly argues that the Islamic theological doctrine of predestination and other Ash’arite—the dominant theological framework within Sunni Islam—teachings have driven Muslims to a fatalistic, anti-intellectual dead-end, a “suicide” as Reilly describes it, quoting Fazlur Rahman (1919 – 1988), the famous Pakistani Islamic intellectual.

Reilly’s thesis is that scholarly theological positions hamper Muslim curiosity and intellectual achievement. He asserts that religious scholars and their doctrines have the power to put a damper on the freedom of thought among Muslims. In his rather depressing vision, intelligent Muslims are almost mind-controlled by a fatalistic Islam, and if only they would abandon this version of Islam, they would, as if by magic, acquire the ability to stop being narrow-minded and develop into full human beings. As is sadly typical of Western discourses about Islam, Reilly compares the very worst examples of the people of the Middle East with the best of the West, and from this highly skewed comparison he concludes that Islam must be the reason why the Middle East is not doing as well as the West.

If Reilly is right that the presently dominant version of Islam causes narrow-mindedness and is tantamount to “intellectual suicide”, then we would expect the intellectual elite of the Muslim world to be severely affected by this suicidal doctrine. Men and women who would have been scientists and inventors in a different reality would instead be narrow-minded and anti-intellectual worshipers at the feet of the religious scholars. It sounds like the set-up for a good story, but is there any reality to this scenario? The question to ask is: are city-dwelling, cosmopolitan Muslims hampered in their intellectual curiosity by theological doctrines?

Reilly’s answer should be yes. These people would be responsible for intellectual progress; but there is supposedly little intellectual progress, therefore these people are instead narrow-minded anti-intellectuals who need to be freed from harmful Islamic doctrines.

In the Reilly’s imagination, Muslim hordes listen to their religious scholars then zealously go on to implement whatever backward thing said scholars recommend.

But in the world of reality, like George Eliot’s Christians and George Orwell’s proletarian Catholics, Muslims politely listen to the preachers at the Friday sermons, then go out to think whatever they themselves choose to think. If the sermon makes sense within their personal, familial and cultural conceptual frameworks, they may be motivated to slightly change their behavior in response to it. And if it did not survive this critique, the content will simply be ignored. And if a preacher insults their intelligence or conscience one too many times, they will simply stop attending their sermons and find another mosque to go to (if one is available). If not, they may go to the sermon as late as possible to catch the obligatory performance of the communal prayer after sermon ends, as I have seen some Muslims do.

Reilly writes:

There are people in Saudi Arabia today who still do not believe man has been on the moon. This is not because they are ignorant; it is because accepting the fact that man was on the moon would mean also accepting the chain of causal relationships that put him there, which is simply theologically unacceptable to them.

Reilly quotes things like the above, thinking that they are somehow representative of all Muslims, when:

  1. Saudi’s cosmopolitan Muslims would find that just as laughable as any Westerner.
  2. There are perhaps tens of thousands of Americans who do not believe the moon landings ever happened. A quick search on Amazon.com for “moon landing hoax” brings up dozens of books.
  3. Saudi Arabia, this supposed capital of Islamic backwardness, now produces more scientific research[8] than Hungary, Thailand, New Zealand, Israel or Romania.[9]

Whether Saudi’s Wahhabi preachers dislike the country’s research institutions or not, the Muslim population not only tolerates them, but is proud of them and their achievements. In 2010, the Saudi website al-Weeam reported that a female Saudi student had come first in her class at Southampton University in England. The article led to 88 comments, most of which praised her achievement. A few of the usual suspects were present to mention how she was suffering moral decay by being in England, but these were the exception “that proves the rule”; most readers found positive value in her achievement and expressed pride in it.[10]

An illustration of the independence of the Muslim mind from religious scholars is the way Iran’s middle class rejects the Shia practice of temporary marriage, rightly recognizing it as legalized prostitution[11], despite scholarly approval for it.

Egypt is a very conservative country, yet its scientific output has increased from 4,515 scientific research papers published in 2005 to 17,300 in 2016. It is common to brush such data aside by saying this progress is happening despite Islam. Even if the research institutions that are producing these papers are staffed by devout Muslims, this is brushed aside by saying that they are not really Muslim in their hearts, that they have abandoned parts of Islam and this enables them to be rational and human. In this way, all actual cases of Muslims acting rationally, acting as intelligent and modern creatures, are dismissed in order to maintain the narrative that Islam promotes irrationality.

Western pundits preemptively close all doors to data that would prove their theses wrong; any data about real Muslims behaving intelligently, rationally and humanistically is inadmissible to them (they are not real Muslims, or they are doing what they do despite Islam), while all data showing otherwise is admissible.

Reilly, as many other pundits, considers Wahhabism somehow a natural form of Islam that has the danger of spreading to all Muslim minds. This is despite the fact it is likely only practiced by less than 1% of the world’s Muslims, largely sponsored by Saudi Arabia, and despite the fact that the vast majority of Muslims strongly dislike it. When the Wahhabi Ibn Saud conquered Mecca and Medina with the help of British funding[12] in the 1920’s, the people of these two cities so strongly disliked Wahhabi preachers that he had to import clerics from Egypt.[13]

Reilly has to focus on Wahhabism because he is trying to explain why Islam is causing so much terrorism.[14] Like almost all of those who try to answer this question, he tries to find the reasons for Islamic terrorism within Islamic cultures and societies, ignorant of the fact Islamic terrorism is very much a 20th century phenomenon triggered by colonial rule in Egypt, the Jewish ethnic cleansing of Palestine[15], and the US arming, training and funding of the Wahhabi Taliban and al-Qaeda organizations in the 1980’s in order to weaken the Soviet Union.[16]

Instead of trying to look blindly grope inside Muslim minds for the causes of Islamic terrorism, Reilly would probably do much better to call up a few of his friends at the Pentagon.[17]

The decline of Islamic science

The rise of the rationalist Mu’tazilites coincided with the rise of Islamic science in the 9th century, and the fall of the Mu’tazilites and the rise of Ash’arites in the 11th century coincided with the fall of Islamic science. Reilly considers it his most important contribution to the discussion of the decline of Islam to suggest that the abandonment of Mu’tazilite doctrine and the adoption of the less intellectual Ash’arite doctrine was a cause for the decline and fall of Islamic civilization. For him this correlation equals causation.

During the period of decline that started from 900 CE onward, the Abbasid empire suffered repeated Turkic invasions. The same process that caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (centuries of barbarian invasions causing a breakdown in urban networks of professionalism and trade) happened to Islam from the 10th century to the 15th century. The West was spared this process during the same period so that it enjoyed a Renaissance in peace just as the Turkic Mahmud of Ghazni was carrying on his slaughter of cosmopolitan and productive Iranian cities.

Baghdad was the center of Abbasid science and philosophy, which was largely conducted by Iranians coming from the great Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia. These cities were one by one decimated by the Turkic and Mongol invasions, and Baghadad itself never recovered from the destruction of its irrigation system by the Mongols.[18] Two centuries after the Mongols, the Turkic warlord Tamerlane re-destroyed Baghdad even more thoroughly than the Mongols had managed.[19]

Russia and Poland, the only significant areas of the West that suffered Mongol and Turkic invasions during the same period, were until recently just as famous for being backward and undeveloped as the Muslim lands, despite being Christian lands. John Saunders writes:

Since the conversion of Northmen and the Magyars around 1000, Western Europe had been completely free from this scourge. The Mongols, who devastated Russia as thoroughly as they did Western Asia, got as far as Silesia in 1241 before their leaders were obliged to return home in order to elect a new Great Khan. Had they pressed westwards to the Rhine and the Atlantic and overrun Germany, Italy and France, which they could probably have done with ease, there would have been no Renaissance, and the West, like Russia, would have taken centuries to reconstruct the shattered fabric of its civilisation. Western Europe has perhaps never properly appreciated its good fortune in escaping conquest by the last and most dreadful of the invaders from the steppes of Asia. It emerged from the Dark Ages in the eleventh century, at the very time when the first barbarian blows were being struck at the world of Islam, and it was able from then onwards to build up a new civilisation on the Atlantic fringe of the Eurasian continent uninterrupted by the raids and devastations of Turks or Mongols or Bedouins.

Now that the destruction brought by the barbarian invasions has been repaired and trade has resumed, we should take another look at Muslim societies and see whether things are changing or not. Islam has not changed greatly in the past 200 years. Muslims continue to consider the Quran the literal Word of God and the hadith collections of al-Bukhārī and Muslim as canons of the faith. If Renan, Lewis and Reilly are right that Islamic theology is causing a closing of the Muslim mind (John Saunders, too, considers Islam a potential negative influence), we would expect little change to have taken place after the restoration of peace, because they tell us that it is the Muslims’ Islamic beliefs that is making them backward and decadent, not something outside of Islam, such as historical circumstances.

Today, throughout the Muslim world there is great interest in philosophy, in science, in literature. The top 6 Muslim-majority countries in terms of population (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran and Turkey) have increased their scientific output by three to ten times in the past ten years alone.  Iran now publishes more scientific research papers in peer-reviewed journals than Sweden, Poland or Belgium. Muslims are sending their children to Western-inspired universities by the millions. In Iran and Egypt, most Western bestsellers are translated and published a year or two after their publication in the West. It is breathtakingly ignorant to color one’s understanding of the Muslim societies of today by prejudices inspired by the decaying societies of 1000-1900. Islamic theology has remained the same, yet everything else is changing.

The Scientific Revolution was the edge of edges that enabled Europe to rule the world until the year 2000. It has only been in the past 20 years (since the 1990’s) that the nations outside of Europe, Muslim and non-Muslim, discovered the importance of formal scientific research. Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India and China realized they would forever be second-class citizens on the world stage, clients of Europe, as long as they did not have a system for churning out discoveries as Europe did.

All of the 20th century was a difficult lesson for the third world in learning that, to keep up with Europe, it is not sufficient to copy its technologies; one needs to recreate its scientific research culture. Only this enables one to have the well-educated and well-equipped men and women needed to develop the blades of aircraft engines and the connectors used in supercomputers.

At the moment that I am writing this, we stand at the moment in history when the non-European world has finally realized the essential necessity for scientists. China went from publishing 28,000 scientific papers in 1996 to over 400,000 in 2016. Recently it was announced that China had surpassed the United States in its output to become the world’s number one publisher of scientific research.[20] Iran has seen even more dramatic growth, going from less than 1000 papers in 1996 to over 47,000 in 2016. Similar growth can be seen in all major Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia.

We are now in a major turning point in history, perhaps as important as that in 1600 when Western Europe became the world’s supreme civilization. The thing that gave Europe its permanent edge over the past centuries no longer solely belongs to it. The culture of scientific inquiry is being recreated throughout the world, so that today any of Egypt, Iran, India or Malaysia is likely perfectly capable of carrying science forward even if Europe and the United States were to vanish from the world.

A theory that blames Islam for the Islamic world’s status today will have to tell us that this recent realization of the crucial importance of science to national prowess and prosperity is going to make little difference as long as Muslims remain devout. We are supposedly backward because of Islam, not because of historical circumstances. But a quick comparison between Muslim countries and their non-Muslim equivalents in the next section shows that this is just a figment of the imagination; these nations are remaining devout Muslims while embracing science.

We Muslims are often given the nonsensical choice of either choosing to be human or choosing to be Muslim, and in Western works like S. Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment and Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment, the writers make it amply clear that they could never see eye-to-eye with a faithful and devout Muslim (who is invariably an enemy of rationality and intellectual progress). They cannot conceive of someone as intelligent as themselves (or God forbid, more intelligent) being a faithful Muslim.

Caught between Western discussions of often imaginary Muslims are actual, living and breathing Muslims who are experiencing no crisis, who are happy to engage in intellectual pursuits, and who while respecting the religious scholars, do not take them seriously when what they say goes against reason and conscience. Are Muslim doctors systematically avoiding intellectual inquiry because of Ash’arite indoctrination? This is such an incredibly outlandish thought that it would make most Muslims laugh. Are Muslim parents systematically forbidding their children from reading Western classics and studying the humanities at Western universities? No. They see no conflict between intellectual inquiry and Islam because to them there is no conflict, and it is their opinion that matters; it is they who make Islam’s history.

Imaginary Muslims live in Muslim “no-go zones”, do not read except strict religious literature, do everything the scholars tell them, and keep their women in cages. Real Muslims live wherever they want, read whatever they like, are respectful but inwardly skeptical toward the religious scholars and treat their women according to whatever their human instincts and cultures demand. It is time that we started considering real Muslims in our discussions of Islam. Imaginary Muslims need to be taught reason, rationality and humanism. Actual Muslims do not—they have already embraced these ideas and integrated them into their own lives. In just a single century the Islamic world’s scientific output has increased by orders of magnitude, nearly all Muslim families have started to send their children to secular universities that have popped up all over the Muslim lands, and almost all Muslim countries have adopted some form of constitutional democracy. This, I believe, is sufficient progress for just one century.

Harmful theology?

The Ash’arites (represented by al-Ghazālī and others) said that God is capable of willing anything. Reilly thinks this shows a dangerous moral relativism within Islam, since it tells us that God’s nature is totally arbitrary.

But this is fantastical nonsense; a Muslim cannot perform the obligatory prayer without referring to God as the Gracious, the Merciful, multiple times, amounting to a minimum of 36 times a day. Can a theological idea that the majority of Muslims have never even heard of[21] somehow override this consistent emphasis on God’s attributes of grace and mercy?

Reilly writes that the elimination of cause and effect “makes prediction impossible”. He refers to the case of certain Islamic scholars getting weather forecasts banned between 1983-1984 as evidence.  But his evidence actually takes away from his thesis; even in a traditional and supposedly backward country like Pakistan, the ulema could not get weather forecasts banned for more than a year. The scholars won for one year and consistently lost every single year before and after that—despite Pakistan remaining very much a conservative Muslim country. The sensible conclusion is not that Muslims believe in irrationalist nonsense, but that they reject nonsense even if it comes from their religious scholars.

The Safavids and Qajars were not Ash’arites, they were in fact Shia who maintained respect for the opposing rationalist Mu’tazilite tradition, yet they were no more open to intellectual inquiry than the Ash’arite Ottomans. Additionally, today Ash’arite Sunni countries like Egypt, Turkey and Malaysia are not behind non-Ash’arite Iran and Azerbaijan in science and intellectual inquiry. Both the past and the present show that Ash’arite theology is useless as a predictor of the openness or closedness of the Muslim mind.

If religious scholars abuse Islamic theology to attack common sense, Muslims will feel embarrassed that their religion has to be represented by such people. Reilly continually uses the excesses of certain minor sects and political groups in their support for unreasonable policies as proof for Ash’arite theology’s extreme influence, despite the fact that the majority of Muslims consider these groups unrespectable and unworthy of attention. George Makdisi mentions an interesting case of theological abuse by a scholar:

The Spanish grammarian Ibn Mada’ (d. 592/1196) wrote a refutation of the concept of the regent (‘āmil: regens) in grammar, on the basis that government belongs to God alone. The author, applying the Ash’ari theological view to grammar, denies the power of the regent on the basis that desinential inflections are really the result of God’s acts; they are merely attributed (kasb) to man. Needless to say that this view had no success in the field of grammar.[22]

A person who views Islam as an anti-intellectual force will consider the above “typical” of Islam. But Makdisi, who understands the functioning of real-world Islamic societies, considers it “needless to say” that this absurd abuse of theology was not taken seriously by Muslims. The quoted anecdote does not show that Ash’arism had a negative influence on Muslim minds, it in fact shows the opposite; Muslims by and large do not accept nonsense even when dressed in the language of religion.

It is tempting for an intellectual, especially a Westerner, to think of himself or herself as a knight in shining armor chosen to rid the Muslim world of its backwardness, chosen to bring the Muslims out of the darkness of faith into the light of reason. But such a person, if they were to go to cosmopolitan places like Cairo or Tehran, and if they were to have dinner at a devout cosmopolitan Muslim’s home, will find that there is no need for the battering ram of reason and rationality they brought with themselves. The closed gates of the Muslim mind are an illusion; there are no gates. Look at the books sold on the streets of Cairo, Tehran or Baghdad. The openness of the Islamic world of today to ideas from around the world would shock medieval Islamic theologians (and medieval Christian theologians). Even in the Islamic theocracy of Iran the books of freethinkers like Avicenna and the latest Western bestsellers are not merely tolerated but celebrated. This alone should be sufficient to show that the idea of “closed” Muslim societies and minds is uninformed fantasizing.

[1] J. J. Saunders, Muslims & Mongols: Essays on Medieval Asia, ed. G.W. Rice, Christchurch: University of Canterbury and Whitcoulli Limited, 1977, 27.

[2] Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey, 26.

[3] Saunders, Muslims & Mongols, 106.

[4] Ibid., 102.

[5] Ibid., 103.

[6] Ibid., 104.

[7] Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010.

[8] 18,953 research papers in 2016 according to Scimago Journal and Country Rank.

[9] Perhaps the larger part of Saudi’s scientific growth is due to the importation of foreign scientists. But the fact that the Saudis are willing to spend billions of dollars on research, and the fact that the Saudi population is not up in arms against this scientific growth but actually supports it should give us pause.

[10] Sālim al-Shaybānī, “Mutaba`ithah saudiyyah tuhaqiq injaz ilmi wa tatafawwaq al-talabah al-baritaniyyin fi jami`atihim”, Alweeam, December 1, 2010, weam.co/4351 (retrieved January 27, 2018).

[11] One can marry someone for a day as long as a cleric is present to officiate the wedding.

[12] See Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, London: Profile Books Ltd, 2018.

[13] See Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

[14] Almost all cases of Islamic terrorism are carried out by Wahhabis and sects following similar doctrines.

[15] For the Palestinian issue, see Ila Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007.

[16] See Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s Wars for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2016.

[17] The Pentagon was providing regular flights to al-Qaeda members right before 9/11, as FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has publicized. See Edmonds’ interview with Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine: “Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?”, November 1, 2009, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-sibel-edmonds/ (retrieved December 24, 2018).

[18] Saunders, Muslims & Mongols,  114.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Dockrilll, Peter. “China Just Overtook The US in Scientific Output For The First Time.” ScienceAlert, January 23, 2018,  https://www.sciencealert.com/china-just-overtook-us-in-scientific-output-first-time-published-research (retrieved March 5, 2018).

[21] In my discussions of Ash’arite theology with Muslims, I have found that they find it very unsettling and outlandish, since it goes against the normative Islam they have learned throughout their lives; that God is just and kind.

[22] George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special Reference to Scholasticism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990, 124.

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