According to the standard secular story that’s been repeatedly told to us for the past century or so, just a few short decades after the start of modernity, science was able to defeat religion with its sheer brilliance and power to explain. We’ve been led to believe that for centuries religion had been doing some…
A Few Thoughts On the Death of Non-Muslims
SOME MUSLIMS LABOUR under the mistaken notion that given the enormity of disbelief in Allah’s final Prophet ﷺ and Revelation, one must not speak well of a non-Muslim (kafir) when they pass away on disbelief. Islamic teachings do not, however, require or insist upon such an uncharitable approach. Many non-Muslims died during the lifetime of…
A Real Crisis in the Trust of Muslim Scholars and Leadership
LET ME START with this statistic: By 2050, it’s predicted Muslims will be as high as 18% of Britain’s total population, rather than the 4.5% that they currently are. With such numbers, this alone imposes on us the urgent task of evolving a socially and politically relevant, and theologically-authentic, set of leadership challenges that are…
Educating the Heart
When we see terrible or wicked things happen in the world, we moderns are often reluctant to ask ourselves why such bad things happen? The answer, if we're honest and objective enough, will come back to us in no uncertain terms: they stem from dark, diseased or sinful hearts. In this latest episode of The…
Knowing Tawhid in Ten Minutes Or Ten Years?
By the late eighties, or maybe the early nineties, ‘‘Aqidah comes first’ started to become something of a slogan in certain Muslim quarters here in Britain. It can’t be dismissed that ‘aqidah, ‘creed’ or ‘belief’ (from ‘aqada: to tie, bind, fasten securely - out of which comes the idea of tying certain beliefs to the heart in utter conviction of…