Preliminary Discourse

A candid and honest appraisal of Islamic intellectual history will no doubt reveal how much this tradition has been influenced by the surrounding intellectual milieu. But for over-zealous adherents who claim to ‘purify’ the entire tradition from any external accretions, to return the religion as it were to its pristine purity unadulterated by any ‘outside’ influences, the whole religion must be kept strictly self-referential. That means all that savors of Islam must be identifiable back to the Qur’an (and Sunnah) alone. If indeed there are elements of, say, Greek, Hellenistic, Hindu, Jewish or Christian origins in the tradition, this must be replaced with an entire system based squarely on the Qur’an. In doing so, what the so-called ‘reformists’ have done, unbeknownst to them, is to replace a system of intellectual inquiry made up of hundreds, if not thousands of learned men and women, with a new-born ‘system’ born of the narrow confines of their own ego.

Now that Palestine has recognition for statehood, the next step, like all others, will be drafting a Constitution for Palestine. That's where the power struggle will be.

Worry for the evil of banality as much as the banality of evil.

"Think for yourself"? More like the self ( nafs ) thinks for you.

Mustafa Akyol’s Islam without Extremes: a Muslim Case for Liberty (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), carries an excellent analysis on the convergence of the Islamic and liberal trends in Turkey. Turkey is one of few Muslim countries in the world today which somehow escaped Western colonialism and consequently, does not perceive the West as its hostile ‘Other’. If the Muslims have a nemesis, an antagonistic ‘Other’, it is Kemalist secularism (born of its founding father, Mustafa Kemal ‘Ataturk’) with its “dictatorship of the seculatariat”, aspiring to re-engineer citizens into a class of “homo kemalicus”. The Kemalist legacy, which made it an explicit point to emulate the West in all its manner and form, down to the minutest details – even demanding the people to wear the brimmed hat as a mark of modernity (!), attracted disdain and revulsion, not just from the Muslim (or Islamist) camp, but also from the liberals. As a result they joined hands to confront the military-backed secularis...

When we say that the market should be restrained by ethical norms we don’t by default mean that the state should carry that responsibility. Critics typically take as axiomatic that the market is the root of all evil that any instance of irregularity, deficiency or oppressive practices that occur in commercial contexts is taken to warrant immediate outside intervention; and by that is often meant the state. Such an assumption about the market seriously underestimates the possibility of the market itself in restraining its own excesses. The misplaced emphasis on developing measures external to the market to rectify the latter’s shortcomings has only the result of treating the symptom rather than the real disease.

A sign that one’s heart is afflicted with ego is when one feels offended that another person is praised in one’s presence.

The abolition of man is only a prelude to his subjugation.

Take care that you do not take deformers as ‘reformers’. “And when it is said to them, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’ they say, ‘We are but reformers’.” (al-Baqarah 2:11)