It is not often mentioned that Liebnitz’s famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” must be asked twice. The first time, its answer is a knowledge in the heart that is almost impossible to articulate without demeaning the question. Having reached that first knowledge, then one has to ask again, “But why is …
Category Archives: Blogroll
Harun Yahya
Whoever resorts to Google in order to find out something about me will find my name paired very often as author with Harun Yahya. This is not true. In my professional capacity as an editor long prior to his subsequent fame and, some might say, notoriety, I edited the texts of a number of his …
An Open Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury
“I would like very much to see a dialogue developing with Islam about this question of what a just, a reasonable rate of interest might look like in the light of a religious ethic but this is work, reflection, very much in its infancy to put it mildly.”1 Dear Dr Williams, We write to you …
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Predicting the Last Hour
Adh-Dhahabi said: “Texts have come to us affirming the annihilation of this abode and its inhabitants and the razing and scattering of the mountains – and these reports are by way of multiple chains of uninterrupted narration which are incontestable; and no one knows when this will happen except Allah, exalted is He, and whoever …
Channel 4’s – The Qur’an
Apropos Channel 4’s programme “The Qur’an” shown on Monday the 14th of July, the debate that is being stirred up by some orientalists around the text of the Qur’an takes place, predictably enough, in the context of a pseudo-science, orientalism, whose definitions of terms and axioms are horrendously anti-intellectual and, frankly, indefensible. Nevertheless, at least …
Noblesse – D. H. Lawrence
Some men must be noble, or life is an ash-heap. There is natural nobility, given by God or the Unknown, and far beyond common sense. And towards this natural nobility we must live. The simple man, whose best self, his noble self, is nearly all the time puzzled, dumb and helpless, has still the power …
There will be blood
If art holds the mirror up to life, then the meaning of the film There Will Be Blood is that we are in serious trouble indeed: subjects of a drunken murderous capitalism in a life or death struggle with a pseudo-religiosity, a struggle which the former wins. But what this mirror shows us is so …
A Salmonella Outbreak (1988)
Yes indeed, I was there at the famous Whipround Prize of 1988 when Salmonella rushed in to announce his latest revelation from Mammon. “Nothing is off-limits, neither God nor Prophets…,” he recited. “Except your bank account Salmonella, my little bacillus”, interjected Satan (his literary agent) furtively. “O yes of course,” Salmonella recanted and chanted the …
Malik
Qadi Iyad wrote in Tartib al-Madarik: Know, may Allah grant you success, that the preponderance of the madhhab of Malik over others and the loftiness of his rank and his exalted degree by way of transmission and tradition is only denied by the obstinate or the shortsighted whom knowledge of that did not reach even …
Something strange in the state of Jordan?
What exactly is going on in Amman? Two curious documents have issued from there endorsed by large numbers of big names. The first one, the Amman Agreement, claims, contrary to the consensus of knowledgeable Muslims, that there are 8 madhhabs and not 4, and it neglects to mention the Maturidi school of dogma, an oversight …
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