The rich history of the Muslim diaspora varies from culture to culture, but in every Western country where our children are raised, we are collectively othered. While our ethnic and racial differences may have been the first victims of bigotry, post-9/11 the West overtly turned its aggression onto our faith. Continue reading Glad Tidings to the Strangers
The modern history of the Balkans region presents a great analogy for the West’s anxieties towards the Islamic world, an uncanny image of an Islamic heritage which the heirs of Christendom wished to forget. From the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, through to the rise and fall of Yugoslavia such an image would remain. During the Bosnian civil war of the 1990s, Serbian nationalist propaganda would evoke this Islamic past in order to alienate the Bosnian Muslim population, pejoratively referred to as “Turks,” to illustrate their supposed foreignness and therefore lack of belonging to the region. [5] In this light, Bosnia finds itself in geographical and cultural limbo. Such was the world which Alija Izetbegovic (1925-2003) was born into, and such was the world molded him. Continue reading Towards An Islamic Theory of Culture Part II: On Islamicates and Third Ways
In any given society, there are certain common sense moralisms ingrained within that culture. Certain aspects of ethical life and sentiments may be universal in nature and span multiple countries and continents, as part of a generalized weltanschauung. Yet, the particular way in which that ethic is practiced is always subject to cultural conditions and specifics. The key part to this common-sense morality is that you do not think much about these things: they are simply the immediate ethical context one engages with and considers as obvious. As a result, one of the main arenas where we see a stark shift from pre-modern to modern societies, and from religious to liberal societies, is in ethical sentiments and “common sense.” Continue reading 7 Modern Deadly Sins and Misunderstandings: Inequality
This article is part two of a series, you can find the part one here and part three here . In the last part, we established how the Islāmic civilization is built on a worldview that deems ontology as the highest determinative factor. This ontology, or pure metaphysics as Guénon calls it, concerns the Ultimate Reality, Allāh, and how everything else is contingent upon Him. … Continue reading A Study of Worldviews: Islām and the Modern West, Part II: Ontological Apathy
How do we make sense of reality? This is inarguably the most difficult question one can pose because it amounts to giving an explanation of everything. Even if we concede to the Heideggerian claim that metaphysics is inevitably nihilism, nihilism’s fundamental claim that there is no such thing as reality does constitute itself as an explanation of everything (which to them is nothing!) regardless of whether we agree or disagree with it. Continue reading A Study of Worldviews: Islām and the Modern West, Part I: Inversion
It has become a redundant trope among critical Muslims within Islam and the non-Muslim critics of Islam to gleefully point out what they consider to be the absolute passivity of “the Islamic world” in the fields of science and technology. Continue reading Technology as a Mode of Secular-Liberal Theology
