The Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam Kemālpāshazāde (d.940/1534) in his treatise on creed provides a small summary:
-God was a hidden secret→He wants to be known→creates creation.
-Of God’s Names, Light is manifested→from which...
→from which He creates the Muḥammadan Reality→from which He creates all existence→Mankind is the best part of this creation→Mankind cannot escape that it needs to settle for rest as it has a body→a body needs a place→earth is created as its place on which Man is created→
→Man also needs food, but on dry earth nothing grows→so God creates the sky from which rain falls so plants can grow→of this all kinds of foods can be acquired→so this is also why God created mankind, to eat this food→some are grateful&obey&worship God→so God gives them...
→so God gives them an honorable place full of blessings wherein He reveals His beauty (the secret He wanted to be known), this place is heaven. Others are ungrateful&disobey→so God gives them an evil place full of punishments, this place is hell.→So God does all these...
...all these matters and interests for the sake of mankind.
Ibn Kamāl Pāshā, al-Munīr fī al-Mawā‘iẓ wa al-‘Aqā’id (Istanbul: Dār al-Lubāb, 2018), 46–49.
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In the final days of Ramadan Muslims are focused on Laylat al-Qadr (LQ), the night of destiny, which Islamic history identifies as the historical moment of the revelation of the Qurʾān (and all previous revelations).
Ramadan and other months existed as sacred time in pre-Islamic times, and were integrated and re-assigned in Islam. But LQ is uniquely designated as sacred time by the Quran, *created* by the religion when itself formed. There is no LQ without Islam, and no Islam without LQ.
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A great misunderstanding is how the Quran was revealed from a theological perspective. Many people have this idea that the Angel Gabriel went up to God and down to Muhammed ﷺ as if sacred cosmology is like a skyscraper with God as a CEO *in the world* and *in time*.
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“Historically the expansion of colonialism had to do with the broader question, Who is it that the Earth belongs to? That was the key question underlying colonial conquest and imperial expansion since the 15th century…
…European powers had decided that the Earth in its entirety belonged to them. They were its true owners, and they could occupy lands that were populated by foreign people…To a large extent, colonial expansion was a planetary project…
…decolonisation is by definition a planetary enterprise, a radical openness of and to the world, a deep breathing for the world as opposed to insulation…Because racism is in the DNA of colonialism. There is no colonialism that doesn’t entail a huge dose of structural racism…
A small thread on the Islamic theological theories of language:
Quran verse 2:31 “He taught Adam all the names” is central to the Islamic discussion on the nature of language. The majority of theologians among the Muʿtazila, early Ashʿarī, and Māturīdī schools understood... 1/
...ʿallama in its apparent meaning of ‘taught’, as in that language, both in form (lafẓa) and meaning (maʿanā), was in one way or another divinely imposed (bi-l-tawqīfi) on the first human(s). But a minority among the Muʿtazila proposed an alternative semantic meaning... 2/
...for ʿallama as ‘inspired with the impulse to do a thing’, whereby only the impulse is divinely imposed but the lingual form and meaning is naturally and rationally constructed by humans themselves. The later Ashʿarī and Māturīdī eventually held that both views were possible 3/
Premodern Islam had a quality something modern Islam has lost: the quality to embrace multiplicity and ambiguity.
For centuries the Islamic intellectual tradition discussed in detail Qurʾānic multiplicity and ambiguity in meaning and recitation.
We had a *qualitive* approach to the Qurʾān and how we understood it to be true and historically authentic. With Enlightenment modernity we started to have a *quantative* approach to truth, this mathematical approach viewed ambiguity as equal to untruth.
I remember lecturing to a room full of imams on the premodern embrace of multiplicity and ambiguity in Qurʾānic studies and tafsīr. At one point I cited Suyūṭī on this, and before I could mention it being Suyūṭī an imam started shouting I was lying and mistaken.
This development from pre-classical proto-Sunnism to demarcated classical Sunnism is also discernible within exegetical history whereby school-defining heuristics on key verses went from “it could be saying (yuqālu)” in the 9th century to “Ahl al-Sunna say” in the 11th century 1/
An important element in the development to this demarcated Sunnī identity is it self-othering from important ‘others’ such as the Muʿtazila. A common phrase in post-classical works is: “And this opinion is what is adhered to by the
ahl al-Sunna, while the Muʿtazila say...” 2/
I have mapped out this development from proto-Sunnī to Sunnī heuristics within exegetical history for Qurʾān verse 11:117 (and a little for 2:29 and 17:15 as well) in this article, and I hope to do this with more key verses in future writings:
All the disinformation going around among Muslims on so many issues, Islam, world politics, and now #Corona , whereby people forward anything blindly, shows that Muslims really must learn critical engagement to information.
A small thread on Asbāb al-ʿilm
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Classical epistemology is discussed in works on creed/philosophical theology (ʿaqīda/ʿilm al-kalām) and philosophy of law (uṣūl al-fiqh), as “causes of knowledge” (asbāb al-ʿilm). These were first discussed in early Kalām, and were connected to the discussion on prophethood.
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Epistemology was directly linked to prophethood, as why would we need “revelation” as a source of knowledge? Can humans attain full truth about the world on their own? So theologians started to divide up different forms and causes of knowledge.
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